Australian bookshelves can provide good reading material for book lovers. I found this during a recent visit to Australia when I had the opportunity of browsing through the shelves in bookstores, a few libraries and through the Internet during the month I spent there. Though not much known to us, good writing and book publication have made great strides in Australia since I left that country in mid 1970s. Three years later in 1973, the Nobel Prize in Literature was won by the Australian, Patrick White, for his book ‘The Eye of the Storm’. White wrote 12 novels starting first in 1939 and the last one in 1986, four years before his death at the age of 78 years. He won several other prizes for his other books and was named the Australian of the year in 1974.

As I was teasing my memory trying to reconstruct the accounts I learnt in Australia over forty years ago about the seafaring Sri Lankans from Magalle and Unawatuna in Galle who migrated to the English penal colony which was separated from Sydney and came to be known as Queensland, an Australian friend who came for my daughter’s wedding recently brought me a copy of the book "An Irresistible Temptation" authored by Carol Baxter (2006), which besides throwing light on the life and times in the Australian penal colonies as part of the story she has pieced together from archival records surrounding the life of a young English transportee, provided also an interesting bit of information about the management of deceased-estate –trust –funds.

This was a reference in the book to an accusation levelled at one of the principal characters figuring in its story, John Steven Jnr., the Registrar of the Supreme Court of the Sydney Colony, Magistrate and Commissioner of Crown Lands who faced, among other charges, the accusations that he had embezzled deceased- estate- trust funds. In the 1960s, I was somewhat puzzled when as First Secretary of the Ceylon High Commission in Canberra, I was pursuing a personal request made to me by the late Dr.W. Dahanayake, M.P. to obtain information about properties of two of his constituents’ late father had owned in Australia. That was when I learnt that two of his real-estate properties in Townsville, a town north of Brisbane, which had been administered by the Public Trustee after the man’s death intestate had been disposed of by the latter to recover administrative costs. Long correspondence ensued but I was perplexed by the news that valuable properties could have been so disposed easily. Siri Mendis, a long time resident in Brisbane ,whom former High Commissioner General Anton Muttucoomaru had introduced to me as a useful person to keep in touch, who put me wise on the value of the real estate concerned and asked me to prevent the local authorities of similarly disposing a remaining property which he said was something very valuable as it stood adjoining the Tobacco Company premises.

Siri who was then running the popular jewellery business his father established in Melbourne (his brother was running the business in Thursday Island) hailed from Galle and knew the antecedents of the man whom Dr. Dahanayake referred to, one Arnolis Appu from Unawatuna. He had been brought to Queensland by Siri’s father along with hundred others from Galle whom he had recruited as labourers to work in various enterprises that the new colony offered. Work in sugar plantations was the easiest available for the unskilled. But the men from Galle area being adepts in many fields, found opportunities as woodcutters in the vast cedar forests, sawyers, carpenters and cabinet-makers and a few as grocers, vendors, bakery assistants, boarding-keepers et al. Arnolis Appu had been a more enterprising man than others. Having bought an old horse and a rig after earning some money from his labour, he had ended up as a trusted supplier of groceries and vegetable to farm settlements around Townsville, a town north of Brisbane. That is how he built up his resources to purchase valuable real estate.

The rest is another story to be taken up separately. What concerns me here is that, that as the story related by Carol Baxter reveals the management of deceased –estate trust property had not been hunky-dory in the old settlements. I am not suggesting that Arnolis Appu’s properties suffered the same fate, but the information in Baxter’s story leaves one perplexed.

Another interesting piece that came my way from another book "The Federation Mirror," a serious book on the situation of the former Queensland colony around the time Federation which is not unrelated to the early Ceylonese immigrants to the colony, is a case of a violent physical attack on a Sinhalese boarding keeper by fifty drunken South Seas Kanakas brought as indentured labour to work in sugar plantations, an incident which the Cairns Morning Post of 11th January 1901 reported. I have so far not been able to trace who this boarding keeper was, That inquiry has to be taken up separately.

To come to Carol Baxter’s book, "An Irresistible Temptation," it has special meaning to me not only as interested as I am in the phase of western expansion, commonly called ‘colonial history’ but also because many of the places described in the book present themselves to me as real-life places as I saw some of them over forty years ago while travelling through the country around Sydney and New South Wales not just on the Hume Highway which was then freshly laid out but on the roads on the outback. Stopping in little towns with their country pubs which still retained an aura of old American townships one saw in old Westerns, and at cattle auctions on week-ends was a real invitation to understanding the past going back to the colonial penal settlement days. Tasmania where I went searching for seed-potatoe spuds for our farmers and Victoria and South Australia where I traversed in the company of a horse- breaker and saddler to collect 15 horses for our Police force also came to mind when I read this book, especially the narrative about Amos Crisp, a transportee from London, who ran such a business of breaking horses and as a saddler at Lower Minto, some miles inland from Sydney, who provided an annex for John Steven Jnr’s week-end escapades with a woman whose identity was disputed.

Other book lovers, I am sure, may find this type of book, which the author describes as "neither fiction nor ‘faction,’ the latter of which she describes as a current trend creating a vivid story by interweaving fictionalized dialogue and description into a story about real people and events, a very rare one to come-by. One may not easily find such a fascinating story among the plethora of books from British, American and other writers which have now invaded the shelves of bookstores.

The author, Carol Baxter, is a Fellow of the Society of Australian Genealogists and researchers who has published widely in the field of Australian colonial history. She says the ‘faction’ of today has the drawback for the reader in the uncertainty as to where fact ends and fiction begins….She claims that in the "An Irresistible Temptation" the characters, events and dialogue are all drawn from the wealth of records relating to the Jane News scandal. To generate a sense of immediacy, a feeling that the characters were living their own story rather than a narrator observing them, the author says she used information from court testimonies, affidavits, letters, reports and newspaper articles to describe events as they happened and that she used the technique of converting recollections [of witnesses] into speech but conversions were not always straight forward words, phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs. Sometimes these had to be omitted, or words added or the arrangement tweaked slightly for ease of comprehension. There are other innovations adopted in presenting research material in a easily readable form close to those who take delight In fictional literature.

As the many end-notes, source descriptions individually for each of the 49 chapters, the epigraph and the epilogue and several-paged fine index point to, the book is a well researched one. The five pages of bibliography which includes printed books, journals, manuscripts and Internet sites, which the author has accessed at the British Library, London, Cheshire Record Office, Jersey Archives, Channel Islands, London Metropolitan Archives, Lancashire Record Office, Mitchell Library, Sydney, Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages, Victoria, State Library of Tasmania, state records of New South Wales and the National Archives, Kew, England reinforces the claim.

The story which begins with Jane News nee’ Maria Wilkinson, who was transported to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Island (Tasmania) claimed Leeds in Yorkshire as her birthplace (baptized at Headingly in 1805?) and knew nothing of her father (probably, a widowed mason who married Elizabeth Cormack in 1804?). Jane’s childhood was one of ‘work, work, work’ with minimal schooling of one week (paying halfpenny) which was just what the parents could afford. The Industrial Revolution had enveloped the suburbs into the town of Leeds, formerly a major woollen producing neighbourhood into a cotton manufacturing centre. As I often quoted in my writing in these columns, the model that Locke, the leading representative of democratic and liberal thought in England recommended for ‘the children of unemployed poor to be put to work at the age of three since they were then capable of producing more than it costs to maintain them’ would have fitted little Jane.

Whether or not she went to work with her mother, Elizabeth Wilkinson, as early as the age of three years as Locke advocated, is not clear; but probably, before she was ten years she joined her mother in the drudgery of scrubbing floors, washing up linen and stitching up ‘unwanted clothes’ of affluent employers as she was seen used by her mother for shop-lifting by the time she was thirteen years! That was better than the drudgery in the households. Jane excelled in needlecraft and graduated in the needlework industry which was then dominated by single or widowed women or small entrepreneurs employing them. Women laboured in these places from 8 in the morning till 11 in the night and till 12 in winter when the fashion season was on. Many females looking for a little change from this boredom and exploitation turned to sex or alcoholism.

With 300,000 soldiers returning after the final victory of Duke of Wellington from Napoleonic wars –that is the other side of success in wars - and the crop failure England experienced at the time, the country was facing depression under the Regency making many unemployed. Jane, 13 years of age at the time was induced to crime by her mother. Jane’s mother, another accomplice and Jane were caught shop-lifting and were arraigned before the court for the crime. The items involved, a pair of boots was under-valued by the shopkeeper at a penny and a half each obviously to prevent the women being sent to the gallows if the value exceeded a few shillings. So harsh was the English law at the time! When the Dutch in Sri Lanka ordered the death penalty for anyone damaging a cinnamon plant a century earlier, it was not surprising! Jane and the other accomplice were imprisoned for two weeks but Elizabeth for twelve months. Jane, thereafter, pursued a career of crime of shop-lifting and both mother and daughter spent more time in prison than out. At sixteen with three crimes and prison terms behind her, at eighteen Jane earned seven years’ transportation for her fourth similar charge to such parts beyond the seas as the Majesty’s government may determine. Jane was transported to Tasmania on 12th October 1824, while her mother was transported to Sydney on board another ship but they planned to meet not knowing that a distance of 18,000 miles separated them on the seas.