“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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18 March 2018

JOHN HORROCKS' 200TH BIRTHDAY

The State Library reminds me that today is John Horrock's 200th birthday. A remarkable young man from Picton, Lancashire, he settled in the Clare Valleys and died terribly there in Penwortham after a disastrous expedition to the far north. This image is a selfie by the colonial artist S. T. Gill, who's put himself in the centre between Bernard Kilroy, Horrocks and Harry the Camel. 

I don't know whether Harry was the camel Horrocks had executed after the incident in which the cranky beast lurched, knocking the gun from its rider's hands to shoot the bottom of his face off.

It must have a terrible trek home across the vast red centre as the gangrene set in. 

The cottage in which he died is intact and well-kept for people to visit.

Horrocks was one of the buccaneering boyos from wealthy English families who were common among the first white occupiers of these vast tracts of other peoples' country. He "brought with him a family servant, a blacksmith, a shepherd, four merino rams, sheepdogs, tools, sufficient clothing for five years, and a church bell." You can read more of John Chittleborough's biography here.

This amazing book below, based on the letters and diaries of many women of the day who ran large households and estates, some vast, for their industrialist husbands, is a good feeding-ground for anybody interested in where such individuals came from.

Several branches of Horrockses are mentioned. I can see why John did a bolter.

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