The Far Country - Nevil Shute

This is a story about old & new countries, about starting a new life, either forced by circumstance or as a free choice. The Far Country (picture from here) is set in Australia & Britain in the early 1950s.

Jane Dorman scandalised her family in 1918 by marrying an Australian soldier & coming out to Australia to start a new life. Only her Aunt Ethel supported her. Now, in the years after WWII, Jane & Jack Dorman have made a success of their sheep farm near Merrijig, in the High Country of Victoria, near Mt Buller. Jane has become concerned about Aunt Ethel, who is surviving on a widow's pension from her husband's Indian Civil Service career. After the Dormans receive a substantial wool cheque, Jane sends her aunt £500. The money arrives as the old lady is dying of malnutrition, too proud to ask her daughter for help when her pension stops. She's been surviving by selling her furniture & eating the dried fruit in the parcels Jane has been sending her but finally she collapses in the street & her family is notified.

Ethel's granddaughter, Jennifer Morton, is working in London, having left her parents' home in Leicester. She's called in to look after her grandmother & Ethel gives her the money, telling her to go out to Australia & visit the Dormans. Life in England is grey & gloomy, with rationing still in place & the costs of everything rising. Jenny decides to go & she is warmly welcomed by the Dormans. Australia is a revelation to her. The abundance of food, the kindness of the people & the beauty of the country around Lenora homestead are such a contrast to her mundane life in London.

Carl Zlinter has emigrated to Australia from Europe after the war. He was a doctor in Czechoslovakia but he is not allowed to practice in Australia without undertaking further training. Carl was an Army doctor during the War & ended up in a displaced persons camp as he didn't want to return to a Communist Czechoslovakia. He must work for two years at a lumber camp near Mt Buller before he can make his own way. Carl is a quiet man in his early thirties. He enjoys the outdoor work, the country reminds him of the Bohemian forests of his home, & he can go fishing at the weekends. He is also the unofficial doctor at the camp. The manager allows him to treat the men's minor injuries & keeps him supplied with medications & bandages.

Carl meets Jenny & the Dormans when an accident at the timber yard leaves two men seriously injured. Jenny helps him to perform the operations & Carl is invited to visit Lenora. As they get to know each other, Jenny & Carl grow close. Carl discovers that a relation of his with the same name, Charlie Zlinter, was a bullock driver at a small gold rush town in the mountains fifty years before. He finds Charlie's grave while on a fishing trip & tries to find out more about him. He realises that he will not be able to afford to retrain as a doctor when his two years is over & decides that he will keep working at the timber mill & build himself a hut on the site of Charlie's house from so long ago. However, Carl & Jenny's relationship faces challenges when Jenny's mother dies & she decides to return to England.

I loved The Far Country. I've read several Nevil Shute novels but I have more on the tbr shelves & can't wait to read them. Shute's love of Australia is evident in every line. He has some very harsh things to say about post-war Britain & the National Health Service in particular & the contrast between the old & new countries is very stark. The plenty of the Dormans with their prosperous farm & the rising price of wool promising more in future years is starkly contrasted with the poverty of those back Home in England. I enjoyed the picture of Melbourne in the 50s when the Dormans visit to spend their wool cheque & Jane's search for the right picture to put on her wall now that she has the money to afford it. At the centre of the story though is the tender relationship between Carl & Jenny. The days that they spend exploring the high country are so beautifully described, the peace & beauty of the bush is the perfect background to their discovery of each other & of the possibility of a new way of life & a new home.

Carl's experience as a New Australian (which is one of the more polite names the post-war European immigrants were called) could be reflected in many more stories of that time. Australia became a multicultural country thanks to the migrants who left Europe in the 1950s. They were grateful for the chance of a new life & we were grateful to have the labour. In some ways, the novel shows a rose-coloured view of the migrant experience. There were lots of cases of exploitation as well as stories of friendship & support. I don't want to get too political but I wish our current government could emulate this more humane refugee policy.

I listened to The Far Country on audio, read by Julie Maisey. She did a good job with the Australian accent, supposedly one of the most difficult accents to do, & I enjoyed it very much. I chose the lovely cover photo of the first Heinemann edition because it's so beautiful, but the cover image I remember best is this one from the edition that was reprinted for the1980s mini series with Sigrid Thornton & Michael York. Although, having read the synopsis of the TV series & a couple of reviews, I'm glad I have no memory of the series! It seems to have been sensationalised & to have very little relation to the novel.

Charles Dickens & the house of fallen women - Jenny Hartley

Charles Dickens was one of the most energetic men of the Victorian age. He was the most famous novelist of the period, he edited or “conducted” as he put it, his own weekly journal, he was a journalist & philanthropist. His most famous experiment in philanthropy was Urania Cottage, a home for fallen women. The aim was to take young women off the streets or, more usually, from prison after they’d served their sentence, & give them the skills they needed to leave behind a life of crime. They would be trained in the domestic arts & sent to Australia, Canada or Sth Africa to start a new life. Dickens’s partner in this as in many of his philanthropic ventures was Angela Burdett Coutts, a young woman who was the heiress to the Coutts Bank fortune. She provided the money & certainly took an interest in the girls but Dickens was the driving force behind Urania Cottage. Dickens had always been interested in crime & punishment. His early experiences when his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea for debt are well-known. The effect of this & its consequences for him – the end of his formal education & the time he spent working in Warren’s Blacking Factory – are well-known. He was fascinated by prisons & had very enlightened views of how prisoners should be treated - reformed rather than punished. Prisoners were forced to do repetitive, menial work, often in complete silence & there was no idea of reform. Dickens understood that many prisoners had started their life of crime through poverty rather than vice. Women were especially vulnerable. Orphaned or abandoned by their families or partners, it was almost impossible to make a living through respectable work. A seamstress could barely make enough to live on & if they didn’t have the skills to become domestic servants, prostitution or petty theft were the only alternatives. Urania Cottage was to be a home for the girls, not an institution or penitentiary, where they could be treated with respect, as individuals & earn the right to emigrate to a new life. Only a small number of women could be accommodated, about a dozen, but they usually only stayed for a year (if they stayed the course) before leaving for the colonies. Of course, not all the girls were grateful for this interference in their lives. It could be seen as middle-class meddling. But, Dickens & Miss Coutts really wanted to make a difference in the lives of their charges. The alternative was horrible, a short, miserable life on the streets or in prison. Urania Cottage was an enlightened alternative to some of the other schemes of the time, most of them with overtly religious or punitive aims. Jenny Hartley has written a fascinating account of the project. Dickens took a hands-on role in every area. He leased the Cottage, employed the staff, bought all the furniture, set out their daily timetable, personally interviewed the prospective inmates & was the moving force of the Committee set up to manage it. He wrote hundreds of letters, engaged the help of two prison governors who suggested suitable girls, & took an avid interest in every aspect of the work. He was involved for over 10 years & the effects of it can be seen in his books. Characters such as Martha Endell & Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, Tattycoram in Little Dorrit & Susan Nipper in Dombey & Son, are all testament to the effects of Dickens’s involvement at Urania. Dickens wrote up the story of every girl who entered Urania Cottage in a Case Book. He interviewed them all personally on arrival & throughout their stay. Although the book has disappeared, there’s enough evidence from his mentions of it in letters to know that a very full record was kept & only Dickens saw it. What a resource for a novelist! Although very little is known about the inmates apart from Dickens’s letters & Census records, Hartley has managed to trace several of them once they emigrated. Rhena Pollard was 16 when she was admitted to Urania Cottage. She was a troublemaker, spirited, but with a temper. Even so, Dickens thought she had potential, “The little girl from Petworth is an extraordinary case of restless imposture & seeking after notoriety; but there are chances (not desperate chances, I think) of something better being made of it.” Rhena lost her temper once too often & declared that she was off, she wouldn’t stay another minute. All Dickens’s theatrical instincts came to the fore. He ordered her to be turned out at once, as was the rule. But, it was Christmas, & he didn’t want Rhena to go at all so he called her bluff. She was shocked into admitting that she wanted to stay & she pleaded with the matron in front of the other girls to be allowed to change her mind. Dickens then wrote a letter to be read out to the girls that had the effect of allowing Rhena to stay, showing the others the consequences of disobedience & reinforcing the authority of a new matron as Dickens pretended that it was the matron’s pleas which had changed his mind. Rhena eventually emigrated to Canada, married a homesteader & had a family. Her descendants live in Ontario today. Hartley even speculates that Rhena is the model for Tattycoram as she resembles her in looks & temper.
Another descendant of a Urania girl was traced on Hartley’s last day of a trip to Australia in a retirement home here in Melbourne. She had no idea of the Dickensian connection in her family. This is a wonderful book for anyone interested in Dickens or in the social history of the 19th century. The Urania Cottage project was a period of ten years of Dickens’s life that had a profound impact on his life & work.