History Matters

Maria Simms. The Dead House. Gibbes Street, an imprint of New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd.

Reviewed by Carolyn Van Langenberg

In Why History Matters the eminent British historiographer John Tosh argues that ‘… history is the property of “the public” rather than academia, in the sense that the laity are the principle audience. He also makes an argument for the place of history as historical narratives and ‘edutainment’ television programmes in an era when citizens are increasingly required to understand their national histories. Sometimes this takes the form of knowing about famous battlefields, like Anzac Cove, or about sportsman, like Donald Bradman. Emphatically, this knowledge forms the basis of the citizenship tests migrants are required to pass in many nations — Australia, Britain, Denmark and many others. The aim is to assess the intending citizens’ knowledge of the nation they are aspiring to join. National identity is examined in understanding a few points about the history that formed the nation as well as something of national institutions and laws.

Historical fictions, whether in written or videoed form, are a primary source of historical knowledge for the audience that Tosh identifies as ‘the public’, the laity that likes to be entertained as it picks up a detail here, an atmosphere there or the names of historical characters and their place in the drama of history. Judging by the extensive acknowledgements at the beginning of her first novel, The Dead House, Maria Simms did the spadework of historical research, successfully writing a sprightly thriller set against the background of the turbulent beginning of nursing as a profession in Australia. One of the principal characters is based on Lucy Osborn. She was selected by the Nightingale Committee to be the Lady Superintendent of the Sydney Infirmary, where her task was to establish the Nightingale system of nursing. Lucy and the five other nurses who came with her to Australia are fictionalised in the novel.

The Dead House is set in Sydney, a small and rough town during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Electra, the sleuth heroine, is a country girl seeking an escape from financial difficulties her family encountered when the farm had to be divided after her father’s death.

Plots and sub-plots combine to lend freshness to what is after all a genre novel.  There is rivalry among the English nurses. The kitchen staff is eerie. Nurses mysteriously die. To solve the mystery of their deaths, Electra teeters on the edge of a romance with the handsome young doctor Julian Craig, an intrigue that leads not to marriage but the possibility of a career in medicine.

Libby Carlyle as Lady Superintendent battles to keep her hospital clean and orderly. Men assume authority, sometimes nastily, to undermine Libby who has the full support of Henry Parkes, but not that of the alcoholic John Blackburn, the manager of the City Infirmary. The Hospital Board is open to his manipulation. Blackburn won’t allow male staff to assist the nursing staff with sanitation and quarantining. Nor will he allow nurses regular water to wash themselves. And the floorboards of the City Infirmary creak with rot and vermin.

Flying through the tale of political machinations, dead nurses and patient suffering, an ugly scandal is unearthed by the spirited Electra. She solves the crime, aided and abetted by the Italian Detective Delano, a further hint at how well researched The Dead House is. Italians were part of nineteenth century Sydney life. Not all were seeking gold or economic reprieve. Like Delano, some were political refugees.

Maria Simms offers many insights into the rough and tumble of 1870 Sydney. Small details such as the pedestrian toll for people walking to and from Ultimo to the area around the present-day Domain, for example, alert the reader to the difference between the familiar  present and the past reality.

The characters are light and bright, swiftly stepping into the larger character of Sydney itself, perfect for a television drama.

My one quibble is that the editing suffers from haste, the bane of the electronic age, denying the final novel a polished gleam.

The history is sound, providing the laity, the public who constitute the audience for the historical thriller, the readers curious about early Sydney and how Australian institutions struggled to begin, with an entertaining thriller that gently teaches.

The Dead House is a lively success.

Carolyn van Langenberg lives in the Blue Mountains and has travelled widely in South East Asia and Europe. Author of four novels including Blue Moon (2004) she now concentrates mainly upon poetry.