Trent Dalton is the now-famed author of Boy Swallows Universe, the 2018 novel that reaped widespread veneration and had bands of book lovers across the country clamouring for more.

By Sea & Stars will satisfy Dalton’s new-found fans. His telling of the First Fleet and the marines, thieves, pregnant women and experienced seamen that sailed 15,000 miles across the sea to the Great South Land is masterful.

‘See it through the eye of a spyglass,’ he writes as an opening for one of the brief chapters in the book. ‘Eleven British ships at full sail cutting across the Atlantic. Arthur Phillip’s majestic First Fleet flotilla en route to a place where a troubled bush kid named Ned Kelly will one day hammer a bulletproof br eastplate and a golden girl named Betty Cuthbert will set fire to a running track and a bronzed larrikin named Paul Hogan will crack jokes atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge.’

This passage exemplifies Dalton’s tight control of his audience’s focus. He has the ability to zero in on the miserable minutiae of the stinking bowels of a convict transport vessel and then zoom back out to capture the majesty of a fleet charging across the ocean, altering world history as it goes. But it’s towards the end of the book that Dalton’s spyglass seems to skip over an essential part of this story.

By Sea & Stars was originally a serial printed in The Australian, following another 20 000 word serial that centred on Captain Cook’s Endeavor voyage. In the foreword to By Sea & Stars, Editor-in-Chief of the Oz, Paul Whittaker, writes that, ‘the need to know our own history was underlined in August 2017, when Australia woke to the news that a spray painter had defaced Captain James Cook’s statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park.’

Whittaker implies here that he sees the targeting of Cook’s statue as an act of brainless vandalism rather than the concerted political statement that it was intended as. The reason the words ‘No pride in genocide’ and ‘Change the date’ were sprayed across Cook’s pedestal is because the activists knew exactly who he was – the man who brought colonisation to Australia and instigated the near collapse of the world’s oldest continuing culture.

Whittaker continues to say in the foreword that the story of Cook ‘would be written from two critical vantage points – the view from the ship and the view from the shore. European and Indigenous. White and black.’ This statement set up the expectation that the Indigenous perspective of Arthur Phillip’s arrival would be at the forefront of By Sea & Stars. It is not. Dalton instead sketches out a few peaceful exchanges of gifts that occurred between the colonists and Eora people and reminds readers that King George III called for the original inhabitants of Australia to be treated with ‘amity and kindness’. The massacres and structural oppression Aboriginal peoples would come to face is merely hinted at.

This seems to clash with Whittaker’s claim that this history series can act as a uniting force for non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians. The valorisation of colonial figures like Captain Cook and Arthur Phillip in Australian culture, while the atrocities inflicted on Indigenous peoples are euphemised, is exactly why protestors took to those Hyde Park statues with spray paint.

By Sea & Stars is indeed a brilliantly written and engaging account of the First Fleet’s voyage. Hopefully it will prompt readers young and old to seek out further reading on Australia’s colonisation that fully captures each side of the story.

Reviewed by Angus Dalton