The Great Boomerang

Ion Idriess has written a lot of books, and they fall in to some fairly specific categories. He writes biographies of historic figures - pioneers, explorers, miners, men of the outback; he writes autobiographical books sharing parts of his life (these are probably my favourites); he writes non-fiction text books on mining, minerals and gems; he wrote a series called ‘The Australian Guerilla' which were military techniques; and he writes books about how to improve Australia.
This book fits that last category, and if the first of these type of books from him which I have read.

“The Great Boomerang” is the tile of the book, but is also a geographical description of a part of Australia. It is a boomerang shape on a map - a wide band starting on the coast of northern Queensland below the Cape York Peninsular, sweeping inland so that it approaches the south-eastern tip of the Northern Territory, then south to the coast again, in South Australia. This is illustrated very vaguely on the cover of this book.

In this book, from the very first page, Idriess promises his grand plan, and painfully slowly he shares that with the reader. I will cut to the chase a little, because it is not a spoiler - his plan is to bring water from the damp, tropical Northern Queensland rivers during the rainy season to the dry heart of (eastern) central Australia.

Relevant to mention at this point, that Idriess is a planner and has achieved a huge amount in his life (as evidenced by his autobiographies), but also a big picture man and a dreamer. This book, published in 1941 was his big plan to progress Australia when the influx of soldiers returning from World War II appear, and inevitably unemployment and lack of industry become a problem. His book Fortunes in Minerals, published the same year was another plan - essentially teaching people how to prospect for minerals in outback Australia.

So for the first 180 or so pages, Idriess sets the scene. He takes us through all the individual areas within his boomerang footprint, describes the land, the weather patterns, the successes and failures of the cattle stations on the periphery of this desert area. He tells these stories through many hundreds of anecdotes and second hand tales. Aborigines, men who go wild and look to live alone, men who become lost, and lots of cattle thieves who steal cattle from Queensland and take the risk through the dry lands to sell them at quick profit in South Australia.

These are arranged into short chapters covering various geographic locations and in each one Idriess teases his ‘plan' and points out features which come into play later in the book. To be honest this gets a bit tedious, as the teases are repetitive, and I longed for him to just get on with the plan. Throughout the book, there are photographs. Two per photo page, with in every case the top one being from inland Australia, the bottom from coastal Australia. These are always comparative, and again pretty tedious. Eg a photo of desert and rolling hills, captioned “Hills of the dead heart country” and a photo of a lake surrounded by trees and some forested hills, captioned “The same type of country transformed by water”. Again, with a critical eye, they are only ok photos and the repetition of inland and coastal comparisons is a bit tiresome.

One aspect he talks about for a few chapters which I did find particularly interesting was the dinosaur fossils and evidence of the land in prehistoric times. The Dead Centre (as he calls a particular area) sits below sea level and its geology shows it was a pre-historic swamp. The now extinct animals he mentions (which may or may not have been disproved by now) included giant sized kangaroos, and other oversized marsupials, but most interestingly an opalised plesiosaurus skeleton which was found! Unfortunately rather than being maintained it was broken down and sold as opal. How amazing would that have been. Interestingly google directed me to a 1987 discovery which sounds similar, but less intact: https://gizmodo.com/eric-the-pliosaur-one-of-the-most-interesting-fossils-5987941

The last 60 pages are all about the plan. It is a simple idea, and Idriess goes on to explain in greater levels of detail the problems and his solutions. As I mentioned above, he is planner, and while I won't steal the glory of his plan, or the hydraulics he proposes to utilise to overcome the challenges.
He goes further, on the closing pages to state the benefits to the whole country, which are all forward thinking, and are all challenges to most countries even now. Briefly, these include: Mass employment; harvesting electricity from the hydraulics put into play; the vast desert area turned cultivable - regeneration of land long unusable; the supporting industry with this power and the new developed land uses; electrification of remote areas as a bi-product of further harnessing downstream water to generate; decentralisation - opening remote areas for people to live and work away from present high density cities; elimination of droughts by providing controls; control of erosion and dust; weather and environmental changes which eventually sustain an ecosystem returning desert areas; and, of course the financial benefits by all this increased production.

If I had to pick a ‘least favourite' Idriess book from those I have read, this is probably it. It lacked his normal in depth biographical thoroughness, due to it using repetitive anecdotes (clearly his intention to make his point through repetition); and the teasing of his plan didn't help. Still a less-brilliant Idriess book is better than a mediocre book by most other authors.

For me 3 stars.