‘Dying’ is quite a word for a lapsing diary, and goes against Andrew Hassam’s warning to us that the diaries contain very little emotion or inner life, that they’re ‘concerned primarily with the events and arrangements on board ship rather than with the fears and anxieties of the emigrants themselves’.

Disappointing. And yet I suspect most diaries read like log books while containing a lot more. I’ve had experience with diaries of my own that looked hopelessly dull till I saw a way to read them (‘Counting Myself’ ABR, June 1994). Maybe Hassam wasn’t very interested in mining for fears and anxieties (or pleasures and hopes). Certainly, in an extract from what he tells us is ‘one of the most monotonous diaries one could ever fear to come across in a manuscript reading room’, he doesn’t hang around to see if there’s anything under the surface cool. A man called Mr Rankine goes ‘out of his mind’ in front of the whole ship’s company. Mr A, the diarist, keeps an eye on him:

Mr Rankine still continues very unsettled, he refused to speak either to Captain Smith or myself because he says we laughed in the Hour of the Lord (13 Feb)

Mr Rankine still continues very unsettled (14 Feb)

Divine Service as usual, at which Mr Rankine (who still continues in a very unsettled state) did not attend (18 Feb)

Mr Rankine still continues very unsettled in his mind (22 Feb)

Mr R still continues unsettled in his mind (25 Feb)

Mr Rankine still continues very unsettled in his mind, although more tranquil than he was some time ago (3 Mar) (Diarist Mr A)

I might be too ready to believe in there being strong emotions behind tight lips and lapidary description. Cooped up with only each other and the sea for company for three months, would Rankine be the only one to lose his wits? And at least Mr A hangs in there to tell, Horatio-like, without art to be sure, a poor wretch’s story. I find the last entry full of tenderness. Andrew Hassam says: ‘The reduction of Mr Rankine to a formula allows him to be incorporated into Mr A’s log-book as just a routine item like the wind direction’.

I am not debating sensibilities here but an approach. Hassam’s big answer to why the emigrants wrote a diary is that in fact, the emigrants didn’t write them at all; the culture did. The emigrant diary is ‘already written’ before the voyage begins, ‘the act of writing the diary, its performance, was largely passive’. Admittedly, he assures us, ‘two diarists on the same journey did not perform exactly the same diary’. But this wasn’t for want of trying on the culture’s part.

As I understand this topsy-turvy way of thinking, narrative convention, specifically the journey-narrative, shapes the experience of the emigration, not the other way round. What else, you might ask, explains why all the diaries begin with embarkation, continue through the voyage and end with, or soon after, disembarkation – except that culture imposes beginnings, middles and ends on life, which, it’s held, has none?

I can see that if you are pondering religious matters then challenging the journey-story form might be an enlightening thing to do. But challenging a journey-story for a journey!

Hassam clearly has things he wants his students and colleagues to see and be amazed at – perhaps cultural studies, or whatever, is like the social sciences, where we justify ourselves by being counterintuitive. But what is the surprise in discovering that emigrants fell in with the idea of writing a diary of their experiences on their first and last emigration? Or that they all decided to begin at the beginning and continue on to the end? Or that, few of them geniuses and none of them professional writers, they tum out much the same results? And why should they not treat themselves to the satisfying flourishes they’ve seen real authors use in real books?

Dear Reader,

I am told it is as necessary to have a beginning to a book as it is to have an ending for the same – and that this beginning, (I am further told) to deserve its epithet ‘Preface’ or ‘Introduction’, should he such as to enable the reader to form some idea as to what he may expect from the work before him.

(Arthur Manning, 4 November 1839)

The-culture-wrote-it approach is unbending. There are wonderful descriptions of embarkation in the diaries, vividly coloured images of confusion and excitement as people and luggage and provisions are got on board, and of the worries (as on QF 09) about what to send below, what to take to the cabin. But what the diarists wrote seems to be used, if not against them, then not exactly for them. You never sense that the scholar/author is remembering himself snuggling into his two-man tent on a wet night at Scout’s camp as he uses the diarists’ words to convict them of – only? mainly? – arranging their cabins to reproduce the class structure and gender arrangements of home. Getting comfortable at last, he tells us, this was – mainly? only? – so that they can give themselves over to the narrative puppetry that had been pulling at them while they got settled and thus begin their true journey, their diaries.

Not much, in this account, is charming or amusing in the diaries, no rueful reminders of human folly or sightings of hopes dwindling and reviving. On the contrary, setting themselves to thoroughly clean the ship near the end of the voyage, and preparing their wardrobe for landfall, the emigrants are only enacting ‘rituals’. No practical pressures here. And an excuse not to read between the lines to the anxieties and hopes, the honour and dignity, expressed in wanting, as they tum into Australians, to leave behind them a clean ship – like as hell? – and to be in good order themselves.

Thursday April 14th (1842) I went on shore yesterday, horribly disappointed with the place – confused, my feet very soon became tender – unable to walk – turned back to the wharf to return to the ship – was charged by the policeman with being intoxicated because I walked so roly – escaped him by explaining – returned to the Ship in a state of delirium tremens. (William Wills).

This is my favourite extract in the book. A miniature of slapstick, misery, heart-warming action (the policeman understands!), bewilderment, physical pain, and terror. But Hassam’s bird’s eye approach gets no joy out of it. ‘Suspicious’ of the happy endings diarists wrote for themselves, with their return to terra firma, he uses poor William Willis only to remind – them? us? – that the mere act of ‘Stepping on land does not provide somewhere to live, work or friends’ (sic).

This ‘Culture rules, okay?’ business sure is grumpy.