Peter Lacey

The story in Nick Brodie’s ‘Kosciuszko’ is threadbare, resulting in what, to me, is a disappointing book. Basically, the story is this – two young men (Evan Hayes, an Australian, and Laurie Seaman, an American) embark on a cross-country ski trip to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko in August 1928. They do not return. It seems they reached the summit, become separated in worsening weather on the return journey, and both perish. Numerous search parties are organized but fail to find them. The body of Seaman is discovered 4 weeks later by a group of schoolboys on the logical route he would have taken for home, that of Hayes is not recovered for a further 15 months and is found on the opposite side of the mountain. Seaman’s Hut (between Charlotte’s Pass and the summit of Mt Kosciuszko) was subsequently erected as a memorial to Laurie Seaman. That’s not enough of a story to fill a 232 page book – so it’s little wonder (and very frustrating for a reader who is eager to get to the real point of the book!) that it took 97 pages of the book to get the two adventurers to their starting point for their ill-fated day trip to the summit of Kosciuszko. And much of this ‘background’ or ‘prelude’ is devoted to the author’s (to me, unnecessary) thoughts about the place that Kosciuszko has, or supposedly may have, in the Australian psyche. I’m reasonably familiar with the Kosciuszko area, but found it necessary to go back to some old maps (thank goodness for Google!) to pinpoint the sites of some of the places named in the book – even one of the most important places in the story, Betts’ Camp, that long-ago disappeared as a site of any significance in the area. So, the absence of a map in this book was a further frustration. In short, this was an unsatisfying read.