Customer Reviews

A Long Way Home: The Life and Adventures of the Convict Mary Bryant

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As one who has spent his entire life in Australia, I can't help feeling that story of the First Fleet is almost a part of me. From an early age I was fed and I absorbed the legends of poor English children transported to Botany Bay for the crime of stealing a handkerchief or a loaf of bread. Brutal guards, corrupt officials and murderous natives are used to complete the picture, and to help create an Australian ethos which is - and of course I generalise - anti-authority, anti-British and, perhaps most tragic of all, anti-Aboriginal.
Mike Walker's work is, in that context, an important contribution to a more complete understanding of Australia, and Australians. It's also a darned good read.
Mary Bryant (nee Broad) is stereotypical in many ways - poor Cornish fisherman's daughter, driven to petty crime, almost hanged, transported, persistent, strong - and so it goes.
Her story moves from the stereotypical to the extraordinary as she battles all before her to return with her family to her beloved Cornwall.
While the tale itself is remarkable, and worth the price of admission in its own right, I enjoyed the other personalities just as much. James Boswell, Arthur Phillip, Watkin Tench (or, in an hilarious error in the index, "Watkin Fench"), and Ralph Clark all come to life in a real, raw and entertaining way, thanks to Walker's style, and also to the way he has structured the book.
"A Long Way Home" is a neat companion to Tom Kenneally's "The Commonwealth of Thieves," also published in 2005, and providing a more general account of the first four years of English settlement in what we now know as Australia.
Walker is more tightly focused, but no less incisive and insightful. His is a book for the vaguely-interested (in Australian history) and also for the vitally-concerned. It is beautifully presented, and - I'm writing this review in early December - would make a superb Christmas for any thinking person.

I found the book to be very dsconnected. Definitely full of history but lacking in continunity. Mike Walker had so many sources to use and think he used them all, but many times he lost focus of Mary Bryant and tended to give a history lecture. Very interesting and informative, just didn't care for the structure of the book and presentation of the story.