Daily Life in a Vanished Australia. A detailed and fascinating look at how early settlers lived in Australia.
| Author: | Geoffery Blainey |
| Publisher: | Camberwell., Victoria : Penguin, 2004. ©2003 |
| ISBN: | 9780143002666 0670041327 9780670041329 9780143002666 (paperback) |
| Characteristics: | ix, 484 pages : illustrations, facsimilies ; 24 cm |
| Source: | |
| Date Read: | 12-Aug-2025 |
Black Kettle and Full Moon, by Geoffery Blainey, is one of the best books I have read this year. It’s a detailed look at everyday life for ordinary Australians. The preface mentions that the focus is only on ordinary folk but there are several insights into the wealthy and more famous inhabitants as well.
Interesting is how things effect other things in ways unexpected. For example, smoking was only done with a pipe next to a fire due to the necessity to freqently relight it. It wasn’t until matches and butane lighters came available that smoking became freed from the fireplace.
Transports costs affect what people eat. Beef and lamb were cheaper than vegetables as the latter required expensive and slow transport whereas cattle and sheep make their own way to market.
And early Australia was multi-cultural. Many Chinese grew vegetables for sale to the public, and Aboriginals traded goods and services with the general population.
It was a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading, and it will provide good background information for visits to folk museums typically in country towns. In fact, the book was written for the many queries the author got about everyday life needed for movie production, but he didn’t know the answer. The book is the result of much collecting of old written material and visiting many museums. A finely crafted work, and I’ll be reading more of Blainey’s work.
Book Summary
Geoffrey Blainey’s Black Kettle and Full Moon is a richly illustrated social history that transports readers to Australia between the first gold rush and World War I. Covering life in the outback, towns, cities, and at sea, Blainey explores how early settlers cooked over billycans, gathered in brass‐band concerts, and relied on pipes and pubs for comfort. Contemporary illustrations by artists such as Julian Ashton deepen the sense of immersion, bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of a vanished world for modern audiences.
Structured thematically rather than chronologically, the book devotes chapters to cooking and food preservation, domestic routines, leisure activities, and technological innovations. Blainey delves into the spread of ice‐making technologies and the etiquette of afternoon teas while also charting the evolution of public entertainments—from circuses to seaside promenades. His narrative style balances scholarly rigor with vivid anecdotes, ensuring each vignette remains both informative and engaging for general readers.
Beyond everyday objects, Blainey highlights the significance of seemingly trivial details in understanding colonial society. He documents the brand names of kerosene lamps lighting remote homesteads, the varieties of apples grown in orchard towns, and settlers’ repurposing of used candle‐boxes for storage. A particularly evocative example is the “Stradivarius of cattle bells” crafted by Robert Mennicke of North Wagga, whose creations could ring out across frost‐cold fields nearly ten kilometres away.
By weaving microhistory into broader national narratives, Black Kettle and Full Moon underscores how ordinary practices shaped Australia’s character during its formative decades. The book received the Westfield Waverley Library Award for Non‐Fiction in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize, cementing Blainey’s reputation as a master storyteller of everyday life. His approach demonstrates that understanding minute details—billycans, pubs, and kerosene lamps—can illuminate the social fabric of an entire era
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