The story of Conaci, aged seven, and Dirimera, aged ten, who were spirited away to Europe by a Benedictine missionary, Rosendo Salvado, in the mid-nineteenth century to be trained as Australia’s first indigenous monks, is arguably the first, forgotten chapter in the story of Australia’s stolen generations. It is also the subject of The Grand Experiment, Anouk Ride’s compelling but problematic book, in which a number of the author’s charges may also, ultimately, be levelled at her.
When towards the middle of the book, for example, Ride asks whether Salvado was “transferring his ideals onto real children”, one can’t help but feel that in fact this is what she is doing, too. Her prose is weighed down with passive-aggressive assertions that the boys “would have seen”, “must have thought”, “could only have felt”. But there is save little evidence to back these assertions up, and Ride makes them solely on the basis of conjecture and her imaginative self-identification with the characters. This is insufficient as history and, for this reader at least, unsatisfying as literature.
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Australian Book Review, June 2008
