Book review: The Eastern Curlew, Harry Saddler (2018)

This ambitious meditation on a migratory shorebird demonstrates the author’s clear eye for detail and solid grasp of his primary material. The story goes along well enough until there’s a snag, like a broken fingernail caught in a cashmere sweater, that stopped me in my tracks. When he is describing the habits of the bird or prying into the places it stops to feed at along its annual two-way migration route he is in his element, but once he wheels out Edward Said like some sociological version of Uncle Fester, with one trick to show amazed guests at a dinner party, I paused to contemplate the size of my own task.

Progressive intellectuals in Australia often have a crippling sense of shame mixed with a sense of awe they feel when they contemplate the world and all that it contains. Said gets wheeled out to lend gravitas to productions by such people when they want to appear woke for the benefit of their readers. The standard postcolonial narrative where the west is reprehensible and Asia is misunderstood lies at the core of a problem in the arts that is characterised by a type of cognitive dissonance. No-one can quite put their finger on where the virtue begins or where the defect starts. Readers have to forgive me for appearing to show Saddler how to wax-on and wax-off, but if he wants to get the finish on his machine up to a high shine, he needs some help with his ninja skillz.

In the book, Saddler goes on his own pilgrimage to the home of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish natural historian who developed the standard modern system for classifying living things, but he shows no inkling of how Linnaeus happened to arrive on the scene in Sweden and not, for example, in Xian. So gather around the fire, friends, while I tell you a story.

The Humanist project started in the Middle Ages with the appearance of the vernacular poetry of Dante Alighieri (1285-1321), whose ‘Commedia’ in three books took in an encyclopedia view of the world much like Linnaeus’. His innovation was taken up by Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374, also known in English as Petrarch) who grew up in Avignon in southern France with his parents, who were part of the court of the Pope, who had moved there for political reasons, and he started the Renaissance craze for resurrecting classical Roman books for contemporary audiences. He also wrote love poetry in Italian.

This trend for publishing books in the vernacular instead of Latin was no doubt one of the reasons why John Wycliffe, an Oxford scholar, began to push for a vernacular Bible. He completed an English translation from the Vulgate (the official Latin version belonging to the Catholic Church) by 1382. His heresy inspired Jan Hus (1369-1415), in what was then known as Bohemia, to demand church reform 100 years before Luther protested the sale of indulgences (the practise of enabling people to get expiation for their sins by giving money to the church).

The first vernacular Bible translated from the original languages it was written in (Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic) was actually published in Spain in around 1520, just a few years after Luther’s initial overtures to the church, by Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. Their ‘Complutensian Bible’ was a profound inspiration for the later Humanists in northern Europe, who took the gains won from their leaders in the realm of religion, which saw them developing personal relations with God instead of ones mediated by the hated clergy, to spread their ideas through the new medium of printing, which had arrived in around 1440 in Germany.

Different countries had different solutions to the problem of educating boys in how to read the vernacular, which was now required by the new Christian denominations so that people (at least, men) could worship their God. In England, the tide turned when Henry VIII told the Pope to rack off and, unable to get a divorce from his Spanish wife, who could not give him the son he craved, set up his own church in England instead. As a result all boys went to school, and hence we have Shakespeare.

The new technology of printing threw up unexpected jewels in unexpected places, including Montaigne’s ‘Essais’ (1580), in which the French author turned away from God, the normal point of reference for writers of the time, and examined his own feelings. In 1620, Francis Bacon’s ‘Novum Organum’ appeared which is like a manifesto for the scientific method. In it the English statesman told his readers to turn away from the divine and instead focus their attentions on the secular realities surrounding them.

But apart from these individual works that changed the ways that people thought about themselves and their places in the world, the bigger influence was due to all of those men publishing books on all sorts of subjects as a great rate, in fact at a speed that was unprecedented in history. The process of nominalisation, whereby sentences and phrases are distilled into nouns that could then be deployed along with adjectives in other sentences for the purpose of furthering arguments, was accelerated by the new technology and by the new regime of education that proliferated especially in northern Europe.

In England, where the largest number of new discoveries appeared over the ensuing centuries, culminating in the industrial revolution and the invention of the steam engine, popular magazines that contained articles about new scientific discoveries alongside reviews of new novels and books of poetry were printed and consumed throughout the country in the 18th century by a newly-literate middle class. And women were an integral part of the public sphere, as we can see notably in the success of the novels of Jane Austen in the early decades of the 19th century.

All of this because of vernacular poetry. Everything we value, from antibiotics to jet engines, from the internet to Bob Dylan, comes from the process of nominalisation super-heated by demand for printed material among ordinary people.

Why it didn’t happen in China, where movable type had appeared earlier than it did in Europe, was due to the centralised form of government that obtained there. With one source of official power and a spreading bureaucracy with a subservient army, it was possible for the state to tightly control what was published in every corner of the realm, whereas in Europe many different countries competed for supremacy against one another. The dynamism of the European market for knowledge, where different rulers sought to achieve an advantage over their neighbours in all sorts of ways, including through their militaries, meant that there was competition for ideas there in a way that China could not equal. Diversity is strength.

And there is a connection between Humanism and Sydney that doesn’t appear at first glance. Tucked away in the city’s eastern stretches, surrounded by rocky bays lapped by the rolling waters of the Pacific Ocean and the placid waters of Port Jackson, lies sleepy Vaucluse, named after the same area of southern France that Petrarch inhabited centuries ago and where he discovered the poetry of the troubadours. The suburb was settled by William Charles Wentworth and the federal electorate that contains it is named after the early Australian politician. Connecting New South Head Road and Hopetoun Avenue is a short street named Petrarch Avenue. On the corner of this street my mum’s gift shop stood back in the day when I grew up in the area and before I went to the University of Sydney to study Italian. The shop had windows shaped like keyholes, and does to this day.

Wentworth was one of the men who founded the university (Australia’s first) and he was also part of the push to introduce democracy to New South Wales, which was achieved in 1856, a few years after it had been brought to New Zealand and over a decade before it would be brought to Canada (the British North American Act was passed in Parliament in London in 1867). Wentworth chose the name Vaucluse because he knew the value of the Humanist project and made sure that the people who came after him did as well. Urban working class men in the UK didn’t get even to vote until 1867.

Petrarch was an immigrant when he wrote his sonnets to the woman he called Laura, just like the eastern curlew, whose story is a kind of slow-motion tragedy as valuable wetlands are gradually converted into “productive” real estate in countries along its flyway (the route the bird takes twice a year in its migration between Siberia and south-eastern Australia). The reclamation of the Saengnamgeum Estuary in South Korea in recent years for example is nothing short of a criminal act committed by an ostensibly pluralist democracy in the name of “progress”.

Progress is not always beneficial, as the early Romantics well knew. What the story of the Humanist project should however serve to illustrate is that specific things happen for specific reasons at specific moments in time in specific locations. It’s like it is in nature: there is an unassailable reason for everything, from the size of the bird to the length and shape of its bill to the colour of its plumage.

This fine book is richly imagined and elegantly formulated and makes a valuable addition to the literature of the natural world, with elements of the author’s own personality introduced to lend texture and colour to the undertaking. I grew up with the books of Gerald Durrell and Gavin Maxwell, so like Saddler I was early on in my life an admirer of nature. And I very much like his title, it’s unostentatious and fitting for an Australian, where you find the Harbour Bridge spanning Sydney Harbour, Central Station in the city forming a locus of connection for all of the city’s train lines, and the Federal Highway leading into Canberra, where the author grew up, from the north.