The Bibliographer as Detective

The Celebrated George Barrington: A Spurious Author, the Book Trade, and Botany Bay by Nathan Garvey; Hordern House Rare Books, 2008, $64.

Several decades ago the distinguished Yale historian Robin Winks published a series of essays under the title, The Historian as Detective. With the publication of Nathan Garvey’s account of the life and disreputable times of “the Celebrated George Barrington”, and the publishing industry that became associated with his name, it’s now the case that readers have available to them a classic example of the bibliographer as detective.

But to leave a characterisation of the work of Nathan Garvey as simply the fruit of earnest bibliographic research would be unfair and misleading. For what readers will find in this beautifully produced book is the account of a plausible rogue’s life that holds a mirror to late-eighteenth-century society; the skulduggery that prevailed in the publishing industry of that period and into the nineteenth century, when there was no fixed copyright legislation; and a connection to Australia that underlines the extent to which the colony founded in 1788 fascinated not just the literary world of Great Britain but continental Europe as well.

Long known to students of Australiana, because of the publication in various forms of the allonymous A Voyage to New South Wales, of which he was the supposed author, few others will have a sense of why the name Barrington is so closely associated with the infant colony at Port Jackson. And even for those to whom the name is familiar, the history of how Barrington rose to dubious fame in the 1780s is a fascinating story in itself.

Strikingly, and despite much research, we are still not sure when he was born and what was his actual birth name. Nathan Garvey has almost certainly taken us as close to the truth as is possible. His speculation that Barrington, possibly born John Waldron in Dublin, adopted his name because of its suggestions of aristocratic connections, since both a peer and a baronet were Barringtons, seems highly probable.

What is remarkable about Barrington’s life as a professional thief, which lasted over fifteen years and brought him before the courts several times before his transportation to Sydney in 1790, was the fact that he escaped the hangman’s noose. Indeed, even after having been convicted to serve time in the notorious hulks moored in the Thames Estuary he was able to attract the sympathetic attention of no less a figure than Jeremy Bentham. Whatever the truth of his background, he acquired a capability to defend himself in court and in letters to the press in a style that won a curious approval for its grandiloquent and apparently repentant character and made readily sellable copy for the contemporary press. Here he is writing from Woolwich:

I view with the deepest compunction the errors of my past life; errors that have drawn upon me the displeasures of God, and the displeasure of good men; blasted me in fame and fortune; and plunged me into inexpressible misery without leaving me a single advantage in return …

By providing such good copy before his transportation, Barrington proved an ideal name to associate with a spurious account of New South Wales that was pillaged from official reports, and notably from Captain John Hunter’s An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island. Entitled A Voyage to New South Wales, and first published in 1795, there is no certainty as to its real author, or authors. Nathan Garvey offers some probable answers, but we will never be certain.

Amusingly enough, and in concert with the general air of deceit that was associated with the Barrington name, he was identified on the title page of “his” book as “Superintendant of the Convicts at Parramatta”. In fact, at the time the book appeared Barrington was occupying the less important position of high constable at Rose Hill. By 1804 he was dead.

But his name lived on in multiple versions and variations of “his” Voyage in many languages. And perhaps most curious of all in a collection of gothic tales, Barrington’s Annals of Suicide, or Horrors of Self-Murder, which included the “Dreadful History of Anaboo, a Native of New Holland Who Killed Herself Through Love”, the tale of a tragic liaison between an Aboriginal woman and a convict. It is, as Nathan Garvey points out, one of the earliest “imaginative exploration[s] of cross-cultural erotic encounters” set in Australia.

The scholarly apparatus in this book is admirable for its detail and its accessibility. It is illustrated with contemporary prints and reproductions of many of the title pages that served to perpetuate Barrington’s “celebrated name”. This is a book to be read for enjoyment and as a testimony to the fact that bibliographic and historical research need not be submerged beneath inscrutable prose.

Milton Osborne is an author and Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney.