Backed by a team of astute researchers and editors, FitzSimons is a well-oiled publishing machine, averaging almost a book a year. The brand is well established; as Manning Clark wore his Stetson, so FitzSimons, the Cheshire-grinning republican nationalist (“and proud of it!”), dons his red bandanna. It comes as no surprise that the subtitle of
Eureka is “the unfinished revolution”.
FitzSimons’ connection with the gold diggers’ rebellion began at primary school, where he dressed up as a redcoat in a Eureka re-enactment. Determined to atone for this miscasting, he leaves us in no doubt that he has changed sides. Burning with “passion”, and “poring” over documents in his “obsession” with the story, FitzSimons proclaims his epiphany:
The action! The characters! The fact – and this was perhaps the key – that this was a real Australian story … I felt I was getting to the very foundation stones of what it is to be an Australian – from multiculturalism to mateship, from our broad mistrust of the elites who would seek to rule over us, to our wide embrace of egalitarianism and insistence on a ‘fair go, mate’, to the very use of the word ‘mate’.
Such is the Fitz style: attention-grabbing (“Oh dear!” “Devastating!”); reliably entertaining and narrative-driven (he ventriloquises primary sources in order to create the effect of a novel); occasionally heavy-handed (exclamation marks and italics abound); conversational in that familiar, blokey manner (“Fare thee well, Raffaello [Carboni]. You were a beaut.”); humorous (he quotes Jerry Seinfeld during his visit to Australia in 2000: “I love your flag – Great Britain at night.”); and entirely unapologetic in his gung-ho nationalism. FitzSimons gives the impression that he would lead the boys over the top if given half a chance, his red bandanna lighting the way for the rebels marching behind him. In his hands, the Eureka rebellion becomes a victory for the ordinary Australian over the English elite: “and when we become a republic – as we surely some day must – what better flag to choose than the Eureka flag? Say it loud. Say it proud. Exactly!”
In nearly all his books (including
Eureka, even if it is not strictly military history), this is FitzSimons’ mission: to exalt the Australian spirit and nation, to raise the country from its slumber and through the power of its ‘stories’ of military endeavour and heroic struggle, urge it onwards to republican independence. Yet perhaps it’s precisely the glaring absence of the stirring foundational narrative for which FitzSimons pines that has seen Australia embrace blood sacrifice in an imperial war as the bedrock of its national consciousness.
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/december/1363672450/mark-mckenna/lest-we-inflate
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