Ian Reid’s The Mind’s Own Place brings English folk to Australia

Ian Reid richly evokes the abandoned English worlds of those who travel from England to the antipodes.

From the cover of The Mind's Own Place by Ian Reid.

The epigraph of Ian Reid’s third fine historical novel, The Mind’s Own Place, comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘‘The mind is it own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’’ The fortunes of the five characters whom Reid follows from different parts of England to Western Australia in the mid-19th century are fashioned in part by their minds — defects or excesses of imagination and judgment, the workings of conscience or an indifference to the claims of others — but also by the material circumstances of their lives.

Details of the latter are gleaned from Reid’s intensive and judicious research into what he fictionalises. ‘‘Some aspects of this novel correspond partly to a framework of real people and events,’’ he tells us in an afterword. Two of those people are white-collar criminals: Thomas ‘‘Satan’’ Browne, an architect and engineer, and Alfred Letch, transported for embezzlement and theft respectively.

Their future wives make free passage to Australia: Letch marries Amelia French; Browne marries Letch’s niece Polly. Shipping separately, and in disguise, in 1867 is the detective ‘‘Runty’’ Rowe. He travels on the Hougoumont, the last convict transport to Australia. In the best manner of Victorian fiction, all their fates will be entwined.

In its English sections especially — London, the early industrial landscape of Lancashire, ‘‘where new ways of designing and manufacturing are at their boldest’’, and the Potteries — Reid’s novel is, reflexively, much concerned with both the Victorian novel and Victorian narrative painting. The exile to Australia, whether for convicts or free settlers, figures in several of Dickens’s novels, while Daniel Doyce, in Little Dorrit, is an early fictional imagining of an engineer.

Reid offers cameos of such engineering giants of their time as George Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It is across one of the latter’s bridges that the locomotive travels in JMW Turner’s 1844 painting Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway. The navvies who built the railways (and are a focus of Browne’s homoerotic urges) feature in Ford Madox Brown’s Work. The flimsy facade of bourgeois respectability is the subject of Robert Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home.

As several of Reid’s characters find, money, family and reputation can readily be lost, and as one of them reflects, ‘‘the whole civilised order was as precarious as a rickety bridge over a huge malodorous cesspool’’. Widowed, Browne’s sister is reduced to fur pulling (preparing rabbit pelts for commercial use) in a London slum. He in turn is driven to crime by his wife’s profligacy. Both idealistic and mercenary dreams may swiftly be undermined in a world where prosperity and respectability are so highly valued, yet so treacherously unstable.

For such reasons, Reid’s cast is despatched to Australia as fictional characters have been since Henry Kingsley briskly assembled his for the journey in one of the classic novels of the colonial period, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859). A literary scholar as well as a novelist, Reid is aware of the antecedents of his fiction.

Like Kingsley, and indeed John Marsden in last year’s South of Darkness, Reid richly evokes the abandoned English worlds of those who travel to the antipodes. Left behind are not only family but language. This is a novel where regional dialects are given rein and we are sent to dictionaries to fix the meanings of ‘‘a hefty hackam’’, ‘‘a jannock fella’’, ‘‘a flackety lot’’. Here is some of the verbal colouring of a novel that is thick with specifics of time and place, whose loss is therefore the more poignant.

To the new world come optimistic chancers (‘‘Perth seems to be a go-ahead kind of place’’) and political as well as regular prisoners. Prime among the former are Fenians, Irish rebels on whom Rowe spies on board ship as ‘‘in defiant songs and maudlin recitation they defended their cause’’, and then in Western Australia.

There the fabled escape of their leader John Boyle O’Reilly adds another chapter in Fenian history, and in that of the colony and its literature. This is a subplot that the chronology of Reid’s story makes impossible for him to resist, although it is incidental to the lives of all his characters save Rowe. Alfred Letch is busy establishing himself as a man of affairs in Perth and ‘‘had become the very epitome of a reformed sinner’’. ‘‘Satan’’ Browne dreams largest of all about the advancement of the colony, and suffers most in consequence.

Turn by turn Reid engages us with his characters’ untidy and unruly fates in an assured work of historical reconstruction and imagination. The last founded and last closed convict establishment evidently has as much to offer the novelist as the dark recesses of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land.

Peter Pierce edited The Cambridge History of Australian Literature.

The Mind’s Own Place

By Ian Reid

UWA Press, 328pp, $24.99