Transported: The Diary of Elizabeth Harvey, Australia 1790

If you want to publish novels that are intended to support the history curriculum, this is probably the best way to do it. Some of the most popular teenage novels come in the shape of diaries, and the individuality and intimacy of the form gives an appealing aspect to a story which otherwise might be mainly concerned with accurate description of historical conditions and events.

Alexander’s portrayal of life among the first European colonists doesn’t get very far under the skin of her characters. Nor does she explore in any depth the social divisions between militia and convicts, and between the whites and the aborigines. The need to offer an objective historical viewpoint softens the edges of class and racial antagonism but the narrative does deal with the reality of grubbing an existence in an inhospitable world and with the outbursts of barbarism that must have punctuated it.

In Elizabeth Harvey, Alexander has created a young woman who thinks and speaks in ways that are different from our own, and whose relationships and everyday problems of survival hold our interest. On balance, however, there is perhaps too much of the historically authentic and not enough of the dramatically effective. The novel leaves the impression of a writer’s imagination constrained by her brief.