The Savage Shore by Graham Seal is exactly what its subtitle portends: a collection of stories. Seal, professor of folklore at Curtin University, Western Australia, presents an easy-to-read narrative history of the numerous shipwrecks and explorations made by Europeans before the fleet of Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay on January 26, 1788 (celebrated each year as Australia Day, a national holiday). Indeed, one of the main points Seal intends to demonstrate that “Australia was finally encountered, revealed to some extent and settled long before [that] official date of non-Aboriginal occupation” (256). Australia is, for Seal, “a communal story” (259) of varied, diverse encounters between Europeans (of different stripes) and Aborigines (of different stripes). The Savage Shore tries to demonstrate this by recounting the many interactions between indigenes and newcomers.

Seal tells these tales in a gripping fashion and there is much here to interest the casual reader. There are no illustrations, however, and only one meager outline map of Australia, when several detailed maps would have been helpful. For a scholarly reader, however, the book has some significant problems. Seal’s zeal to counter the idea that Australian history begins in 1788 is laudable. (Indeed, The Savage Shore serves as a corrective to the idea that, as Paul Carter posited in The Road to Botany Bay, that Australia did not conceptually exist in the European mind until Cook and Flinders gave it names.) But the notion that Australians (or well-informed readers outside Australia) actually think Cook was the first European to reach Australia in 1788 is a straw man at best. (It is akin to believing that most intelligent Americans know nothing of the Viking voyages and think Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas in 1492.) Worse, though, for a scholarly reader, is that there is no new information here. Seal has simply synthesized previously published material. His too sparse endnotes refer mostly to widely-published secondary sources like books, periodicals, and news websites. There are very few primary sources cited and those are only a smattering of previously printed material. Seal, a folklorist and not a historian, did no archival research in original documents. Indeed, Seal twice derisively refers to museums as “history zoos” (249, 261). What must he think of archives? For what are archives if not “history zoos” made for paper? The dearth of primary sources is a major drawback for a serious researcher in the history of exploration.

Though Seal has no overarching thesis, he does make a few points in his final chapter. He recognizes some patterns in the pre-Cook explorations and shipwrecks that historians of discovery will recognize from other regions. He also highlights the fact that more than three hundred Europeans were castaways on Australia’s shores before 1788, people who interacted with (and probably reproduced with) the continent’s first peoples. These relationships between Europeans and Aborigines were complex. Seal also shrewdly observes: “Just as it is inaccurate and unhelpful to think of indigenous Australians as a single group, so it is to think that all colonisers were heartless thugs intent on destroying the many different cultures and lifestyles they encountered in Australia” (254). Seal wants to ensure that the stories of these encounters will serve Australia as a “richer mythology and history” (258). He succeeds on this score. ( )