Shadow Country: Journeys Through the Underbelly of Australian History
© David Lowe 1992-2002
Shadow Country will be unlike any history of Australia yet published. Designed as a series of state by state guidebooks, Shadow Country will seek to establish a new Australian sense of place: a connection between historical events and their settings usually made tangible only at foreign battlefields and other sites of 'official history'.
It will draw together the histories of ancient and modern times, white and black, Irish and Chinese, female and male, convict and squatter, in an entirely new way.
Places to be researched will include sites associated with: assassination attempts, Aboriginal pre- and post-contact history, fires, shipwrecks, riots, strikes and lockouts, executions, blackbirding, segregation, murders, early feminists, rebellions, circuses, defections, inventors and inventions, underworld activity, convicts, epidemics, archaeology, unusual legal cases, scandals, massacres, battles, mining disasters, UFOs, gunfights, ghost towns, eccentrics and street characters, hoaxes, rock art, rescues, neglected poets and authors, bushrangers, extraordinary forgotten athletes, political prisoners, floods and film locations.
These are not, on the whole, sites commemorated by plaques. Some have been swallowed by the bush, others by suburban development. Many are not even known by those who live nearby. Shadow Country will rescue the hidden histories of Australia from the shelves of libraries and link the people and places of the past to corresponding sites in the modern world.
Shadow Country will not only draw upon original written sources, but also specially gathered oral history. The primary focus will be upon the locations of events. Gravestones, geographical features and buildings will be used as sources of historical evidence, engendering a wider respect for these natural and man-made monuments, and helping to destroy once and for all the notion that Australia is a land without 'real' history.
My intention is to divide each book into segments averaging two pages in length. There will be one segment for each major site location. Half of the space (about one page) will be used to describe what happened at that location, written in a lively story-telling style and supported by written and oral evidence. The other half of the segment (again, about a page) will contain a description of how to find the place or places. Where appropriate, this information will be supported by maps and photographs.
Minor site locations will be dealt with in less detail, appearing in brief 'en route' and 'in the area' sections within major site location segments.
Potential readers of Shadow Country include international backpacking tourists, Australian history students, retirees who don't want to do the conventional round-Australia trip, families looking for a different kind of holiday, and people who just want to learn more about the history of their own areas.
Specially designed photo-realistic covers for each state edition will show a road which mysteriously ends in some way, linking the series visually and emphasising that these books will guide the reader into the unknown.
Some examples - Northern Territory edition: the road goes slap bang into the side of Uluru; Western Australia: the road is swallowed up by red sand; Tasmania: the road disappears into Lake Pedder; South Australia: the road goes under a high fence warning of radioactive danger; Victoria: the road disappears into space at an eroded sea cliff, near the Twelve Apostles.
During my travels around Australia over the years, I have developed a large database of potential sites, ranked in order of interest, and have done much of the preliminary background research.
© David Lowe, 1992-2002
Please contact David's agent, Belinda Maxwell, at ICS and Associates, Sydney Australia, for more information.