Spinifex and Sand

by David Wynford Carnegie

A narrative of five years pioneering and exploration in Western Australia

Genres: History, Australia

454 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1898

Reviews

[Peggy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, but not gripping.

[Vince Snow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where to begin? This book took me all year to complete, I began in January and finished today at the end of November. Its not that the writing was terrible, or that the subject matter didn't fascinate me. It was a little monotonous.

Definitely in the style of John Wesley Powell or John Muir, David Wynford Carnegie tells of his experiences in the deserts of Western Australia in the 1890s. The book details several expeditions, starting out looking for gold during the Australian Gold Rush. It was very fascinating to me that the hunt for gold really was a secondary mission, really they were hunting for water first in the desert, and THEN gold.

After a mostly fruitless attempt at find gold, Carnegie hires some men and some camels to try and cross the western desert to see if there is any livable or auriferous country. The book repeated the word auriferous so regularly that I looked it up and it means 'containing gold'. So the second part of their book details their crossing of the desert, their stay in Hall's Creek and their return across the desert.

My favorite parts of the book were whenever he talked about the camels. He really loved those camels. They had names such as Czar, Satan, Misery, Kruger and Mahatma Billy. They were very endearing and were the true heroes of the story.

A controversial part of the book is that throughout the expedition across the desert they came across the native people. What these people represented to Carnegie was water, and so they would regularly capture one of them and only release them once they took them to water. I felt conflicted because it was the only way their party would survive, but despite them not bringing physical harm to their captive, they were depriving them of their liberty.

Here are some quotes from the book that I liked:

"Why, then, do you go?" To which I can only answer that one must make a living somehow, and that some like to make money hard, and some to make it easily. Perhaps I belong to the former class

This was the expedition I had mapped out for my undertaking, and now after four years' hard struggle I had at length amassed sufficient means to carry it through. I do not wish to pose as a hero who risked the perils and dangers of the desert in the cause of science, any more than I would wish it to be thought that I had no more noble idea than the finding of gold. Indeed, one cannot tell one's own motives sometimes; in my case, however, I believe an insatiable curiosity to "know what was there," joined to a desire to be doing something useful to my fellow-men, was my chief incentive.

The next morning was a sad one, for it disclosed the death from poison-plant of poor old Shiddi, one of the best and noblest of camels-a fine black, handsome old bull. I declare it was like losing an old friend, as indeed he was.

In regards to a couple of men who had a homestead one hundred miles away from their nearest neighbors:

In fact, the only people I have ever come across, who seemed really satisfied with life are some of theses far-away squatters.

And now, alas! another was to meet the same fate. Poor Satan, my faithful companion in good times and bad, whose soft velvet nose had so often rubbed my cheek in friendship was laid low by the deadly wallflower... I left him to find his way to the Happy Hunting-grounds where there are no native wells nor spinifex, only flowing rivers and groves of quondongs! ... remember that often in the solitary bush one's animals are one's only companions, that on them one's life depends. How, then, could one fail to love them as friends and comrades?

Though I have come to the conclusion that, unless Spinifex and Sand can be conjured into valuable marketable products, the far interior of the Colony is worthless for any purpose, yet I have also shown that beyond the borders of the desert Nature smiles her brightest; and given population, West Australia may well vie in wealth and usefulness with any of her sister colonies.

[Adrian Byass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably gave it a higher rating because of the content not the delivery. Formalised and strucutred prose but a ripping yarn of adversity and adventure in the early days of Australia.

[Sammy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can never warm to Carnegie, who gives me the impression that his life of privilege was the prime motivation to "rough it" in Australia, a country where very real issues of race, class, and gender were perpetuated throughout the 1800s. But Spinifex and Sand deserves a place on the Top 20 works of the 19th century in this country nevertheless, for what it reveals about the strange, often exhilarating life of those who dared to jump off the map and into the Australian unknown, in an era when such a thing was a genuine risk. (It's still not highly recommended today!)

[Peter Macinnis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carnegie was another English public schoolboy, a younger son of an aristocrat, too full of himself to realise just how much of his own base nature he reveals in this warts-and-all account. He made an epic journey, based on a faulty hypothesis about where gold might be found, but at least most of his party survived.