Nadia Wheatley had a big hit with her picture book My Place by showing history as ordinary people doing their everyday things.  It deservedly won her a Book of the Year award, and is a modern Australian classic.

With A Banner Bold, Wheatley has returned to Australia's history but this time she focuses on a single major event and presents it as a novel/diary.  The strengths of My Place, the immediacy, the realistic details, the ordinary concerns of everyday characters, are still there but the novel format allows us to get a much deeper understanding of the history and of the narrator, Rose Aarons.

The setting is Ballarat in 1854 and the great event is, of course, the Eureka Stockade.  Rose travels with her family from England to the diggings and keeps a journal of her experiences for a friend, Jennychen.  She observes as a young teenager, often superficially and missing the importance of details which are obvious to us with our hindsight of history.  But that is part of the success of this book.  History is a continual conversation between the present and the past, and Nadia Wheatley cleverly creates gaps in Rose's story that the reader fills in from present day understandings.

Rose might simply see Raffaello Carboni as a nice Italian with a friendly dog, or Peter Lalor as a quiet Irishman, but her observations are still astute, often noting little quirks of character and situation that we see as leading to the "Great Event".  The police and their digger hunts, the unjustness of goldfields regulations, the difficulties of simple food and shelter and family life in a tent, all create a larger picture that the reader can observe while Rosa lives from day to day.

Her concerns are her own, not those of history.  She worries about making friends, and her family's difficulties, and the play she is writing.  But the real characters that pop in and out of the story, Carboni, Lalor, Governor Hotham, keep bringing us back to the wider picture.

Even Jennychen, her friend back in London, is Karl Marx's daughter, which adds another political aspect to the story.  The inevitable approach of the 4^th of December with its battle at the Stockade, looms over the whole story.  The police raids increase, the miners meet (disrupting the circus Rose and her friends are preparing), Rose's mother sews the Eureka flag (using the children's circus costumes).

Finally it comes, and passes, Rose plays her part in history, and then life goes on.  And that seems to be Wheatley's message.  History is people, ordinary people living their lives and doing what they think is best.  A Banner Bold is an outstanding portrayal of life on the goldfields and of the events of the Eureka Stockade.  Nadia Wheatley has recreated a great historical moment vividly, realistically and sympathetically, but what she says about our place in history is the main achievement of this story.

Review by David Beagley

© 2001 David Beagley