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Description
Just before Anzac Day in 1968, the writer Kit Denton slipped into an Adelaide pub and spent a bit of time with some old soldiers who were getting together over a beer. One of them--an 'old and angry' veteran from the Boer War--told him a story, spinning a 'splendid yarn which was the truth as he remembered it'. This attracted Denton's interest and inspired him to do further research. (1) The story was about 'Breaker' Morant, a name at that time only dimly familiar to Denton, and the version he heard was that of the innocent and charismatic victim sacrificed by Kitchener in the interests of wider political imperatives. He described the encounter thus:
I first heard about Harry Harbord Morant in a pub in Adelaide, just before Anzac Day five years ago. There was this old, old bloke with a TPI badge and a face that was sinking fast back into the quicksands of baby-shapes. He talked about wars and campaigns and battles and skirmishes on three continents during a life which had lost its muscle-tone before World War Two, and there were old names rolling out of the wet and puckered mouth under the heliograph eyes. He talked about fighting the Boers. And he talked of Harry Morant, 'The Breaker', and filled my head with a story that has kept me itching and scratching at it since. (2)
Some of Breaker Morant's story is probably known to most Australians, thanks largely to Bruce Beresford's film of 1980. An Englishman of obscure antecedents, Harry Harbord Morant (almost certainly not his real name) arrived in Australia in about 1884. He spent the next fifteen years in the eastern states, droving and horse-breaking; his excellence in the latter pursuit brought him his nickname, 'the Breaker'. He became a bush balladist and between 1891 and 1899 published about sixty poems in the Bulletin. He developed friendships with other bush poets, including Banjo Paterson and Will Ogilvie; he played polo and rode horses in races, and acquired a reputation as a womaniser, hard drinker, fighter, and daredevil. Apocryphal tales abounded in the bush about his audacity, sexual enterprise, and willingness to undertake extravagant challenges in order to win wagers. Thus far, he furnished material for a splendid yarn.
In 1899, Morant enlisted for the Boer War, where he fought with Australian forces for a year. He was discharged in October 1900 and the following April signed up with an irregular force called the Bushveldt Carbineers, established by Kitchener to enable the British to respond effectively to the Boers' guerrilla style of fighting. Later that year Morant was involved in incidents in which Boer prisoners and a missionary named Daniel Heese were shot. Morant never denied shooting the prisoners, but argued that circumstances rendered the murders defensible. He did deny killing Heese, which many regarded as the more significant crime. He and two Australian colleagues, Peter Handcock and George Witton, were court-martialled by the British. Though exonerated from Heese's murder, Morant and Handcock were executed in February 1902. Controversy has existed ever since about the degree of Morant's guilt and the appropriateness of his punishment, and most of the public narratives about Morant: for instance, F M Cutlack's biography Breaker Morant: A Horseman Who Made History (3); Denton's novel The Breaker (4); and Beresford's film Breaker Morant (5) all encourage a view of him as scapegoat and martyr.
Kit Denton was responsive to splendid yarns. Born in London, he emigrated to Australia as a young man (after stints in the British Royal Artillery and Parachute Regiment, and British Forces Network radio in Germany) and had tried gold mining in Kalgoorlie before investigating more conservative career options. In 1951 he joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Perth, where he worked as an announcer for fourteen years. He wrote novels, poetry, and television scripts and worked as a film production manager and director. He was a man of keen intelligence, lively curiosity and robust energy, and the glimpse he had caught of the Breaker's tale nagged at him until he went to the Mitchell Library in Sydney to examine it further and found 'such a bloody good story' that he thought it 'roughly the equivalent of a fossicker suddenly coming across colour and knowing instinctively that he was on a find'. (6) The most recent book on the Breaker had been Cutlack's biography published about ten years earlier, and Denton was aware of the deficiencies in Cutlack's narrative, which presented Morant essentially as a martyr and romantic 'beau cavalier'. He wanted to write a better account and, at first, to write it as a history.
Denton worked with persistence and determination, but every time he tried to follow a trail to a source within the British military or government establishments, the trail petered out. There were no records available of the court-martial itself, nor of the events leading up to it. He wrote of his frustration in his foreword to The Breaker, the novel he eventually wrote instead of a history:
I had hoped to write a true history of the events and the people concerned, but the obduracy of the British Government in refusing to release a number of essential documents has made this impossible. Nonetheless, this book has in it many of the historical facts ... Morant lived, wrote, fought and died pretty much the way I've pictured it. (7)
Later, he described these experiences in greater detail:
[I]n London, when I tried to find substantial proof of what had really happened, tried to find documentation, I was met with bland denials that anything untoward had taken place and with a variety of explanations for the absence of the transcripts of court martial proceedings. These ranged from 'they were loaned out and not returned' through 'we don't have them but the Navy/Army/Public Records Office/Prime Minister's Office have them', the variations depending on who was answering my query at the time. Within one week I was told at the Public Records Office that the papers 'should be here somewhere' and that 'they were destroyed by enemy action during the war'. Six weeks of that sort of thing left me with the strong belief that what I had been told in Australia was so; that the British were, indeed, covering up. (8)
The obstacles Denton encountered in his research for The Breaker, far from dispiriting him, inspired in him a greater determination. By now, the story had grabbed a hold of him: it 'niggled at him', his widow Le Denton later said. (9) His inability to... |
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