IN EARLY NEW SOUTH WALES

Press, Volume C, Issue 29674, 18 November 1961, Page 3

IN EARLY NEW SOUTH WALES

The Secrets of Alexander Harris. With an Introduction by his grandson. Grant Carr-Harris. Angus and Robertson. 245 pp.

Alexander Harris < 18051874) is well remembered in Australia especially for his remarkable chronicle, "Settlers and Convicts.” first published anonymously in 1847. This was and still is an important book, graphically written and containing much informative material about New South Wales between 1826 and 1840. Subsequent editions appeared under the author's name, but because certain personal particulars in the book did not ring true, the impression arose that the name Alexander Harris was not genuine; and thus, when an edition was published in Australia in 1953, it was suggested that the author was probably an ex-convict, hiding under a pen-name.

At last, after many years of controversy, the mystery is solved. The author was in fact Alexander Harris, and the book now under review is his autobiography. It turns out that Alexander Harris was a well-educated son of an English person who ran away to Australia to get out of trouble. Reaching New South Wales late in 1825, he lived for a time a dissipated life in Sydney, subsequently wandered extensively about eastern parts of the colony working in a wide variety of jobs from magistrate's clerk to pit-sawyer, and after returning to England, late in 1840, he began writing of his Australian experiences, at first cautiously adopting a pseudonym and disguising the names of persons whom he met. He did not, as he claimed in “Settlers and Convicts.” marry in Australia; but he married twice on re-

turning to England, lost both wives—one by death and the other by desertion—and thereafter lived in the United States and Canada.

All this and many other details of an unusual life are contained in the present book, which is at basis a frank autobiography written by Harris in his days of “repentance.” Though first published in serial form by the “Saturday Evening Post” (Philadelphia) under the title “Religio Christi” in 1858, until now this work was not known in Australia and has never previously been published. The narrative leaves certain gaps, and to fill some of these, his grandson. Grant Carr-Harris, of Canada, in an introduction comments on Alexander Harris’s boyhood and education, his family background, his religious conversion, and its impact on his domestic life, and finally, on his last years in America In the preface, Alec H. Chisholm (president of the Royal Australian Historical Society) examines the Harris revelations from the Australian angle. Alexander, Harris himself was a writer of ability, and the New Zealand reader will be impressed by the parallel between the temperaments of Harris and Samuel Butler, now so well known. Both were sons of nineteenth-cen-tury parsons: each based his first book on colonial experience, and each in subsequent writings revealed definite dislike of his father. “Strangely, too,” comments Chisholm, “Butler emulated Harris in that he did his utmost to draw a veil of secrecy around himself, so causing a recent biographer to comment that ‘whoever meddles with Butler is likely to start more hares than he can chase'.”

Harris’s autobiography is written objectively and with mature outlook. It sheds light on the torrid conditions that prevailed in early New South Wales, and gives a fascinating story of one man's physical and mental struggles, against an authentic background of early colonial life. He is bitter when discussing the brutal excesses of the penal system. He strongly impeaches, too, the “prodigality” of early granting of land, which, in his belief, had led to “an aristocracy as real, and as overwhelming in wealth and influence, as that which existed in the old monarchies of Europe.” On the other hand, however, he exclaims frequently on the beauty of the countryside and on the beneficent nature of the climate; and, in commenting on the sturdy stature of the native-born white men and the gracefulness of the females, he observes that “from convict blood, on either or both sides, has sprung much more than the average of the strength and beauty of the colony.” Extensive passages of “Religio Christi,” as originally published, have been omitted from the present book. To the author’s grandson these seemed largely repetitive and tedious moralising, and so, with the publisher’s concurrence, he decided upon a measure of curtailment. Otherwise we are assured that the original text has not been amended to any remarkable degree. The illustrations are "excellent and add to the interest of the text. Australian literature usually holds no great interest for New Zealand readers. Nevertheless, Alexander Harris was a vivid story-teller, and as a result this beautifully-pro-duced autobiography should be well received in this country.