Picking over ancient bones
Title: Napoleon’s Last Island Author: Tom Keneally Publisher: Vintage/Random House RRP: $32.99
MUNGO Man remains stuck in a cardboard box on a shelf in the National Museum in Canberra, 42 years after his prehistoric remains were uncovered by rain and spotted by a geologist in a lake bed in the NSW Outback.
Perhaps that time is but a blip in the 42,000 years scientists now believe he lay buried, placed there in a funeral ritual by his people and later covered by sediment as the lake filled and emptied innumerable times over the millennia.
That early human’s life, a book project drawing together ancient threads with our own time, and the injustice of leaving Mungo Man on a shelf while traditional owners of the Lake Mungo region and governments sort out what to do, were explained in a rush when prolific Australian novelist and non-fiction author Tom Keneally addressed his session at the Byron Bay Writers Festival.
It was an interesting by-theway moment, delivered in a hurried parting with his audience by one of the nation’s most prominent writers as he ran out of time and closed his address on another interesting moment in history and its link to Australia.
Keneally was there to talk about Napoleon, the selfcrowned French emperor who was defeated by a coalition led by the British at the Battle of Waterloo in June, 1815, and whose time in exile as a prisoner on St Helena Island in the Atlantic is detailed in an entertaining mix of fact and fiction in his book, Napoleon’s Last Island.
As wind and rain whipped around the marquees set up for the Byron festival, Keneally had taken his place on a dais in front of an audience of several hundred and, spotting a blanket left on a seat for the speakers, wrapped himself up, becoming slightly reminiscent of Napoleon the general, wrapped in a cloak on the battlefield as he swept across Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.
Keneally was about his subjects.
Mungo Man, he said, was a “wonderful human treasure’’ – picking up on his theme in a comment piece he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in April when he flagged his campaign for justice for an ancient man of dignity who, along with the partial remains of a woman discovered nearby and called “Mungo Lady’’, provided earliest evidence of human burial rites on earth.
In the Sydney article he said: “It is both very human passionate and very Australian to have a treasure before us and not know what to do with it, or not even know it’s a treasure.’’
Forty-two years might be a drop in the ocean for a man who has slept for 42,000 years – “12 to 13 times the antiquity of King Tut’’ – but Keneally believes a fitting memorial or interpretative centre at Lake Mungo is long overdue. And at 81, he has embarked on a writing project with Mungo Man at its heart.
For much of his time at the microphone though, he kept his audience enthralled about how he came to settle on a book about the French military and political leader, Napoleon Bonaparte.
In many of his books, Keneally explores a big issue through the story of a seemingly minor character. In this instance, Keneally is looking at the plight of someone held captive in a foreign land or, more to the point, on an isolated island.
At the core of the Napoleon story is Betsy, the strongwilled 13-year-old daughter of William Balcombe, successful provedore and partner in St Helena Island’s branch of the East India Company. Balcombe learns he is to look after the captured Napoleon and his entourage, which includes put- ting him up in the summer house on his estate, The Briars, until the British Government has built Longwood, Napoleon’s intended farmhouse.
So Betsy, described by Keneally to his Byron audience as “a 13-year-old girl living wild, as a part-tamed child on a mountain top (island) in the Atlantic’’, finds herself forging a friendship that will unintentionally put her family in peril.
Napoleon “turns up in her garden’’ and the “charismatic narcissist’’ – as Keneally describes him – proves to be a great playmate for local kids.
But there is a lot happening as Napoleon seeks advantage with whoever and wherever through his ability to manipulate and befriend. The family come onside and see themselves as his friends rather than prison warders.
He convinces Balcombe to assist him surreptitiously in financial matters, and the relationship with the Balcombes and Betsy does not go unnoticed by the island governor and people back in London, who go so far as to accuse Balcombe of treason.
Betsy’s island paradise is Napoleon’s exile prison and in the end he dies there, while the girl – a woman by the time the family is sent back to London and eventually to the colonies in 1824 where her father becomes colonial treasurer of New South Wales – endures her own exile from her beloved St Helena.
As he tells it, Keneally came across the subject and inspiration by chance, visiting the National Gallery of Victoria and seeing an exhibition of Napoleon’s furniture, objets d’art and other items that had been in the possession of the Balcombe family when they eventually established a property on the Mornington Peninsula, which they also called The Briars.
Balcombe’s granddaughter was Dame Mabel Balcombe Brookes (1890-1975), socialite and wife of prominent businessman and tennis champion Norman Brookes, who won at Wimbledon in singles and doubles before World War I.