Ross Gibson's brilliant 26 Views of the Starburst World focuses on two notebooks, ninety pages in all, in which William Dawes recorded his notes on the 'language of N. S. Wales, in the neighbourhood of Sydney (Native and English)' in the late 18th century.

Dawes was a marine lieutenant and astronomer who lived in Sydney from 1788 to 1991, years in which the world of the Eora (the people who lived there before the English arrived) changed catastrophically and in which that of the invader–settlers likewise was transformed. These two notebooks were rediscovered in London in 1972. In compiling them, Dawes drew on his relationships with a small group of Eora, including most memorably a young woman named Patyegarang, who visited him at his tiny observatory on the edge of the settlement. They record snippets of conversation, and give sometimes enigmatic glimpses of tiny interactions.

Gibson describes the notebooks as 'fragmented, unfinished, heuristic', with 'a prismatic quality'. And his book might be described in similar terms: it quotes, questions, analyses, peers closely at faint marks, speculates, extrapolates. It comes at the notebooks from, well, at least 26 angles: there's biography, linguistics , psychology, anthropology, the history of colonisation, the history of science (1788 was a time of a high romantic approach to scientific enquiry in England), communication theory, the politics of Rugby League in 21st century Sydney. Apart from Dawes' contemporaries Watkin Tench, David Collins and Arthur Phillip, it quotes Wordsworth, Emerson, Walden, Mallarmé, James Agee, Kenneth Slessor, the 20th century haiku master Seichi – all of them pertinently ... And sometimes it lets the notebooks speak for themselves. Gibson describes his approach as 'roundabout, relational, a tad restless and unruly', and in a slightly less alliterative moment as 'a little like history, a little like poetry, a little maddeningly like a séance.' ( )