The Wreck of the Batavia and Prosper

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 9781863951500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In 1629, the ship Batavia, pride of the Dutch East India Company, was wrecked on the edge of a coral archipelago, some fifty miles from the western coast of the Australian continent. Most of the people on board - nearly three hundred men, women and children - escaped from drowning, only to become victims of a visionary psychopath who, with the help of a dozen followers, organised a methodical massacre of this hapless community. Acclaimed sinologist and author Simon Leys travelled to the site of the disaster and learned that, paradoxically, the natural environment of these islands could have afforded the survivors fairly decent living conditions; the massacre therefore appears all the more aberrant. In fact, in its gratuitous absurdity, it seems to present a microcosm of the totalitarian atrocities that are perpetrated by various ideologies seeking to establish Paradise on earth.

The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 9781863953269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In 1629, the Batavia was wrecked on a coral archipelago fifty miles from the Australian continent. Most of the people on board survived, only to become victims of a visionary psychopath who, with the help of a dozen followers, organised a methodic...

The Wreck of the Batavia

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9781560258216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 111

Book Description
Traces the harrowing 1629 shipwreck of nearly three hundred survivors on small islands off the coast of western Australia who found themselves at the mercy of a visionary psychopath and his team of supporters, a group that brutalized the survivors before eventually slaughtering them in an organized massacre.

Prosper

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1925203549
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 42

Book Description
'A big liner, brightly lit, passes us one or two cable-lengths ahead. 'Ow! They are guzzling champagne but cannot see what's in front of them!' grumbles Etienne, who has the helm and puts Prosper back on course. Our wooden boat, which one long wave can carry, is a mere cork in the wake of that ship, which crushes three dozen such waves under her uncaring steel plates. How many hundreds of men does she carry? Up there, people laugh, play, dream, eat and sleep . . . while we, a few feet above the water, surrounded by dancing lights, keep watch till dawn.' One summer, Simon Leys joined the crew of a tuna-fishing boat in Brittany, one of the last boats working under sail. In this exceptionally beautiful and elegiac essay, he evokes the traditions, hardships and dangers of the oldest and finest form of seamanship.

Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth

Author: Michael Titlestad
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030870413
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Shipwreck Narratives: Out of Our Depth studies both the representation of shipwreck and the ways in which shipwrecks are used in creative, philosophical, and political works. The first part of the book examines historical shipwreck narratives published over a period of two centuries and their legacies. Michael Titlestad points to a range of narrative conventions, literary tropes and questions concerning representation and its limits in narratives about these historic shipwrecks. The second part engages novels, poems, films, artwork, and musical composition that grapple with shipwreck. Collectively the chapters suggest the spectacular productivity of shipwreck narrative; the multiple ways in which its concerns and logic have inspired anxious creativity in the last century. Titlestad recognizes in weaving in his personal experience that shipwreck—the destruction of form and the advent of disorder—could be seen not only as a corollary for his own neurological disorder, but also an abiding principle in tropology. This book describes how shipwreck has figured in texts (from historical narratives to fiction, film and music) as an analogue for emotional, psychological, and physical fragmentation.

The Wreck of the Batavia, 1629

Author: H. Drake-Brockman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Legalized Identities

Author: Lucas Lixinski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108488153
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Reimagines the fields of transitional justice and cultural heritage, showing how law shapes cultural identities in unanticipated yet powerful ways.

The Savage Shore

Author: Graham Seal
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300223250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
For centuries before the arrival in Australia of Captain Cook and the so-called First Fleet in 1788, intrepid seafaring explorers had been searching, with varied results, for the fabled “Great Southland.” In this enthralling history of early discovery, Graham Seal offers breathtaking tales of shipwrecks, perilous landings, and Aboriginal encounters with the more than three hundred Europeans who washed up on these distant shores long before the land was claimed by Cook for England. The author relates dramatic, previously untold legends of survival gleaned from the centuries of Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Indonesian voyages to Australia, and debunks commonly held misconceptions about the earliest European settlements: ships of the Dutch East Indies Company were already active in the region by the early seventeenth century, and the Dutch, rather than the English, were probably the first European settlers on the continent.

Pelletier

Author: Stephanie Anderson
Publisher: Melbourne Books
ISBN: 192212902X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
This book tells the story of a French cabin boy, Narcisse Pelletier, and his life with the Uutaalnganu people of north-east Cape York from 1858 to 1875. Even though it is all but forgotten in Australia, and in France is known only in its broad outlines, Pelletier's story rivals that of the famous William Buckley, both as a tale of human survival and as an enthralling and accessible ethnographic record. Narcisse Pelletier, from the village of Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie, was fourteen years old when the Saint-Paul was wrecked near Rossel Island off New Guinea in 1858. Leaving behind more than 300 Chinese labourers recruited for the Australian goldfields - believed to have been subsequently massacred by the Rossel Islanders - the ship's captain and crew, including the cabin boy, escaped in a longboat. After a gruelling voyage across the Coral Sea, they landed near Cape Direction on Cape York, where Pelletier found himself abandoned when the boat sailed off without him. He was rescued by an Aboriginal family and remained with them as a member of their clan until 1875 when he was sighted by the crew of a pearling lugger. 'Rescued' against his will, Pelletier was conveyed to Sydney and then repatriated to France. The author, Stephanie Anderson, came across Pelletier's story by chance in an old French anthropological journal. As she started researching it, her fascination with the story grew. She found that Pelletier had left an account of his experiences, first published in 1876, that had never been translated into English. Now, for the very first time, this remarkable story is available to read in English, complemented by an ethnographic commentary by anthropologist Athol Chase and an in-depth introduction by Anderson. Pelletier: The Forgotten Castaway of Cape York is required reading for anyone with an interest in Australian history, anthropology, or the intriguing world of pre-colonial Aboriginal life.

Simon Leys

Author: Philippe Paquet
Publisher: La Trobe University Press
ISBN: 1925435563
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 720

Book Description
An award-winning biography of one of the greats. Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in 2014. Writing in three languages – French, Chinese and English – he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His writing on China and on varied literary and cultural topics appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction. This substantial biography – recently published by Gallimard in France to wide acclaim and winning an award from the Académie Francaise – draws on extensive correspondence with Ryckmans, as well as his unpublished writings. It has been translated by an internationally renowned French translator Julie Rose (based in Sydney).