Word: moorehead
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...FATAL IMPACT, by Alan Moorehead. Writing in the wake of Captain Cook, Bougainville and other great Pacific navigators and explorers, the superbly skilled journalist-historian Alan Moorehead takes soundings of philosophic depth-savage and civilized man in confrontations unresolved to this...
Bush Belsen. To the first impact of Europe upon Australia, Moorehead gives a poignancy lacking in other accounts. If Cook embodied the best virtues-manly and intellectual-of the 18th century, and the Polynesians of the Central Pacific composed the most gracious of primitive societies, New Holland (as Australia was then called) presented a contrary confrontation: primitive man at his lowest, civilized man at his worst...
...Moorehead leaves the contemporary reader aghast at the obtuseness of the British, who followed Cook's discovery with the decision to make a penal settlement of New Holland. Reason has its crimes: since the American dumping ground for Puritan and Catholic dissidents had been lost by the Revolution, it was quite sensible in London to decide that the new continent should be used for a gaol. In 1788, the year of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, civilization in the form of white slavery arrived at Cook's Botany Bay. So came about a bush Belsen, with...
...first settlement of Captain Ar thur Phillip-redcoats and canary-yellow clad convicts-nearly starved to death. A relief ship came with food and news of the French Revolution Says Moorehead: "What did they make of the terror? Were the convicts delighted that the underdog was having its day? Did any of them pause to reflect that in France, the most sophisticated country on earth, one could watch the guillotine at work in the public streets with sadistic indifference, while here in New Holland the aborigine, the most primitive of all human beings, burst into tears when he watched...
...they imagined the whip. The same reproach had been felt before. The Tahitians had burst into tears when Cook had a thief flogged on the rigging of his ship. All these things have been written of before -Australia's natural history, Pacific exploration, and colonization. It is Moorehead's peculiar talent to keep the land, the natives and the newcomers in mind at the same time, so that what may have been regarded as mere event takes on the aspect of a moral drama. Historical journalism here justifies itself...