Wrecked!

“Preservation” is based on the true story of the wreck of the Sydney Cove, but Jock Serong uses it as the basis of a novel that imagines what might have happened during the survivors’ trek back to civilisation.

In 1797 the Sydney Cove was wrecked off the coast of Preservation Island in Bass Strait. All the crew made landfall on one of the Bass Strait islands, and 17 of their number then set off to reach Sydney and alert the colony of the wreck and its marooned sailors.

The seventeen were wrecked again, this time off the Gippsland coast, and so began their trek up the east coast through the unknown bush to Sydney. Of the seventeen men, only three were discovered, barely alive, some three months later, by a fishing boat just south of Sydney. What was the fate of the other fourteen – this is the basis of the book.

Preservation Island (from Google Maps)

In Serong’s version, it falls to Governor Hunter’s aide Lieutenant Joshua Grayling to investigate the story. He comes to realise that those fourteen deaths were contrived by one calculating mind and, as the full horror of the men’s journey emerges, he begins to wonder whether the ruthless killer poses a danger to his own family.

And it is this ruthless killer (one reviewer stated that “A more odious villain, could hardly be imagined”) who grips you as you read/listen to the story. I termed him a ‘diabolical psychopath’ (even checked on the correct meaning to be sure I was adequately describing him – appalling atrocious, cruel, damnable, disastrous, dreadful, fiendish, hellish, outrageous, shocking, vicious, vile – yep all of the above), yet juxtaposed against this is, that he has some of the most eloquent prose passages in the book.

Preservation Island, below Cape Barren Island and above Clarke Island

Grayling finds the survivors' accounts of the ordeal evasive, and as each character describes sections of the footslog, we are led along the journey with them.

The group is made up of the Sydney Cove’s supercargo a Scot William Clark the indulgent son of a merchant shipping family hoping to make it rich with a cargo of rum destined for the already rum-soaked colony.

Mr Figge, the opportunist, who purports to be a representative of an Indian tea merchant, who’s real underlying motive we never really discover.

Srinivas, the 14 year old Bengali lascar, now Clark's manservant, a position his father previously held.

Srinivas’ father is now the leader of the Bengali crewmen, and one of the missing fourteen Bengalis.

Apart from other minor characters – Hamilton the ship’s captain, Governor Hunter, and the alcoholic doctor Ewing, the other major player is Charlotte – wife of Lt Grayling. Obviously in love, she listens to his accounts of the survivor interrogations. Less hidebound and trusting, she asks pertinent questions and offers insightful observations.

The journey - from Preservation to Sydney

The real William Clark wrote an incomplete journal, extracts of which were published in “The Asiatic Mirror” newspaper, this provided Jock Serong with the foundation of “Preservation”. He developed the scenario that the journal didn’t record the full facts, or the motivation behind them. What were the survivors hiding, and why were they unwilling to fill in the gaps?

And like any good horror thriller story the postscript (rooted in fact) continues that sense of menace and foreboding, even after you have closed the book.

I listened to the audio version and have to admire narrator Conrad Coleby for his accents, you could always tell which protagonist he was, and for the feeling of suspense he provoked.