Nisi Dominus Frustra.(A Loose Canon: Essays on History, Modernity and Tradition)

A Loose Canon: Essays on History, Modernity and Tradition, by Brian J. Coman; Connor Court Publishing, 2007, $29.95.

WHEN BRIAN COMAN'S first essay, "A Short History of the Rabbit in Australia", which is in this collection, was published in the April 1996 issue of Quadrant, he was I believe completely unknown in intellectual circles. He was not unpublished though, and while I have no doubt that The Identification of Mammalian Hair and Recent Research on Feral Cats were paragons of scientific writing, their influence and readership were probably fairly restricted.

What he brought to his essay on the rabbit was a unique blend of experience and thought. He is a biological scientist, with a PhD in animal parasitology, and decades of experience in the eradication of pest mammals. Now I don't want to be unkind to Brian, but I think it's fair to say that the phrase "pest mammal eradication" is a contradiction in terms in Australia, and even if Brian did not already have the dry, laconic sense of humour of the bushman, then the long-term results of his efforts, and the observations of the farmers he met in the course of his work, would have done something about that.

So Brian has a deep scepticism about humans and their works, and a deep respect for the natural world in all its forms, rabbits and parasites included. But he also has a boundless curiosity and the desire to seek wisdom, something which is probably fairly rare not only among scientists outside their field of specialisation, but also among those who would like to be ranked among society's intellectuals.

The breadth of Brian's reading is astonishing. Among the books he discusses in these essays are numerous classics of ancient Greece, Rome and China, Australian poetry, Irish memoirs, the Arthurian legends, the works of the major Church writers of the first millennium or so, as well as modern philosophy, all the way down to a little volume called Rat Catching for the Use of Schools by H.C. Barkley, which I believe was first published in the 1890s:

 
   A thousand dollars would not tempt me to part 
   with my copy. This is a gem of a book. Barkley 
   wrote the book out of a deep conviction that "it is 
   far better that they [the students] should perfectly 
   master the rudimentary knowledge of such an 
   honest profession as that of rat catcher, than that 
   they should drift on through their school life with 
   no definite future marked out, finally to become 
   perhaps such scourges of society as MP's who 
   make speeches when Parliament is not sitting". 
   Yea, verily! 

As Brian sent further essays to Quadrant he gradually developed his range in accordance with this reading. There was a period of more than a year, after the change in the magazine's editorship, when we heard nothing from Brian apart from one rather biting letter to the editor. Had we heard the last of him, as we had of several other writers?