ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Reading Richard Begbie’s historical novel Cotter coincided this week with the arrival of the latest Quarterly Essay, Moment of Truth – an essay by historian Mark McKenna about how Australia’s future is contingent on coming to terms with our past.  This is the blurb:

In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna considers the role of history in making and unmaking the nation. From Captain Cook to the frontier wars, from Australia Day to the Uluru Statement, we are seeing passionate debates and fresh recognitions. McKenna argues that it is time to move beyond the history wars, and that truth-telling about the past will be liberating and healing. This is a superb account of a nation’s moment of truth.

“The time for pitting white against black, shame against pride, and one people’s history against another’s, has had its day. After nearly fifty years of deeply divisive debates over the country’s foundation and its legacy for Indigenous Australians, Australia stands at a crossroads – we either make the commonwealth stronger and more complete through an honest reckoning with the past, or we unmake the nation by clinging to triumphant narratives in which the violence inherent in the nation’s foundation is trivialised.”

I don’t need to have read the essay yet to agree that yes, it’s high time for a more honest narrative about the beginnings of modern Australia, but Richard Begbie’s book shows just how hard it can be to get it right.  His novel uses the fragmentary record of a pioneer narrative to tell the story of a dispossessed Irish convict-turned-squatter forging an empathetic relationship with the Indigenous owner of the land.  It’s engrossing reading, tracing Garrett Cotter’s life from grinding poverty in Ireland where he was caught up in a ‘Whiteboy’ action and sentenced to death, commuted to transportation for life.  By temperament Cotter is a quiet and industrious man and he does well in New South Wales, fortunate to be assigned to reasonable men and though illiterate, intelligent enough to make good use of the opportunities that came his way.  Like many convicts, he flourished in the colony and ended up as a grazier in the high country around what is now Canberra, and became patriarch of a large and respectable family.

The problematic aspect of this novel arises in its portrayal of Cotter’s relationship with the Aboriginal leader Onyong. Having been dispossessed by the British in Ireland, Cotter is portrayed as an empathetic individual who recognises Onyong’s prior ownership of the land.  Since Cotter has very little agency in his own life in the early years of sentence, he can’t be said to be responsible for Onyong’s dispossession.  He is as much a victim of circumstance as Onyong is, the difference being that (short of insubordination and the penalties that would entail) although he has no alternative but to co-operate with his masters, he is nevertheless part of the machinery of colonisation.  Onyong, for reasons not satisfactorily explained in the novel, chooses to help Cotter find fresh pastures during the drought, and invites him to participate in a great feast when Bogong Moths are in season.  Why Onyong would invite a stockman to bring cattle into the fragile environment of the high country when he must have known by then how much damage cattle do, I can’t imagine.

Cotter’s redemption from his criminal past is part of the grand narrative of Australian opportunity, and Begbie does a fine job of portraying his hopes and dreams, his setbacks and his successes.  But while there is apparently documentary evidence that the real-life Cotter had a special friendship with Onyong, the story ends, as we know it must, with Cotter appropriating Onyong’s land, and eventually with hard times for the disheartened Indigenous people.  As James Dunk at the Rochford Street Review argues in his review,  remorse isn’t really enough for Cotter’s eventual betrayal.

See also Richard Willson’s review in the SMH and this article at the Canberra Times about a meeting of the descendants in 2016.

Author: Richard Begbie
Title: Cotter, a Novel
Publisher: Longhand Press, 2016
ISBN: 9780975232958
Source: review copy courtesy of the author.

Available from Fishpond: Cotter: A Novel