Going Troppo

A guide to cruising the northern Great Barrier Reef from Bowen to Lizard Island

  by David Haynes and Sue Mulvany
  published by Going Troppo (2007) (ISBN 978-0-646-47896-8)
  RRP $69.95 includes postage (Soft cover w/vinyl jacket; 240pp printed on high-quality glossy art paper 201mm x 297mm)
  This new, self-published guide to the coast between Bowen and Lizard Island is a handsome volume with a wealth of content ranging from hard cruising information (anchorages) to extensive historical notes about the localities discussed).
  It incorporates clear, easy-to-read full-colour sketch maps of anchorages with colour aerial photography to supplement the maps.
  The attractive couple on the cover appear far too young to have accumulated the necessary experience to create such a guide, and, indeed, they are not the authors (the girl is their daughter). David Haynes is a marine biologist and his wife, Sue Mulvany, a science teacher. They live in Townsville and have spent the past eight years with their family extensively cruising the Queensland coast in their steel cutter Janis.  The two of them have produced a highly professional book with many beautiful colour photographs and lots of interesting tidbits about the discovery and charting of the Queensland coast and the history behind many of the placenames.
  Going Troppo is divided into sections (with colour tabs printed at the edge of the page to assist in locating each: (1) General historical background, the Great Barrier Reef, the marine park, tropical hazards and how to use the book; (2) Bowen to Townsville; (3) Magnetic Island; (4) Halifax Bay; (5) the Palm Islands; (6) Hinchinbrook Island; (7) The Family Group to Green Island; (8) Double Island to Lizard Island.
  Cruising guides tend to be on the ‘utilitarian’ side aesthetically, so it is nice to see a book such as Going Troppo which has been carefully researched to include lots of ‘bonus’ information and which is presented in such an attractive way. It will be a welcome addition to anyone’s library of books on Australia’s magnificent coastline.
  Available from the publisher at www.goingtroppo.com.au.

The Car Punts of Newcastle CD

  When Graeme Andrews kindly reviewed my recent e-book The Car Punts of Newcastle in Afloat, although he mentioned early in his piece that the ‘book’ in question was an e-book, many people nonetheless seem to have assumed that it was available in hard copy.
  Because of the limited market for a book about the Punts, it has been published on the web (http://www.billbottomley. com.au/car_punts/punts.htm).  It is also available as a CD for $20 (incl postage and handling) from Bill Bottomley, 362 Freemans Drive, Cooranbong 2265 or email billbumley@google.com

 Bill Bottomley

Sea of Dangers

Captain Cook and his Rivals

  by Geoffrey Blainey
  published by Penguin Australia
  RRP $49.94 (420pp; 240mm x 160mm)
  When Geoffrey Blainey, takes on the history of Lieutenant James Cook’s first journey of discovery to New Zealand and Australia an ulterior motive might be expected. After all this is a story already well told. Sea of Danger intertwines with Cook’s exploits a parallel, if less well-known and less successful journey of discovery by the Frenchman, Captain Jean de Surville.
  Terra Australis Incognita had been used in varying ways to describe a supposed continent in the South Pacific (balancing the continents of the Northern Hemisphere!). Also, a Jewish settlement (sometimes called Davis or David Land) was widely suspected to exist in the South Pacific, particularly after Captain Samuel Wallis had thought he’d seen it shortly after his visit (the first by a European) to Tahiti, some 70 years before Cook.
  And it was in pursuit of this land that Jean de Surville set out from the French port of Pondicherry in India in 1769. Loaded with trade goods in his merchant ship, St Jean-Baptiste, which was much bigger than Endeavour, de Surville tracked far and wide across the South Pacific, including the Tasman Sea.  Burdened with a crew stricken with scurvy, the author reveals from de Surville’s logs, that he was within a whisker of sailing into Botany Bay three months earlier than Cook (although he hadn’t actually seen the Australian coastline) before heading towards known (thanks to Tasman) New Zealand and fresh food and rest for the crew.  Blainey points out that the myth of a great continent somewhere in the South Pacific had existed for many years quite happily alongside the existing knowledge of the land known as New Holland. Cook himself was fully aware of the exploits of the Dutch explorers and traders, as well as those of William Dampier in the west of the continent, and knew when heading west from New Zealand that he might eventually run into New Holland’s East Coast.
  Blainey, clearly a ‘Cookophile’, admiringly recounts Cook’s journey, from the original orders to observe the transit of Venus across the sun in Tahiti to the circumnavigation of New Zealand’s main islands. Cook carried “secret orders” to also search for the hidden southland, culminating in his discovery and mapping of the East Coast of Australia.
  The author gives Banks, Solander and a few others of Cook’s crew their due, with references to their contributions to the discoveries along the way. Similarly, he pays tribute to de Surville, not for the lands he discovered, but for his discovery and mapping of the important currents in the South Pacific. At the end of his crossing of the Pacific, poor de Surville drowned in the surf in South America trying to land his sick and depleted crew in Spanish territory. At least, in Sea of Dangers his feats are recognized alongside Cook’s, for his contributions to maritime discovery in the 18th century.

Beneath the Dardanelles

The Australian Submarine at Gallipoli

  by Vecihi and Hatice Hurmuz Basarin
  published by Allen and Unwin
  RRP $24.95 (211pp; 195mm x 130mm)
  After five days, on 30 April 1915, Australian submarine, AE2 was fired upon and disabled by a Turkish Torpedo Boat, Sultanhisar, and her complete crew rescued as she was scuttled.  She had been the first vessel to penetrate the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara.
  Beneath the Dardanelles provides the firsthand accounts of the two Captains, Captain Henry Stoker and Captain Ali Riza (the first time Captain Riza’s memoirs have been published in English).
  The authors are Turkish Australians, whose interests extend to the AE2 Commemoration Foundation, responsible for making recommendations about the submarine since its re-discovery in 1998