But as a red coat, he continually gets dragged back into the colony’s ongoing struggles with food supplies, convict labour and the need to find pasture land further afield. In his little hut, on a remote headland away from the main settlement at Sydney Cove, the 26-year-old relishes the solitude and dark night sky. Lieutenant Daniel Rooke is a young astronomer who sails to Australia, from Portsmouth, England, to set up an observatory - “a small room surmounted by a cone of wood and canvas, something like an Indian teepee” - to chart the stars, specifically the expected path of a comet once seen in 15 and due to be seen in the Southern Hemisphere in 1788. It seems fitting to review Kate Grenville‘s novel The Lieutenant on the eve of Australia Day, because the book focuses on an officer of the First Fleet. Fiction – paperback Canongate 309 pages 2009.
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