Q&A with Australian historian James Boyce

Photo © Matt Newton

Today I am publishing a Q&A with Australian historian James Boyce, the author of Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens.

Boyce is a multi-award-winning writer whose first book, Van Diemen’s Land, was described by Richard Flanagan as ‘the most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore’. 

In 2012 Boyce published 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia which was The Age’s Book of the Year. His 2015 book Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World was hailed by The Washington Post as ‘an exhilarating work of popular scholarship’. 

Imperial Mud was published last year and has been longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and was the History and Tradition Winner in the East Anglian Book Awards. 

The paternal ancestors of Boyce’s mother, the Peets, came from the Lincolnshire Fens village of Horbling, and his father’s from various Fen villages in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.

The interview begins …

Q: You have written about your home country of Tasmania, you have written about Melbourne and the colonisation of Australia, and you have written about the gambling industry. What inspired you to write a book about the Fens of Eastern England? 

A: And I have even written about the history of the idea of original sin! But my main interest and work has been in Australian colonial history, with a particular focus on frontier relations and the environment. 

When I began reading Fenland history over 20 years ago I was struck by how many parallels there were with what happened during the colonization of Australia, and slowly the idea for a book emerged that would consider what happened in the Fens as part of the wider imperial story 

Q: Do you have relatives and/or friends from the Fens? 

A: Back in the late 1990s I worked as a social worker with elderly folk for Norfolk County Council and still have some East Anglian friends. 

My connections with the Fens are primarily ancestral. My mother’s paternal ancestors, the Peets, came from the Lincolnshire Fens village of Horbling, and my father’s from various Fen villages in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. 

Unfortunately, I don’t know any of these relations now (consider this a call-out to Boyces and Peets of which I know there are still many!) but I have met many Fens folk through my wanders as part of the research for the book. 

Q: Your book ranges beyond the East Anglian Fens. You discuss the Isle of Axeholme, for instance, which is further North, near Doncaster. You also make the point that the Fens have no precise border. Nevertheless, people do view the Fens of East Anglia as a very specific place and you argue that it is an area where regional identity is important. As you put, there was a “distinctive way of life that emerged in the wetland”. 

You say that this regional identity was to a great extent a product of local people’s resistance to the Fens being drained and enclosed and you coined the term Fennish (a term I have also adopted for my blog) to make this point. Many will agree that resistance played a large part in the making of the Fennish. Indeed, the term “Fen Tiger” has long been used to characterise those who resisted, and many locals still today use the term to describe themselves with pride. 

Can you say more about the characteristics of the Fennish, and the ways in which their culture is distinctive and different to other parts of the country? 

A: I find it hard to summarise Fennish culture as it was historically in a few words because this theme was such a large part of my book. Summarizing something so interesting, varied and evolving is difficult. 

I suppose the main point I would make is that it was an Indigenous culture in the true sense rather than the idealized one – it was not fixed in time, but changed in response to environmental responses, to new influxes of people, to technological change and so on. All Indigenous cultures do this though – it is an imperialistic fallacy to see them as primeval and fixed in time. They have to be resourceful, flexible, and adaptative to survive. 

However, there is a cultural continuity that can be seen across time and place, which is firmly rooted in the resources and riches of the wetland. 

At the heart of the cultural life, was the extraordinarily vast common, including the summer pastures, on which community well-being relied. Nor was this ever ended by the famous conquests (Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, engineers!) that are sometimes written as if everything then begins anew – i.e., all power and agency is assumed to lie with the invader. 

Q: What would you say were the three most significant events and dates for the Fens and its inhabitants, and why? 

A: Three of the most significant would have be to the coming of the Romans – not least because of the introduction of malaria and the metal spade! The Civil War was enormously significant in the Fens. I have many chapters on this as it played out differently across the region. In some areas it aided the defence of the common wetland, in other areas it facilitated enclosure and drainage. 

Then of course there is the introduction of steam power in the nineteenth century which really brought an end to the old wetland. But there are many others, including the intense drainage and flood control post war; and very exciting recent developments in restoration. 

Q: What would you say are the three (or four) people who have had the most impact on the Fens and/or the wider world, and why? 

A: One of the most influential was Oliver Cromwell whose political career was shaped and influenced by his homeland. 

As an Australian, I hope you will excuse me if I also mention Sir Joseph Banks, who played a leading role in the drainage of the Fens and the colonization and scientific exploration of Australia, and Matthew Flinders, who first coined the term ‘Australia’ and circumnavigated the continent. But that is a very biased selection!  

Imperial Mud is really focussed on the ordinary people though – those who made true home in the Fens rather than trying to destroy it or change the world. 

Colonisation

Q: In your book you draw parallels between the draining and enclosure of the Fens with colonisation, a point you underline by calling the book Imperial Mud, The Fight for the Fens. 

The Oxford dictionary describes colonisation as “the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area”. I suspect most people who use the term colonialism today do so to refer to the process in which Europeans travelled to and colonised other parts of the world. While there is clearly a logic to your use of the term in the context of the Fens, was it not often East Anglian landowners (not least the Huntingdon-born erstwhile farmer Oliver Cromwell) who sanctioned, financed and benefited from the draining and the enclosure of the Fens, as much as outsiders? 

I wonder if the process of draining and enclosure was as much about power, class, and incipient capitalism as it was about colonialism (although of course these things are all linked)? 

A: Yes, you are quite right, the emergence of capitalism and new expressions of power and class are inseparable from imperialism – as they are also in the overseas empire. There are differences of course in the internal and external dynamic, but the similarities are also striking. 

The role of the increasingly powerful centralized state is equally critical in the Fens. Drainage and enclosure was not just about ‘private’ enterprise – it was done and often driven in partnership with the state, and could only be enforced and achieved through its growing judicial and military power. 

Q: I am no historian (and I hope this question is not ill informed) but it seems to me that the draining of the Fens of Eastern England attracts more attention today than, say, the draining and enclosure of other areas of the country, especially on the West coast. For instance, the Somerset Levels were historically also areas of open water, marshes and fens. 

As I understand it, the arch drainer of the Fens, Cornelius Vermuyden, was involved in an unsuccessful scheme to drain the Levels in the 17^th Century. This failed in part because of local opposition but (as with the Fens) the area nevertheless went on to experience a process of forced drainage and enclosure in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. 

What I am suggesting is that other areas of England do not seem to have attracted the same level of interest (or mystique around resistance) as the Fens of East Anglia. This despite the fact that the Somerset Levels can boast an equivalent to Hereward the Wake using the watery isolation of the Isle of Ely to resist the Normans in the 11^th Century: In the 9^th Century King Alfred retreated to a fort in the marshes known as the Isle of Athelney (where he was famously said to have burnt some cakes!) as part of a (successful) resistance campaign against the Danes. 

Is it possible that the Fens, and the defiance and independence of the Fennish, is over romanticised to some degree, or that the area simply gets more airtime today for some reason? 

A: I certainly think the Somerset Levels story deserves to be given more prominence. Part of the reason the Fens is comparatively better known is just because it was so large. 

This region was the last significant wild area in heavily populated lowland England to be brought under effective centralized control and its human and natural life tamed. It was also a very rich area and central to so many epochs in British history. 

But for all this, I would say that there is insufficient awareness of what the area actually looked like – the extraordinary richness and diversity of the wetland and the sophistication of its management. And still too little understanding of how successfully and over such a long period of time the local people fought its destruction and their dispossession.

Progress history, which is deeply ingrained in our culture and history, tends to assume all this was just inevitable. 

Pros and cons

Q: Today I think most people who write about the Fens deprecate the fact that the area was drained. But things are not always black and white: I wonder what in your view are the pros and cons of the Fens having been drained? 

A: Well, the obvious main pro is the availability of rich arable farmland and effective flood control. The con was the destruction of a magnificent ecosystem and the dispossession of the people who managed and to some extent, created, it. 

Britain lost a highly productive natural ecosystem and a model of how this could be managed sustainably. The Fens now is a comparative natural desert but all the challenges that come from peat loss and rising waters in particular, mean that there are exciting new approaches to land management being developed. Farming can co-exist, in fact is a necessary part of wetland restoration and flood control.

 

Q: There are a number of projects today focused on restoring and re-creating the Fens. Is it possible that such schemes have come too late to have a meaningful impact on the environment or climate change?

 

A: The restoration projects such as the Great Fen are incredibly exciting. And while they cannot hope to recreate the old Fens, that is not the point. This has always been a changing landscape, the necessity has always been how to learn to live with the waters, not just fight them.

 

I believe and hope the twenty first century management of the Fens can provide a real case study of hope in this challenging century as sea levels rise and temperatures warm.

 

Q: What will your next book be about?

 

A: My new book is a return to Australian history – it is about land use policy debate in New South Wales in the early 1820s which largely defined how colonization would develop in subsequent decades.

 

Questions of the future of the common, of the rights of Indigenous peoples, and of the place of the small subsistence farmer versus big capital were at the forefront. As they were in the Fens!

 

A: Thank you very much for answering my questions. Good luck with Imperial Mud and your new book!

Detail from Great North Fen in Winter © Iona Howard