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Book Review
| Martin Thomas, The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 2003. pp. viii + 313. $49.95 cloth.
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What is the relationship between place and the human stories that take place within it? In March 2004 I had this book with me as I stood at Pinnacle Overlook at Cumberland Gap, USA. With left foot in Virginia, right in Kentucky, and Tennessee straight ahead at the foot of the adjacent cliffs, I was looking out over a beautiful and tranquil, late winter Appalachian landscape. Yet this place was more than just an outstanding scenic overlook: it was the very soul of the frontier. As Frederick Jackson Turner put it in The Frontier in American History (Henry Bolt, New York, 1893):
Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization marching single file — the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattleraiser, the pioneer farmer — and the frontier has passed by.
My official map and brochure from the US National Parks service (Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. GPO:2003 — 496-196/40511, reprint 2000) informed me, 'the nearly trackless mountains that offered security to the colonists also kept the growing population confined along the eastern seaboard'. Then, of course, along came Dan'l Boone to the rescue, and led the hordes through the gap to the golden west. Wait a minute! I think I have heard this story before about somewhere else. This was America's Mount York (or, giving due deference to chronology, Mount York is Australia's Cumberland Gap). |
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Martin Thomas's The Artificial Horizon combines place, history, art critique, image making and myth making about the Blue Mountains into a delightful but somewhat heady confection. Physical matter is not what it objectively seems, but dissolves into empty space and energy fields when its fundamental particles are minutely dissected and observed. Likewise, place is not just what its objective topography, geographic systems and biota seems to reveal, but a complex visualisation in the minds of many, involving that landscape, ways of seeing it by the different peoples who came to view it and make images of it, and the compages of facts, history, myths and legends that its people create over time. |
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The book is a timely warning to writers (such as me) who have the urge to separate the 'myths' from the 'facts' of history. Ultimately such separation will be in vain, for new myths will evolve to replace those exposed. More than that, the old will never die but will compete alongside the new for popular attention. The prosaic naming of Govett's Leap, a famous waterfall near Blackheath, after a less-then-prosaic New South Wales Assistant Surveyor, George Govett, will forever chase, without catching, the more romantic yarn of the fictitious but bold bushranger, Govett, leaping his steed across the abyss in a single bound (or, alternatively plummeting into the depths to face death rather than capture like the wild colonial boy). |
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The book is not another chronological telling of the story of the 'conquest' and settlement of the Blue Mountains. Rather, it casts around like a searchlight, capturing and illuminating vignettes in the history of this beautiful but enigmatic region. It is a collection of five themes in that history (called 'passages' by the author) and each passage consists of a group of essays within the theme. No doubt geomorphologist, Cliff Ollier, would question the title of one such essay, 'A Mountain is not a Plateau', as his recent book, The Origin of Mountains, is dedicated to demonstrating that most mountains, just like the Blue Mountains, are indeed merely the remnants of former plateaus. |
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However, in The Artificial Horizon the whole is most definitely greater than the sum of the parts, for a coherent idea on the nature of place and image making emerges and the reader, especially a reader familiar with the Blue Mountains, is invited to fill in gaps. For my part, I could imagine another 'passage' built around the heyday of Katoomba as a tourist spot in the years 1900 to 1920. Nostalgia for this high water mark of importance still drives the local tourist industry as a glance at the black and white photographs lining the walls of its many tourist shops and guest houses demonstrates. |
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The book also invites the reader to expand on the text and add detail. As I grew up in Katoomba through the 1950s, I knew many of the people mentioned in Passage Four, such as Frank Walford, Harry Hammon and Mel Ward, as real life flesh-and-blood, as well as warts-and-all, characters. There were indeed many warts. The motor racing track at Catalina was a hotly debated issue in the town with many, probably a majority of the population, opposed, and not just because of the impact on 'The Gully', also known locally and disparagingly as 'Happy Valley'. It is therefore a strange experience for me to see these characters reappearing as mythical figures in the mountain story, but I was delighted to learn more of the history of the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people of the Gully, some of whom played in our children's self-organised cricket team. |
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That was the era when the Mountains people were desperate for employment for their children, and anything seen to increase the potential for tourism was grist to the mill for the business community who dominated local decision-making. The racing circuit was just the project that 'got up'. Even more grandiose schemes were proposed for Catalina Park (now Frank Walford Park). Mayor Percy Galway proposed that it be flooded and the resulting lake (dubbed 'Galway Bay' by less than convinced residents) be lined by millions of tonnes of sand to compete with the coast where the people were now flocking. Lack of air services to Katoomba was to be rectified by large passenger helicopters (similarly dubbed the 'Galway Gallopers'). |
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For my taste, the book is rather too self-consciously modelled on Simon Schama's masterpiece, Landscape and Memory. I would like to have seen the author free of the sort of manacles that Schama's approach tends to apply. There are some flights of fancy and rather too fragile semantic connections made which purport to reveal deeper meanings in perception of the landscape. Perhaps too much is made of the idea of the abyss inviting suicide: if one intends to make a final exit by falling, then the Blue Mountains is undoubtedly a more likely place than, say, the 'sunlit plains extended'. It is clear that there are significant numbers of suicides in the Mountains, but is their incidence there more significant than those at, say, The Gap, or off high city buildings? Gregory Blaxland's suicide in his late seventies occurred on his Cumberland Plains property and it is drawing a long bow indeed to link it with his Blue Mountains experience. A single incident, as in the case of Vere Gordon Childe (who did undoubtedly hurl himself into the depths, whether by design or accident) hardly demonstrates a general proposition, yet it occupies an entire 'passage' of the five presented. |
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Nevertheless, on the whole this is a thoroughly readable entertaining and beautifully produced book which will leave the reader thinking and asking questions as any good book should. It is a genuinely worthwhile addition to the stories of the Blue Mountains and it illuminates the iconic status of that region in Australian history. |
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| University of New England |
CHRIS CUNNINGHAM | |
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