MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
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
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
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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