Usually I’m bringing you the best new Australian fiction to brighten your day, help bolster your beach reads and update you on the important stories. But stories are everywhere in our culture.
Over on Final Draft through November I’m doing a special series on the ways storytelling works in our daily lives. I’m taking new books and speaking to their authors; journalists, historians and commentators, and getting their insight into the ways we tell stories to shape our reality. And we do this for a few reasons;
The right story can help justify your position, it can shout down your opponent and legitimise a platform. Stories can even be encapsulated in a single word. As we’ll explore through the series, something as simple as ‘larrikin’ can soften the edges of power and make it look appealing.
Today I’ve brought you The Brumby Wars - The Battle for the Soul of Australia by Anthony Sharwood
Anthony is a Walkley Award-winning journalist. He loves the high country and his 2020 book From Snow to Ash, is a love letter to the Australian High Country. The Brumby Wars is his third book and it takes in the history and scope of the ongoing battles between supporters of wild horses in the Australian Bush and those who see the destruction they cause to fragile ecosystems.
The book takes an open approach to the debate, trying to hear all sides. Sharwood confronts the challenges of confronting and contrasting the scientific and ecological understanding of feral horses with the cultural understanding of Brumbies. With surveys noting that 78% of Victorians didn’t know that Brumbies were listed by Parks Victoria as pests Sharwood comes to the conclusion that “Mythology has become reality” and the power of storytelling has overtaken the reality of what is happening in the landscape. But in this space, a battle that literally plays out on Mountains and in the halls of political power, Sharwood sounds a warning against tilting towards extremes.
The Brumby Wars is a fascinating look at modern Australian culture. It takes in thousands of years of Indigenous History and the extraordinary damage done in the relatively short period since invasion.
The book even questions the ways stories can be co opted to the cause. One mythology that is central to the story of brumbies in the high country is the work of Banjo Patterson and particularly his poem The Man From Snowy River. In the book Sharwood uncovers scholarship that suggests the eponymous ‘Man’ may have been Indigenous. This may seem an historical footnote to the everyday destruction of hooves on fragile ecosystems but it speaks to the lengths that storytelling may go to shape reality to its own ends.
This is just a taste of what you’ll find in The Brumby Wars. It’s no hyperbole when the subtitle proclaims this The Battle for the Soul of Australia. Do yourself a favour and check it out…
