EWAN CAMERON picks out two fascinating music shows, fusing the Korean, and the Celtic, with the modern
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Diary of a swagman
ALEX HALL is dazzled by contemporary descriptions of life and rural work in 19th century Wales and Australia
UNUSUAL SYMPATHY: Aboriginal Farmers at Parker's Protectorate, Mt Franklin, Franklinford, Victoria, 1858
[Antoine Fauchery and Richard Daintree/CC]
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
Pity The Swagman. The Australian Odyssey of a Victorian Diarist
Bethan Phillips, Y Olfa, £16.99
ON a cold December evening in 1868 Joseph Jenkins, a Welsh tenant farmer aged 50 had had enough. He abandoned his wife and eight surviving children and trudged overland to Tregaron Station, thence to Aberystwyth, on to Liverpool and bought a one-way ticket to Australia.
The proximate cause of this sudden departure wasn’t economic, and he wasn’t leaving to remit funds back home. Joseph was good at farming. Despite the Welsh winters his cattle were prize winners. He was a renowned poet, much in demand for verses at weddings. He was instrumental in getting rail services into Cardiganshire. A faithful agent of the aristocracy he canvassed in elections for the preferred landlord class.
But he wasn’t an easy man to live with in and May 1868 his family severely beat him up.
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