To Chase the Storm: The Frontier Series 4 (51 page)

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Authors: Peter Watt

BOOK: To Chase the Storm: The Frontier Series 4

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‘But you don’t believe in blackfella curse and want to go into the cave. Ha! You should not disturb the old ones. They got power over the living. And you got questions about Matthew, Patrick and all the others. That take a long time. Mebbe, I think ’bout telling you. Mebbe not.’

AUTHOR’S
NOTE

From the hills and plains of India, the prairies of Canada, the fern forests of New Zealand and the Outback frontier of Australia, the tough colonials volunteered to fight in far-off South Africa in the last year of the nineteenth century. They went to fight for the British Empire against men not unlike themselves – independent-minded farmers of Dutch stock known as Boers – and it would become the first war of the twentieth century as the campaign extended into 1902. Like the Korean conflict of the early 1950s, it would become a ‘forgotten war’. Yet, in the South African campaign of 1899–1902, the world saw the trend for conflicts for the next one hundred years: war waged against a civilian population to meet strategic needs, and the technology of weapons of mass destruction employed on the battlefield, such as machine guns and quick-firing artillery.

It was a war where Britain initially saw serious military setbacks and any victories were given wide media coverage to allay the fears of the tax-paying public at home. Sadly, the outstanding tenacity of the colonial defenders of the Elands River siege gained little attention or recognition from the British commanders. But the brilliant Boer commander General Smuts would later comment: ‘Never in the course of this war did a besieged force endure worse sufferings . . . [They had shown] magnificent courage, albeit fortified by dugouts and drink, and had taught local Boers a proper appreciation of the Australians.’ Flattery may come from friends and allies but praise is best expressed by your enemies.

I found Craig Wilcox’s book
Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa, 1899–1902
(Oxford University Press, 2002) a great source of information on the Australian involvement in that campaign. I would recommend it as a starting point to any student interested in the subject.

The Palestinian aspect of this novel is grounded in the history of the Zionist state of Israel. There is a misconception by many that the terrible Holocaust of World War Two began the mass migration of displaced Jewish people to Palestine. In fact a half-century earlier, Jewish men and women were fleeing bloody pogroms in Russia and settling in the Ottoman-controlled territory of Palestine. But it was a young Jewish journalist from Vienna named Theodor Herzl, covering the infamous Captain Alfred Dreyfus case in France, who recognised that something had to be done to free the Jews of Europe
from their two thousand year history of bloody persecution. He put forward his ideas for a Jewish state at the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. At first Argentina was mooted as a place to found a Jewish state but later in 1906 Palestine was formally nominated as the home of people of Jewish beliefs. And so the first settlers after the Russian pogroms of the 1880s drifted to Palestine to seek a new life free of persecution. The rest is the tragic history that extends into our lives in the twenty-first century.

Not to be forgotten in history is the unsung role of Australia’s economic gift to the world – the humble gum tree. Because of its ability to live in arid and supposedly infertile land, it has been planted from Africa to Israel to the United States of America to reclaim land for agriculture.