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One of Clune's earlier books, his travel takes place over a number of trips to Queensland to which he refers as The Free and Easy Land. Largely made up of linked anecdotes, short stories from history and discussions with locals, Clune's book is arranged in a slightly unusual way. It follows firstly his own travels, and then geography. So as he tells of his journey he takes the places he visits and weaves history around them.
The result of this, is he breaks up the stories of others into sections and in the order that he visits the locations. For example Burke and Wills story is not told in a linear fashion, and certainly not their whole story, but Clune picks some anecdotes of their story and tells then as he passes through the geographic locations.
This perhaps sounds a little more confusing than it is to the reader. It flows reasonably well, and while chapters are short, the stories told within them are even shorter, ranging perhaps from a half page to a couple of pages per story, with say 6 stories per chapter.
Burke and Wills were a single example. Clune covers a huge number of stories of explorers, surveyors, prospectors and miners, cattle men (and rustlers), sugarcane growers and others. Leichhardt, Louis de Rougemont (Henri Louis Grin), the Jardine's of Sumerset...
Clune's stories are not limited to the land though, and navigators and sailors, shipwrecks and castaways make up a large portion of the narrative. James Cook, Matthew Flinders, Bully Hayes - the latter sending us off into the islands of Samoa, Fiji and the Pacific for a short sojourn.
Perhaps one of the anecdotes I was the most surprised with was the recent introduction of the cane toads - to deal with the cane beetle. This was held up as a scientific triumph - in the 1940's they were still rather limited in their distribution. Of course, now the cane toads are considered an invasive species, and there are still many research programmes looking at how to control their spread.
While there is a reasonably detailed map on the front endpapers, the real miss here is an index. This would have allowed the reader to pick out the excerpts from each figure and join them together. As it is there are so many names and their stories are presented in such short fragments it is pretty hard to track down certain excerpts - as I found when it came to writing this review.
Recommended for those who enjoy historical excerpts, without necessarily the whole story, and those interested in Queensland.
4 stars.
