Book review: A Kind of Victory: Captain Charles Cox and his Australian Cavalrymen

By Reviewer: Jeffrey Grey
Updated September 4 2014 - 10:23am, first published August 29 2014 - 11:45pm

A KIND OF VICTORY: CAPTAIN CHARLES COX AND HIS AUSTRALIAN CAVALRYMEN
By Craig Wilcox. NLA Publishing. 217pp. $44.99.

Many Australians view our national history in presentist terms. That is to say, past events are viewed through the lens of current ideas and perspectives as though the way we think about a subject now is the way it has always been viewed. When coupled with the lack of context with which we often approach past events this leads to some serious distortions in our understanding.

This is especially true of our long, complex and continuing relationship with Britain and with the entity called British-Australia. We are far too prone to reading our history backwards, ascribing contemporary nationalist assumptions and agendas to earlier generations who simply did not think or feel like that.

In his latest book Craig Wilcox provides a small window into an older British-Australia, illuminating a range of much bigger issues and offering a deeply insightful reading both of the specific events under scrutiny and of the broader whole into which they fit. His focus is a young militia officer, Charles Cox, and the process by which he and a squadron of the NSW Lancers went to Britain in early 1899 to train with the British Army – to learn their trade as cavalry and not, as the fashion then had it, as mounted infantry or light horse.

When the war in South Africa broke out late that year, Cox inveigled many of his men to volunteer for service there while those who declined and returned to Australia were shabbily treated when they landed. All this has been known in outline for decades. Wilcox takes his readers well beyond the bald facts and investigates who went and why; what they did when they reached England and how the British public regarded them; the decision to serve in South Africa and, finally, the culmination in which Cox was involved in the shooting of an unarmed African servant during a raid on a farm, the opprobrium of which followed him for many months though, ultimately, he was not called to account.

Wilcox has woven these events into a wider story of the colonial Anglo-Australian relationship. He draws extensively upon Cox's own papers for this period, supplemented by other contemporary sources to offer fascinating and detailed insights into one man, the men and women around him, and the times they occupied.

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