Mrs Gosse’s book, a tribute to her husband’s family, was inspired by Philip, son of Edmund Gosse, when he visited the South Australian branch of the family in 1959. Philip thought it ‘an exciting hobby’ to trace the history of the Gosses from the earliest records down through the generations. This family interest in family history is echoed in Mr Silbert’s introduction, in which he describes his book as a ‘letter to my children’. Where Mrs Gosse’s historical scan is wide, dealing with the Gosse generations from sixteenth-century Ringwood, in England, to modern Adelaide, Mr Silbert’s work is more properly autobiographical: after a brief description of his Polish-Jewish antecedents, the author settles down to a reminiscence of the events in his own life in Western Australia.

There is danger in this kind of historical writing, whether it is the biography of a man or of a family. It is not sufficient that the author presents a simple array of details and facts: the reader needs to be persuaded that the work is intrinsically interesting, and that the description of events or persons is valuable in some way. This may be accomplished by emphasis on significant facts, by selection of details, by clarifying the worth of the information, and, last but most important, by creating an appropriate structure for the narrative. The Red Queen’s interrogation of Alice is worth bearing in mind: ‘Where do you come from?’ said the Red Queen. ‘And where are you going? Look up, speak nicely, and don’t twiddle your fingers all the time.’

It is possible to charge both Mrs Gosse and Mr Silbert with finger-twiddling, if by this we understand a distracting self-consciousness. It manifests itself in each book by the sheer detail offered the reader: there is, surely, no need for the general reader to be confronted with so much matrimonial and genealogical information. Such inclusiveness leads too easily to confusion: for example, the repetition, through successive generations, of certain names in the Gosse family drives its author to the stratagem of providing for some of these figures a distinguishing soubriquet thus, ‘Thomas-the-painter’, ‘John-the-merchant’ – as an aid to the reader. But the real problem is whether the reader needs to know everything about every member of the family. What is probably a good family joke merely puzzles the reader when he is informed that

Two years after their marriage Alexander’s daughter, Agnes, then twenty, married William Christie Gosse, his new wife’s brother. By this contract Alexander’s brother-in-law became also his son-in-law; and his daughter then became his sister-inlaw. Repetition of names makes the situation even more complicated to grasp as Agnes Gosse had become Agnes Hay in 1872, and in 1874 Agnes Hay became Agnes Gosse. Added to which, Alexander’s first wife, mother of the 1874 bride, had also been called Agnes (nee Kelly) while the name of the bridegroom’s mother was Agnes (nee Grant). (p. 133)

The abundance of detailed information (the result, certainly on Mrs Gosse’s part, of much research) is no doubt occasioned by the more or less chronological narrative structure of both books (The Gasses opens and closes in the present, but the intervening chapters are patterned chronologically). In their attempt to include every member of the respective clans, the authors find themselves departing from the main story line. The desire to retain continuity despite such digressions results in awkward rhetoric of the ‘You remember so-and-so, of whom I spoke earlier? Well …’ sort. The greatest problem is that in the inexorable march of time toward the present in these books, important facts and events, and interesting personalities and actions lose significance. Moreover, such a narrative leaves little time for analytic reflection: this is a major flaw in Mr Silbert’s book.

The problem for both authors was not simply to find a central historical moment from which to tell their stories: it was to choose from among several, in both cases. Many of the Gosses, for example, achieved considerable celebrity: Philip Henry Gosse, the father of Edmund, published important works of natural science; his son was a literary lion; William Christie Gosse discovered Ayers Rock during his explorations of the interior of Australia; and collaterally the Gosses are related to the Waughs and the Huxleys. Any of these figures (and there are others) would have contributed to a focus for the book that did not depend on pure chronological progression.

Mr Silbert’s experiences in Western Australia as a boy, then as an airman during World War II, and then as a civic leader may not be unique. What does give them originality of viewpoint is Mr Silbert’s Jewish identity. In this ostensible family biography, the author had an opportunity to explore to some depth the nature and dynamic of the Jewish community of which he was a part, to examine its origins and its role in the Australian context. Any effort in this direction, however, is absorbed toward the end of the book by the recitation of grievances leading to a feud between the author and the Orthodox Jewish community’s Board of Deputies, a feud which resulted in Mr Silbert’s resignation from that Board. This strongly personal note would have been acceptable in a private document, such as Mr Silbert originally intended: in her foreword, the editor of Artlook Books, Helen Weller, says that she dissuaded Mr Silbert from his aim to publish only a limited edition of five copies, and instead convinced him of the book’s interest for a more general readership. However, the widening of that readership required a muting of the personal, and sometimes strident, note.

The remaining two books are less guilty of finger-twiddling. They both present primary documents, using them, however, in very different ways. Pamela Statham’s work is an edition of letters dated from 1831 to 1845, written by members of the Tanner family, who settled at Swan River and in Tasmania. In her brief but workmanlike introduction, Ms Statham points out that William Tanner was unusual among settlers of this period in that he had income from properties in England, and therefore did not rely absolutely on the results of his pioneering efforts. Given this independence of perspective, it is interesting to read Tanner’s descriptions of the new conditions of his life. In one of his letters home, for instance, he refers to ‘a shrub like your broom but longer, and one like your whitehorn’, the ‘your’ signalling both the writer’s sense of separation from his homeland, and his identification with his new environment. (Likewise, Tanner’s sister, Ellen Viveash, in Tasmania, refers in one letter home to ‘your moist country … your languid sun’.) Although this could not be a complete identification with his new home, since Tanner relied on finances from England, he urges his mother and sisters to emigrate to Australia because of the worsening political and economic conditions in Europe. Throughout the correspondence there is a sense of the opportunities to be found in Australia, a potential of which Tanner himself took advantage. In addition to this potential, there was occasion to make new acquaintances: both Tanner and his sister recount a number of experiences to describe the comradeship and neighbourliness of those pioneers in the early settlements.

The text of the letters is accompanied by numerous reproductions of paintings, drawings and photographs to aid the reader in his conceptualization of the ·conditions under which Tanner lived (he left the settlement in 1835 for England and returned to Swan River in 1840). However, greater annotation of the text would perhaps have been of more help for the reader unfamiliar with the history of Swan River, and with words no longer in common usage (for example, ‘bougie’, and ‘Cuddy’. As it stands, the work seems intended for the specialist in Western Australian history – a pity, since the Tanner letters have interest for the non-specialist too.

Don Charlwood’s The Long Farewell, subtitled ‘Settlers Under Sail’ on the front jacket (but nowhere else in the book), recreates, both through well-researched narrative and the use of emigrants’ letters and journals, the experience of the three-month voyage from England to Australia in the days of the sailing ships. Mr Charlwood is careful to indicate the circumstances in England that encouraged emigration; in addition, he describes the emigrants’ first experience of the distant new land for which they had set sail so many days before.

Mr Charlwood explores the varying conditions under which one might take a passage to Australia. He notes that the term ‘emigrant’ came to be redefined: ‘To them [cabin and intermediate passengers] an emigrant was not one who left his own country to settle in another, but one who was financially assisted to do so’. The class distinction came, not from birth, but from wealth, which alone separated the ‘emigrants’ from the poop-deck gentry. Generally, class distinction by breeding commanded less attention in Australia than the possession of wealth and the capacity to work hard and profitably. Mr Charlwood cites an 1852 publication, The Gold Colonies of Australia, whose editor offered advice to those considering emigration:

No man there cares how he [the emigrant] comes out, or asks a question about it; the only persons looked down upon are the idle, the dissipated … Rank and title have no charms in the antipodes … Great family connections and ancestry would only provoke, to any who should parade them, the remark that ‘he was like a potato: all that was good belonging to him was underground’.

Mr Charlwood makes important comparisons between the fact of emigration to Australia, and of emigration to North America. The difference in the distance of each destination from England, the difference in the expected style and condition of existence in each – these led, first, to the provision by the English government of assistance in fares to Australia, but not to North America; and, second, to the procurement of first-class vessels for the Australia run. Mr Charlwood states, ‘… Australia was served by the finest sailing ships the world ever knew’.

* Mishpochah (Yiddish): family, kin.