Governor Bligh and the Short Man: Penguin Special

by Peter Cochrane

Some seventeen years after the mutiny on the Bounty, William Bligh sets sail for New South Wales as Governor-elect of the fledgling colony. He is accompanied by his daughter Mary, the narrator of this extraordinary shipboard tale. A cultured young Englishwoman, Mary is entirely unprepared for the voyage – the great emptiness of the ocean, the unfamiliar rituals, the terrifying storms, the bedazzling natural wonders. Most confronting of all is the bizarre quarrel between her father and the captain of the convoy, Joseph Short, a man whose sensitivities are almost a match for Bligh's and whose temper brings the voyagers to the brink of catastrophe.

Mary's ardent and witty journal takes us beyond the quarterdeck rivalries into the private world of the Blighs – their family and friends, and the tragedies and failings of a man embarking on his last great command.

Peter Cochrane is an award-winning historian whose accolades include the inaugural Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. In Governor Bligh and the Short Man he proves himself to be as adept a writer of fiction as he is of history.

'His characterisation of Mary is perfect and full of drama.' Troy Lennon, Daily Telegraph

'Compelling' Liam Davison, Weekend Australian

Genres: Historical

86 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 14, 2012

About the author

Peter Cochrane’s writing about war includes the award-winning Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend; the companion volume to the ABC TV series Australians at War; and two studies of wartime photography, The Western Front, 1916–18 and Tobruk 1941. Cochrane is also the author of Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, which won the Age Book of the Year award and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History, and two works of fiction: the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man and the recently published novel The Making of Martin Sparrow.

Reviews

[Oliver Hodson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was by no means a fun book, it’s just so tight, and even if an accurate and insightful imagining of the interior of Mary Bligh and similar thpes of the time, it still just makes you feel like ‘Geez, I’m glad we’ve moved on from that!’

All the prejudice and emotional limescale of class are evident in her character and the battle with Captain Short just had me thinking the whole time that he was in the right and no wonder things seemed to go badly for Bligh in different phases of his life.

I don’t know enough about Bligh or this time to be miffed by his representation or the accuracy of the historical reflections, aside to say that they felt ok to me.

If the question in the writing was, ‘how did such a mean spirited enmity break out between Bligh and Short?’ It was a question well enough answered in this novella, but maybe it’s just not a wonderful thing to know the answer to!