It is chronologically first, despite not being the first written.

It traces the career and life of Otto Prohaska from small-town Bohemia to outstanding service in the Imperial and Royal Navy of Austria-Hungary.

Young Otto studies at the marine academy, learning 19th century sailing skills that will be largely irrelevant in the looming Great War. He travels around the world on a secret mission to find a missing Archduke, experiencing many adventures along the way.

Some have described the Prohaska stories as similar to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, but Otto is much more decent.

There are many zany encounters though, such as with cannibals in the Pacific, and a failed effort to establish an Austro-Hungarian colony in West Africa.

The pace can be a little slow at times, but the historical detail appears faithful to circumstances for major events and the technology of the era.

Prohaska retains respect for the Dual Monarchy, the House of Austria, throughout his experiences and ordeals, despite his pan-German nationalist father and his own Czech background.

He believed that the Habsburgs provided unity and some stability for 11 ethnic linguistic groups, which would otherwise have been at each other’s throats.

I can recommend this book and the series to anyone who wants a genuine insight into a bygone power of old Europe while learning about a largely forgotten fragment of military history.

• My online library: http://ax.lv/books

Kathleen received a gift card for her birthday last week.

Kent is a pseudonym for Douglas Reeman, a British author who has written dozens of books, set mostly in the Napoleonic era and the Second World War.

I’ve been reading novels from the Bolitho series. Richard Bolitho rose to high rank following a series of victories against American and French ships.

Bolitho was known for his tactical ingenuity and his unorthodox methods to achieve extraordinary results.

The early novels I read were fast paced and detailed in their description of various battles.

I was lucky enough to pick up a couple of the books marked down at a local store, while I obtained the others from the Mount Gambier Library.

The library may have the entire series, but several books were missing on the two occasions I went in there, so I’ve had to skip a few along the way to “Beyond the Reef” in which Bolitho is a vice-admiral.

This book is an absolute dud. I mentioned in a previous post how a football coach had a “brain explosion”. I don’t know what Reeman was thinking when he wrote Beyond the Reef, but it’s so far removed from his earlier works that I wonder if it wasn’t just churned out to top up his retirement fund.

Instead of being focused on naval strategy and life at sea it’s mostly about Bolitho’s love life, the machinations of his (understandably) bitter wife and nasty sister, the demise of his friendship with an old colleague and other such tribulations.

Even the shipwreck on a reef while bound for Cape Town was a dramatic anti-climax. Instead of grappling with pirates or slavers, Bolitho and his sweetheart are conveniently rescued and spirited back to England.

I’m afraid I can’t even bring myself to finish this book. I’m so glad I didn’t pay for it.

I’m not alone in holding this view, as this review from Amazon shows:

By now we’ve heard almost all the sail commands and maneuvers possible, and Kent seems to have run out of new sea lore. This is another book in which Bolitho’s passionate interest in his married lover Catherine takes pride of place to sea action. Kent is spinning his wheels in these later stories, or better said: “he’s all aback, an’ that’s no error.” Now that Richard Bolitho has been an admiral for a while, he’s become more involved with grand strategy than small ship actions, and Kent is harder pressed to make him an exciting figure. This is probably true to life but makes for a tedious tale. Symptomatic of the problem is the fact the publisher devotes most of the cover blurb to the author’s credentials to write such a book, and only two sentences to the story. The “Reefs” of the title are more metaphorical than geographic: the estrangement of Bolitho and his favorite officer, Herrick; Herrick’s court-martial; Bolitho’s cruel sister; Herrick’s betrayal; and Bolitho’s continuing estrangement from power and reward due to envy and his illicit affair. Despite his youthful appearance, a lifetime’s violent assaults and horrific losses are grinding Bolitho down. Kent’s mistake may have been to start Bolitho too early in his career and promote him too rapidly, arriving at flag rank too long before the convenient end of the Napoleonic world wars. Kent seems to be grooming Admiral Bolitho’s nephew, frigate Captain Adam Bolitho, for better and more cheerful stories in the future.

I would add that Reeman’s other mistake was not to know when to end a good thing.

The technology uses radio waves to transfer data from an electronic tag, called RFID tag or label, attached to an object, through a reader for the purpose of identifying and tracking the object. Some RFID tags can be read from several metres away and beyond the line of sight of the reader. The application of bulk reading enables an almost-parallel reading of tags.

I knew this gadget had been installed, because we ran a story about it in the paper, but I had no idea how to use it.

Fortunately, there was a friendly librarian on hand to explain it all.

Firstly, I placed my library card on the screen for it to read the bar code. Then I simply had to place the books on the screen; it didn’t matter which way around.

Bingo! The machine printed a docket, I pressed an “exit” button and the process was complete.

I said to the librarian that I hoped this machine wasn’t doing her out of a job. She assured me it wasn’t; that she’d have more time for other important things.

Still being a little nostalgic from the previous post, I remember joining the Traralgon Library in the early 70s while a student at St Michael’s Primary School.

We were given pink library cards, about 2×1 inches. The whole “checkout” was manual — no such thing as bar codes then.

It’s a tough uncompromising look at early colonial life in South West Victoria, just across the border from Mount Gambier.

At the beginning I thought it was set near Wannon Falls at the foot of the Grampians. Later, I realised the setting was Port Fairy, where Hooker lived for many years.

Beyond The Pale describes how an Anglo Irish aristocrat struggles against isolation and hardships in the 1840s to establish a successful farming estate on the edge of civilisation.

For the main character, John Harringon, Australia is an alien land which he dislikes, but seeks to tame.

As the younger son of a financially failed father he was sent to the colonies to make his own way.

He employs Daniel O’Leary, who becomes the farm manager and a lifelong ally, albeit they retain a master-servant relationship.

In Port Victoria (Port Fairy) Harrington has to deal with the merchant James Rutford who owns most of the town and its supplies.

Always prudent, cautious and responsible, Harrington succeeds financially where most others crash. He rarely drinks and remains aloof.

As his father’s fortunes fail, Harrington’s brother Richard, their sister Elizabeth and her husband Clive Davies join him in the new world.

They are all arrogant, flawed individuals who don’t want to be where they end up and struggle to adapt.

Richard Harrington and Davies are drunkards; Elizabeth is frustrated with her life and pretentious; she cavorts with a caddish neighbour Edmund Butler, acquires the pox and goes mad.

Beyond the Pale is a story of displacement, racism and brutality. The Irish are oppressed and they, in turn, oppress the Aborigines.

Unlike some authors, Hooker doesn’t portray the Aborigines as noble savages. They too are shown as having human frailties.

Harrington’s method of adapting to his alien world is to build an English estate, complete with mansion, gardens, a lake and church.

He succeeds, but it’s a constant battle to maintain the property against the climate, pilfering natives, envious rivals, corrupt officials and hostile staff.

A key aspect of the book I felt two thirds through was that no character was decent. Every one of them had a fundamental flaw, some kind of negative trait or vice.

Harrington was snobbish, exploitative and sexually ambiguous.

The ending elevated O’Leary to a more noble status, but earlier it seemed his lack of ambition would be his undoing. Overall he was loyal, persistent and less prone to excesses.

The sense of dislocation and human weakness are constant themes throughout the novel.

Reading this interview with Hooker, who died in 2008, dislocation was one of his favorite themes.

“It’s an uncompromising look at the treachery and racism that underlie Australia’s formation, notes Hooker. He remembers walking “many years ago in the autumnal hills outside Canberra with Manning Clarke who suddenly said: ‘We have no business being here’. He meant we, as Europeans, are in the wrong place. It was an undercurrent in his histories, and it’s echoed in Henry Reynolds’ work, that our presence here is morally defective. And I firmly believe that, that until we face up to our colonial past, we are never going to get it right.”

I think that’s a rather grim view, but I like the way Hooker wrote.

It was also fascinating to read early 19th century descriptions of an area close to my current home.

I’m visiting Port Fairy and Warrnambool tomorrow. I’ll look at both places with a fresh perspective.

Although gripping, the end left me disenchanted and after some belated sleep I woke up a little annoyed.

Amazon’s description of the story:

“Jessica” is based on the real life of a remarkable young Australian woman who defied the conventions of her time. She had a stubborn streak and the courage to act out her convictions … in spite of the consequences. This compelling, sweeping story is her personal fight for justice against enormous odds, and a testimony to the power of the human spirit to triumph over adversity.

Jessica has a few wins along the highway of life, but mostly she is mowed down, left abandoned on the roadside, mowed down again, run off the road and eventually run over.

Quite depressing really.

I started reading Bryce Courtenay’s Southern African books about 10 years ago: The Power of One and later White Thorn.

Courtenay was born in South Africa, but has lived most of his life in Sydney.

In more recent times I have read and enjoyed Sylvia, Brother Fish, The Persimmon Tree and Matthew Flinders’ Cat.

Jessica ended strangely. After covering the main character’s tragic life the story switches to focus on an itinerant half-caste named Mary Simpson and her tribulations.

I was waiting to see if Jessica would be reunited with the son who was stolen from her, but the entire final third of the book hardly touched on it.

Perhaps Courtenay was trying to link the “stolen generation” with Jessica’s experience. If so, it didn’t work for me.

I thought the author had “lost the plot” instead.

What annoyed me however, was the way Courtenay promoted stereotypes, glossed superficially over complex social issues and pandered to minorities.

While possibly not intended to be historical fiction, a more balanced analysis was warranted.

Anyone reading the novel will feel the injustice of groups being discriminated against including women, Catholics, immigrants, Jews, Aborigines, the disabled and the insane.

Gays were about the only minority group that didn’t get a mention.

The fact is, none of those groups felt strongly (majority view) at the time they were being discriminated against, or they accepted their situation.

Regarding Aborigines, Courtenay has no doubt researched and discovered incidents that support his scenes of institutional abuse.

However, that in itself is an injustice to the church missions in particular that did provide adequate food and shelter along with a rudimentary education.

It was like Courtenay wanted to present the worst-case examples, which I suppose is an author’s prerogative, albeit a shallow option when the subject matter is political.

The White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) is portrayed in Jessica as a malignant influence.

The fact is many minorities overcame obstacles to achieve success.

That’s where I thought Jessica was heading in the early stages: a young woman making her way successfully in a man’s world.

Instead she is beaten down by her own family and the WASP establishment.

Jessica made choices that contributed to her own demise.

She was a flawed heroine, but part of me wanted her to triumph against adversity.

She failed and the book failed me.

Apparently the story is based on true-life events. True life doesn’t always have a satisfactory ending as the fictional Jessica affirms.

I falsely believed that Playford created the gerrymander which helped keep him in power for a Commonwealth record 26 years, and that he was responsible for merging the conservatives with the Country Party.

Both of these circumstances occurred shortly before Playford began his extraordinary career, but helped his fortunes immensely.

I won’t retell his life story here.

To give a short summary, he was born into an established affluent family with orchards in the Adelaide Hills, from a non-conformist religious background and his grandfather was a former Premier of South Australia, also Thomas Playford.

The Liberal Federation and Country Party merged in 1932 to form the Liberal and Country League as a tactic to end Labor’s stranglehold on power.

The LCL subsequently won the 1933 election, where Playford was first elected to represent a multi-member rural constituency.

He proved a meddlesome backbencher, often needling his own side, and Premier Richard Butler soon elevated him to the frontbench.

Playford was a hard worker and researched everything carefully. His main interests were land reform and industrial development.

When Butler made an unsuccessful tilt at Federal Parliament, he handed over to Playford as Premier, thinking he wouldn’t last long in the role.

That was in 1938 and he remained Premier until 1965.

The gerrymander guaranteed two country seats to every city seat. The Labor Party was strong in regional South Australia in the 1930s and never minded this arrangement too much until the 1950s when Adelaide’s population was growing rapidly and country areas became more conservative.

Ironically, Adelaide’s population grew because Playford transformed the state from an agricultural backwater to a highly industrialised society.

He oversaw the development of automobile manufacturing, the Whyalla steel works and Leigh Creek coal mine among many others.

Best Labor Premier

Playford was once described by a Labor MP as “the best Labor Premier in Australia”.

He took on the Adelaide establishment to takeover the Adelaide Electric Supply Company and create the state-owned Electricity Trust of South Australia.

He collaborated with the Australian Workers Union to keep the Communist-controlled Miners Federation out of Leigh Creek, thereby saving South Australia from the terrible coal strikes which afflicted New South Wales.

In his foreword, Sir Charles Court described Playford as a “right wing democratic socialist”. The author disagrees, but the point is well made, that while Playford was socially conservative he was interventionist with the economy and supported organised labor.

Under Playford’s premiership, acrimonious parliamentary debates were rare because he got along with the Labor leaders and they often supported his program.

When it came to taking over the electricity company his biggest hurdle was conservative opposition in the Legislative Council.

Cockburn theorises that Playford’s downfall was brought about by the Stuart case and demographic changes in Adelaide, which the rising Don Dunstan exploited cleverly for Labor.

Max Stuart was an Aborigine accused of raping and killing a young white girl at Ceduna. I read the authoritative book by KS Inglis before I went to live at Ceduna in 1991.

Stuart was convicted and sentenced to hang. Some anomalies in the case, new evidence and concerns about Stuart’s ability with English led to public agitation for a retrial and commutation of the death penalty.

Playford was slow to react but eventually commuted the sentence. When he finally appointed a Royal Commission, two of the three judges had been involved with the original trial and the first appeal.

Playford was seen to be out of touch with community sentiment, perhaps reflecting his age.

Six o’clock closing

He also faced a less compliant media, with the Rupert Murdoch-run Adelaide News probing hard on the Stuart case and hospital neglect and television on the rise.

Playford resisted ending six o’clock pub closing, which cost him support from workers in the growing industrial suburbs and these suburbs were spreading into former regional areas like the Barossa Valley.

The LCL narrowly lost the 1965 election and Playford’s reign was over.

While he created many industries and jobs, these were arguably to contribute to South Australia’s later decline as the state produced goods at a high cost which Australia didn’t need. The state became reliant on its manufacturing industries.

These industries were established without much thought given to environmental issues and obtaining water was problematic.

Playford’s solution was to pipe water from the Murray to Adelaide, Whyalla and the Eyre Peninsula.

In terms of his personality, he was a dominant individual and possibly crossed the line occasionally into bullying.

It’s hard to imagine a similar style of leadership coming to the fore in Australia today and no government could operate as Playford’s did with minimal scrutiny.

Nevertheless, everything he did was for South Australia and he retired from Parliament with an ordinary pension.

Not in the same league as the Flashman series, the story meanders, tackles social issues, skirts around social issues, entertains and frustrates, but generally leaves the reader feeling good.

The main character is Mark Franklin, an American who sets tongues wagging in England when he arrives with seemingly unlimited wealth.

It transpires he once flirted with the wrong side of the law before striking it rich when he discovered a massive silver deposit.

Mr Franklin, as he is described throughout the book, is unpretentious but happily mingles with the English upper class.

He buys a home in the Norfolk village where his family hailed from and becomes accepted as the squire.

He stumbles across King Edward VII on a picnic and immediately finds himself mixing in royal society.

Mr Franklin employs a valet to train him in social etiquette, marries well and establishes a London household.

The dark side emerges when the marriage falters, a ruffian from Mr Franklin’s past needs despatching with a bullet, his wife’s brother steals money from him and gets himself killed and war clouds hover.

There are cameo appearances from General Sir Harry Flashman and some discussion of women’s suffrage issues.

I liked the descriptions of English upper class life in the early 20th century. Certainly it must have been a happy and carefree period before the First World War intervened. How terrible and senseless that was.

Mr Franklin frustrated me somewhat. He is portrayed as in control and astute, but allows himself to be deceived by his wife and her family.

Apart from some charity toward a distant relative he doesn’t use his wealth and position for any significant positive good.

I mentioned in January last year that George MacDonald Fraser had passed away.

That was a shame because he could definitely have written some more Flashman yarns. They will remain his best works.

Thomas Wentworth Wills (1835 – 1880) is described in the book’s subtitle as a “charmer, scoundrel and visionary sportsman”.

He was certainly all of those things; a fascinating man, a sporting hero laid to waste when his physical prowess failed him.

Wills was born on a sheep run south of Sydney to parents who were of convict stock. This made him a “native” and there was some division over the next century between native born and immigrants.

The family moved to Mount William in Western Victoria in 1840. That’s about 200km from where I live at Mount Gambier.

Young Tom grew up among shepherds and tribal Aborigines. He learnt to speak their language.

Tom was sent to Rugby School in England in 1850 for his education, around the era covered in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the author of which Thomas Hughes attended Rugby from 1834 to 1842.

Tom Wills excelled at sports, but struggled academically. He rose to be school cricket captain and was an excellent athlete. He also excelled in the early days of rugby football, which bore little resemblance to the code today.

Tom showed no promise of entering Cambridge to study law as his father hoped, although he did represent the university at cricket. His father eventually lost patience and called him home.

His parents had moved to Geelong, just south of Melbourne and Tom’s father Horatio Wills won election to the Victorian Parliament.

While Tom had been in England the first inter-colonial cricket match was played between Victoria and New South Wales. The Victorians had lost.

As a former captain of Rugby School, Tom was in demand as a cricketer and won selection to represent Victoria in the second inter-colonial match.

Football did not exist in 1856 and cricket was the colony’s premier spectator sport. Most clubs had some professional players, although in the English tradition there was a social divide between amateurs and professionals.

Tom fought hard to retain amateur status over the years, but as he derived most of his living from cricket he was eventually regarded as a professional.

Tom took 10 wickets in a losing performance against New South Wales in the second game.

He was later elevated to captain and led Victoria to many famous victories. He was the best cricketer of his generation, renowned mainly as a fast bowler with useful variations and was handy with the bat.

Alcohol was a feature of the sport’s early days. Players took wine during breaks for refreshments. They also smoked pipes while fielding.

Tom was embroiled in many controversies. He had a knack for offending influential people through his combative nature, but won much popular support among spectators and professional players.

There were many spirited debates carried out through newspapers. In his later years, Tom’s bowling action was questioned and after he was “no balled” for throwing, his first-class career was effectively ended.

In between cricket seasons, Tom was basically bored. Along with several others he is credited with codifying the first rules of Australian football.

The rules were based on those learnt from Rugby and other English public schools, modified for Australian conditions.

The author de Moore dismisses a folk theory that Tom introduced rules from Aboriginal games he had observed in the Western District. All the available evidence suggests Tom adapted the Rugby rules.

Football was just a distraction however, and cricket was the main game.

Meanwhile, Tom’s father still wanted his son to pursue a respectable career.

In what appears to have been a concerted effort to remove Tom from the Melbourne sporting world, Horatio took his son with him to carve a station property from virgin bush in Central Queensland.

They took a steamer to Brisbane, bought supplies and wandered with bullock drays to their new property, which was beyond the edge of civilisation … like Boers on a trek or wagons moving west in the United States.

Shortly after they arrived at Cullin-La-Ringo, Tom left his father and most of the staff to buy supplies.

When he returned he found Horatio and 18 other settlers dead. They had been killed by local Aborigines.

Tom was in shock, of course, but stayed on the station for a couple of years. He worked hard, but didn’t make much progress in transforming the bush into a profitable enterprise.

He was lax with accounts and trustees overseeing the operation eventually dismissed him, with much money unaccounted for.

Tom returned to Melbourne and resumed his cricket career. He was still exulted and led Victoria again as captain until his skills waned.

He never took up a regular occupation, but made money from cricket where he could. This included leading a team of Western District Aborigines on matches throughout Victoria and New South Wales.

In his twilight playing years, after the throwing scandal, he played mostly for country clubs in Geelong and elsewhere, including against the visiting English team led by the legendary WG Grace.

He also continued to play football, mostly for Geelong, and umpired some early VFA matches at the South Melbourne ground, which he lived near for a couple of years.

What becomes evident through the book is the demise of a great man. Tom was a brilliant sportsman before it was common to earn a living from sport. He had little other talent.

He became an almost pathetic figure in his early 40s as he virtually begged for coaching jobs with various clubs.

Tom sank into alcoholism and when the money ran out to buy grog, he suffered tremors and hallucinations which led to his suicide.

By that time his family had pretty much disowned him. He was living with his defacto at Heidelberg on the outskirts of Melbourne.

If he had been born 15 years later Tom’s name would probably be etched forever in Australian sporting history, because he almost certainly would have played test cricket and top-level football, like Jack Worrall in the 1890s.

Could a tragic fall from grace occur to a sportsman today? Maybe Ben Cousins could answer that.

The book is well written, with highlights of Tom’s life being introduced with dramatic effect; a ripping yarn.

Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall
Author: Greg de Moore
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Publication date: July 2008

Neither comes as a shock. There have long been rumors that Bill was a Mick, but author Joseph Pearce has apparently found new evidence.

Jesus would have been a great opening batsman and handy spin bowler. Unlike Bradman, who just fell short, he would have certainly achieved the 100 average.

Apparently the Bible can be translated as follows: “He (Jesus) would take the boys to the seashore and, carrying the playing ball and the club, he would go over the waves of the sea as though he was playing on a frozen surface, hitting the playing ball. And watching him, the boys would scream and say: ‘Watch the child Jesus, what he does over the waves of the sea!’ Many would gather there and, watching him, would be amazed.”

One of the Gnostic gospels is said to include: “Jesus carried all before him as the Egyptians inflicted plague and pestilence. He carried his palm leaf to the gates of Jordan while men were dismissed from his presence.”

Modern scholars interpret this to mean that Jesus scored an unbeaten century after opening the batting while the rest of his team succumbed to hostile fast bowling.

The evidence appears overwhelming.

As for Shakespeare being a Catholic it’s probably true and not really a shock.

Those were turbulent times in England and there is plenty of superficial evidence to support the argument.

That’s if you believe Shakespeare really wrote the plays.