“Ian Burnet, an Australian-based traveler, writer and historian who is well-acquainted with the former Dutch East Indies, sets out in this handsomely-produced book to show how Conrad ‘was able to convert actual events of his own experience into enduring fiction’, referring to Conrad’s own statement that he had written his books ‘in retrospect of what I saw and learnt during the first thirty-five years of my life’. This being said , though, Burnet is aware that not all Conrad’s output is autobiographical, and finds most of his material in the earlier works like Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim and The Rescue. These four novels, all based in Borneo, had characters based on people Conrad had met or known in his eastern voyages.
Burnet works backward with the material, reordering the narrative sequence and focusing on background material to definitively link Conrad’s life with the events of the novels, effectively building on Conrad’s own retrospective memory and quoting liberally from the novels to connect the fictional and non-fictional worlds ... I would recommend this book to readers who are not familiar with Conrad, but are seeking an informative introduction to this difficult writer’s life and works.”

“Burnet interweaves an engaging biography of the writer with accounts of his formative voyages as a merchant seaman. While serving from time to time on steamships, Conrad dedicated himself to sail with a serious, thoughtful passion. Burnet devotes intervening chapters to setting the scene, historically but vividly, of key South-East Asian seaports and coasts that Conrad knew. These included the island of Borneo, British Singapore and Makassar in the Dutch Celebes - vibrant and fascinating sea hubs where Conrad spent his time.
In the final section, Burnet shows how some of the real, larger-than-life characters of the 19th-century East Indies inspired Conrad’s fictional figures. They include the charismatic trader Tom Lingard, Almayer and Lord Jim. Burnet demonstrates how the great novelist’s earlier life as a merchant seafarer in South-East-Asia gave him the intimate knowledge of its people, customs, tropical lands and seascapes. From this emerges his vivid cast of sultans, warriors, traders, beachcombers and lovers. ”

“Burnet’s fascinating study shows how Conrad’s writings drew on his own experience and how the characters he met, particularly in Indonesia, became central to the wonderful novels that gave him such a central place in English literature. It is all the more astounding when one realises that English was in fact Conrad’s fourth language, after Polish, Russian and French.
Through historical research and Conrad’s autobiographical writings, particularly ‘A Personal Record’, Burnet has managed to document the voyages the author made and the people he met that were later woven into his many novels. Indeed, in a masterful and incisive manner, Burnet analyses events and characters from Conrad’s own life to show how they inspired and indeed are reflected in the events and characters of Conrad’s The Rescue, Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord Jim …The resulting book is highly recommended and will lead many of us to read or re-read Conrad’s books, with new understanding.
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“Burnet’s first six books explore the history of European exploration and colonization of the region (Spice Islands, East Indies), and its cultures and geography (Archipelago, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map). The new book looks deep into the late colonial era through the lens of Joseph Conrad’s novels. This is a clever device, enabling Burnet to celebrate the novelist and his works, while at the same time exploring this remarkable region in its heyday of travel and commerce at the end of the nineteenth century. It is a universal yet personal tale, told through the intimate stories of individuals, their ambitions and shifting alliances, their loves and hates, and ultimately flawed humanity set against the muddy rivers, the open oceans and the bustling seaports of the time. And all of this resonates with contemporary Southeast Asia. Somehow the characters seem just as real and relevant today as a hundred years ago.

The vibrant bustling jumble of cultures, and the mercantile seafaring world that Conrad conjures up provide a seductive setting for the personal narratives of his novels. In Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages, Tales of Singapore and an East Borneo River, Ian Burnet takes the reader back to that time at the tail end of the 19th Century, when adventurers and opportunists from the various European nations rubbed shoulders, struggling to gain a commercial edge over the Chinese, the Arabs and coastal Malays who traded with the indigenous upriver Dayaks of Borneo.

Burnet’s book follows Joseph Conrad from his early life through to his seafaring years and his eventual retirement to England. He takes us through Conrad’s novels, and the various characters that inhabit them, the books ordered according to the sequence of events they depict from the novelist’s life experience, rather than the year each was published. The text is sprinkled with illustrations from the period, which help to establish the context.
Ian Burnet has captured something of Conrad’s world and something of his own love of Indonesia and the region in Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages. It is a great summer read, and, for me, an enticement – as if I needed one - to escape the confines of my covid exile and return to the islands; to once again taste the sigh of the East in my face.
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“Ian Burnet’s book, published this year, is a very welcome addition to a complex area of Conrad’s life and writing. It is a curious feature of Conrad studies that few Conrad scholars have been to many of the places in the region that feature in his Malay fiction, and it is refreshing to read a book that contains Burnet’s knowledge of Indonesia and of Singapore. This, and his sensitive response to Conrad himself, make themselves felt throughout the short book, a book that would be justifiably classed as suggested reading for any reader or student of Conrad’s works set in this part of the world ...
... Burnet’s book is not literary-critical, and it makes no pretence to being so. His confident and wide-ranging contextual account, combined effectively with his relating of the plots and features of the Borneo novels themselves, provides a powerful sense of the lived reality through which Conrad passed and on which he drew. This enables the reader to gain a reliable grasp of the enormous achievement of Conrad’s Malay fiction in its systematic engagement with a culture not his own but of significance to at least “all of Europe”—like Kurtz—for its interpretation of historical roots in a world that colonialism relentlessly and cruelly changed, and for its portrayal of the human condition through the characters that Conrad portrays inhabiting such a world.
Burnet quotes the well-known comment by Henry James to Conrad in 1906 that: “No one has known—for intellectual use—the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached”. “The whole matter” is a phrase potent in its conciseness and significance, and Burnet’s book skillfully provides an insight into part of the whole matter regarding the Archipelago that often remains obscure. ”

“The subtitle, ‘The Biography of a Map’, is a very apt description of the way the story of the construction of the Tasman Map is presented. The Tasman Map is a compilation of sixteen separate discoveries in the Australia-East Indies region beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century.. Each of the cartographic steps is presented with detailed accounts of the people involved including their personal lives, and their roles in the process that brought traders from Europe to the East Indies. This is the ‘biography’ of the map and it gives the book extra substance and makes for a rich reading experience.

Ian Burnet has presented a detailed and authoritive account of the construction of the Tasman Map and its subsequent history. But he goes a lot further than that. The depth of social and political history contained here is impressive in the way it provides insight into the contemporary conditions and the people involved.

I have enjoyed reading it and learnt a great deal.

Brian Finlayson, School of Geography, University of Melbourne”

“Ian Burnet in this stunning volume brings alive the many voyages of discovery that linked the exploration and Dutch conquest of Indonesia to a growing awareness on the part of the Dutch of the great, but as yet unknown, land to the south. Burnet, chapter by chapter with stunning illustrations and reproductions of early maps, has managed to document the many voyages from Europe to the “far east”.
Most of us will have heard of parts of Burnet’s story, whether it is of figures such as Francis Drake, Dirk Hartog or Abel Tasman, or of place names which reflect historical moments in our history, such as the Gulf of Carpentaria, Arnhem Land, Groote Eylandt, Rottnest Island, or Maatsuyker Island. But other parts of his story will be new to many.
This is a book to savour and to learn from and which will serve as a reference to many a historical event of relevance to both Indonesia and Australia.
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“I would like to thank Ian Burnet for writing ‘Where Australia Collides with Asia’. In his book he explains the significance of the work of these great scientists and states clearly the key place that our Asian neighbourhood has played in their ideas. It brings to life not just Darwin and Wallace but others such as Joseph Banks, Captain James Cook, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle and many others. Written in an easy to read style, with many illustrations, we are introduced to these individuals as real people and the personalities behind their famous names ...
The decades Ian has spent living and travelling in Indonesia and his training as a geologist, have contributed many wonderful layers to this book. The fact that the first of the voyages he writes about is the voyage of the tectonic plates - the voyage of continent Australia - is a wonderful way to start his narrative as it ideally provides background to what is to come.
I commend this book - you will be drawn into another world - a world that has a deep effect on the way we see ourselves and life around us today. ”

“This book is the story of how continental drift has created the world in which we live, and, in particular, the unique and fascinating archipelago of Indonesia, a string of islands which spans Europe and Australasia, a volatile and diverse region. The book is also a wonderful retelling of the tales of three great British naturalists: Joseph Banks who charted the east coast of Australia with Cook; Charles Darwin, whose youthful voyages on the Beagle resulted in our modern understandings of the natural world, and the lesser-known Alfred Russel Wallace, whose wanderings across what is now the Indonesian archipelago, led to his own theory of natural selection.
Away from the confines of a dusty school textbook, Banks, Darwin and Wallace are brought to life. Here we get to know them as flesh and blood, subject to the same social pressures as are we; the same excitements and disappointments, arguments and friendships, loves and jealousies, seasickness, hangovers, fevers … and bright mornings when, as Darwin describes his time in Argentina, he had the “sky for a roof and the ground for a table”.
At the same time, Burnet’s backstory is the immensity of the planet’s geographic and biological history. And, consequently, our own fragility as a species.
Perhaps we can find parallels between Darwin’s reluctance to challenge religious authority and today’s debates over climate change, the reluctance of vested interests to accept the weight of scientific evidence on humanity’s impact on climate.
The writing is a robust; no-nonsense. It is the writing of a man who means business, and it builds trust. The story is light and entertaining yet full of insight. Through the frequent use of excerpts from Banks, Darwin and Wallace’s own writing, we get to see the world through their eyes. And through this, we get occasional glimpses of a wry, understated humour.
These were men of the world; artists, writers, scientists, adventurers, seafarers. It raises the question, where are these men and women today? After reading this book I am inclined to answer that Ian Burnet may be one of them – a scientist, an historian, a traveller and a fine writer.
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“The words, Spice Islands, never fail to conjure images of languid tropical islands, exotic fruits, aromatic spices and romantic tales of intrepid seafarers and traders. This book not only reinforces these images, but goes some way to explain the importance and context of the spice trade and its historical significance ...This is a wonderful book; a triumph of passion and scholarship. It is a short read, but it is packed with fine detail, exquisite maps, fascinating illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography. ”

“Meticulously researched and sumptuously illustrated with old maps and paintings, Ian Burnet’s second book, East Indies, tells the fascinating story of the rise of the trading empires of the Portuguese, Dutch and English which led to the colonisation of much of the Asia by European powers. From the early 16th Century traders, adventurers, priests and pirates were lured by the promise of the great riches to be had in commodities such as spices, sandalwood, silks, gold and Christian converts.
Burnet describes the founding of the great trading companies- the Portuguese Casa da India, the Dutch East Company and The English East India Company - which competed over centuries, often violently, for a monopoly over trade. He has uncovered stirring eyewitness accounts which enrich the narrative, and at times enters the story himself to describe to the reader what we may encounter of this rich history today in such exotic places as Goa, Malacca, Batavia, Penang and Singapore. I found it a ripping historical yarn!
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“This beautifully illustrated and informative book takes the reader on a journey both through the landscape of Indonesia and back through Indonesia’s past. It weaves a spellbinding experience that will take many of us through memories of past trips we have taken and will entice us to explore parts of Indonesia where we have not yet ventured.
... This is a book that will delight, and inform both newcomers to Indonesia and old hands alike.

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