Vivid Book of the Month September 2004

Regulars
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Hale and hearty

by Andrew Begg
September 2004

BRIGHT PLANET by Peter Mews
Picador, 296 pages, ISBN 0-330-36458-8
Regular readers of Vivid would be familiar with Peter Mews' occasional Postcards from Melbourne, which portray Australia's second largest city in a somewhat different light than many travel writers would have us believe. Anyone who has visited Melbourne will delight in his second novel, Bright Planet, that begins in the august chambers of the Royal Geographical Society in London with its members agreeing to fund an expedition to Australia, so that ''the country be opened up, mapped and the rich lands found...to know the unknown'' - but primarily to prevent the French from getting there first.

In 1842, a year later, the Bright Planet docks at Bareheep, the early incarnation of Melbourne, which expedition leaders Captain Elijah Blood and botanist Quiet Giles identify as a ''false city, the mock centre of a faux civilisation.'' The novel is fascinating for its depiction of Melbourne as a fool's paradise, barely a few streets old, lawless and hedonistic and attracting every manner of adventurer and fortune hunter:

The many lanes running off Lonsdale Street were filled with fornicating couples, coves and petticoats roughing it in the shade. The stench of urine was everywhere. Outside each hotel, in the lamplight, musicians were camped, organ grinders and Germans, an African with a top hat holding a python in each hand.

What follows is a rollicking account of an attempt to explore the continent as Bright Planet steers a course up the Yarra River into uncharted territory, to what Blood and Giles believe will culminate in a vast inland sea. It is also richly descriptive of the perils faced by nineteenth century seafarers. Crew members expire with great regularity as unknown illnesses take hold. Aborigines are unpredictable, incommunicable, enigmatic, as much a part of the landscape as the ironbarks that line the river bank. The great unknown is what lies ahead, while sex - and there is a lot of sex in Bright Planet - seems merely to postpone the onset of danger. The novel is dark but laugh-out-loud comical in places, tightly paced, well researched and recommended for anyone interested in early white civilisation in Australia.