I Find Australia by William Hatfield

The title of this book is what first drew me to it. I love finding old books written in the last couple of centuries by Australian men who journeyed the country and wrote about it – or created enticing characters that did. Books like Under the Coolibah Tree, Paving the Way and A Fortunate Life. Such books educate in the best possible way. They’re like the old forgotten church down the street with possums nesting in its roof and scratches in its pews. Yet they move – they dawdle along until they surprise you by rushing ahead in a burst of energy. Sometimes they get you lost and sometimes they leave you behind, but they’ll always come back for you. And when they do, it’s with an equal amount of zeal and just the right amount of pity so that you feel sorry for them and keep reading.             

Published in 1937, I Find Australia is an autobiography, a memoir, written in first-person and telling the story of author William Hatfield’s experience rambling across Australia and writing about it. Hatfield’s voice is witty and deep, but private and somewhat removed from the reader. This I don’t mind – it’s dignified, something I admire in a person. To read I Find Australia is to read the account of a life that was adventurous and mundane all at the same time. It’s the hard yakka of outback dryness and the solid personality of your mates; it’s the mishaps and the deadliness and the calm that goes with them; it’s the dingoes padding around your swag at night; it’s droving the cattle across the moon; it’s going places in life.     

The book begins in 1912. William Hatfield arrives ‘the greenest greenhorn’ from England in Port Adelaide in the middle of summer. He walks down to Glenelg and spends his first night sleeping beneath an upturned boat on the sand. From there, it’s station-hand to stockman to drover to kangaroo-shooter and back again; from painter to dingo-trapper to miner to writer. Hatfield does so much. That’s what I like about his book. It’s a jack-of-all-trades tour across early 20^th century Australia. Up until the last page, Hatfield’s jumping from job to job, and place to place until he winds up a Sydney-sider and singing the city’s praises.

There are times when Hatfield dips into technicalities a bit – massive tangents that the reader tries to follow but ends up getting lost. Sometimes getting lost is nice but getting lost too much on the one trip is exhausting. Reading I Find Australia I was lost too much. In one instance Hatfield started talking about rifles and bullets and calibre and the like and my concentration wandered so far, I was very much at his mercy. I didn’t want to hear about all that, yet I read it because I thought I might learn something. I didn’t. However, I attribute that to laziness and ignorance on my part. William Hatfield’s innovation has nothing to do with it!