Children of Abrahams.(Australian Genesis: Jewish Convicts and Settlers 1788-1860)(Book Review)

Australian Genesis: Jewish Convicts and Settlers 1788-1860, by John S. Levi and G.F.J. Bergman (new edition); Melbourne University Press, 2002, $89.95.

IN THESE TIMES there is a certain exquisite irony in picking up Levi and Bergman s Australian Genesis and once again being reminded that we non-indigenous Australians are all basically boat people. Those reluctant first "settlers" and their jailers from the eleven ships under Arthur Phillip's command (himself rumoured to be a descendant of a Dutch family) landed on what was officially terra nullius. Strictly speaking therefore, they were not illegals. However, the locals had no Pacific solution to fall back on. The rest, as they say, is history.

Multiculturalism was with us from Day One. The people of 1788 were English, Irish, Scots, a Jamaican or two and sundry other nationalities; there were Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

The second edition of Australian Genesis has been recently published. Sadly, one of its original authors, George Bergman, passed away in 1979, but the character of the book remains, with John Levi's revisions and additions in keeping with the spirit of the original.

I enjoyed this book when it first appeared and am even more delighted with the update with its clearer print, the additional information, the colour photographs and the more accessible chapter headings, footnotes and index. The book suits me--I am a dipper into history rather than a cover-to-cover reader. I learn (and teach) history with an emphasis on people and trivia.

Not everyone cares for the likes of Ikey Solomons (was he really the model for Dickens' Fagin?) or Barnett Levey (builder of the tallest structure in Sydney at the time, the Theatre Royal--without government approval or submitted building plans--have things really changed that much?) or for that matter James Larra, a road-making convict who became the first publican of Parramatta. But if you want to know the real history of early Australia, where better to find it than in the stories of the eccentrics, thieves, entrepreneurs and scheming politicians of the colonial period? This book focuses on a slice of that society--the handful of Jews on the First Fleet (probably about eight in all) and those who followed them over the next seventy or so years.

It is the perpetual cry of schoolchildren that "nothing ever happened in Australian history"--not like France in 1789 or America in 1776 or indeed in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Where are the wars and revolutions, the overthrow of governments, or the sweeping intellectual movements for God or Mammon? They may not be intrigued with the three dismissals of duly appointed or elected governments. But what better way to approach the first of these--the overthrow of William Bligh on 26th January 1808--not with a narrative of the monopolising of rum by officers of the New South Wales Corps, but rather through the eyes of Esther Johnston?