Marked by the events of the Great Flood of 1893 and the formation of the first miners’ unions, Over My Dead Body is an Australian epic; a literary feat exemplifying a writer’s craftsmanship and dedication to bringing history alive. It puts Australia’s current resource-driven prosperity into context by showing the day to day struggles of ordinary workers just trying to get by for themselves and their families at a time when the individual was virtually power-less against the arrogance of his employer, and expendable if work-related illness overtook him.
With panoramic themes reminiscent of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, this thoroughly researched, award-winning retrospective certainly reminds us of the important place unions have earned in today’s society.
Over My Dead Body won the IP Picks 08 Best Fiction Award.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
BILLY is a schoolboy who wants to be a journalist but at 16, family hardship forces him to find work. Even as his father sits on the veranda of the family’s modest Ipswich home, coughing up disgusting phlegm from his worn-out lungs – the result of a working life in coal-dust – Billy packs his crib-billy and follows in his footsteps.
The hardships of mining and the betrayals of greedy men, capitalist and rank-and-file alike, are themes of this novel. It begins in the 1880s with the immigration of Billy’s grandfather to colonial Queensland. The Brisbane River flood of 1893 devastates the Walkinton family and they leave farming. The novel then traces the family fortunes over three generations as they entangle with Taffy Jones, the nouveau-rich coal magnate for whom they toil.
While the coal-mining conditions described seem authentic, gaffes are easily spotted. The blurb’s claim of thorough research is wishful thinking.
Three examples: there were no convicts building replica castles (or anything else) in the 1880s; Taffy Jones’s rich wife was unlikely to have used words like “shit” and “crap” when berating her seamstress in 1890; and when workers sang The Red Flag in the 1912 general strike, they were sure to have got the chorus right.
The blurb says Over My Dead Body is reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. I wish. Lawrence’s literary genius is not so easily won. Nor does this novel get within coo-ee of Katherine Susannah Pritchard’s goldmining trilogy set in Kalgoorlie. Still, it brings local mining history alive.
Given the paucity of workers’ novels about
Queensland, it becomes, in this light, quite special.
– Lesley Synge, The Courier-Mail
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Editor’s Comment: Our policy is to publish reviews in their entirety rather than edit them, but in this case the reviewer got some of the facts wrong, so we have given the author a right of reply. However, before that, I need to correct an error that Ms Synge made in attacking the blurb on the back cover. The comparison to DH Lawrence was restricted to the author’s use of “panoramic themes” in depicting the lot of coal miners in Queensland.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Mr Brigginshaw’s reply:
The so-called ‘gaffes’ mentioned by the Courier-Mail reviewer indicate she should do some research herself.
Her assertion that convicts wouldn’t have built ‘castles or anything else’ in Ipswich in the 1880s, for instance. Within a short walk of the Ipswich school I attended in the ’30s was at least one old stone house built by convicts. There were many more, built when Ipswich was called Limestone, named after the white rock that was mined there by the convicts and used in cement and mortar for building.
The castle seems to test her credulity, too. The real replica castle Brynhyfryd, known locally as Lewie Thomas’s Castle, was built on Blackstone Hill by the real Welsh mining magnate Lewis Thomas in 1890 and dynamited in 1936 after subsidence into mine tunnels.
Her claim that ‘shit’ and ‘crap’ wouldn’t have been in the 1890 vocabulary is no more accurate. My miner father was born in 1871 and I can assure the reviewer he was familiar with the terms.
Also, the rich man’s wife was serving beer in a rough waterfront tavern when he met her, so it is more than likely that she, too, had come in contact with such language.
Concerning the suggestion that I wrongly quoted the union song, The Red Flag: Like most songs of the masses, words change over the years. I quoted the one I remembered the miners singing.