Cirrus@Austlit

'When Richard Flanagan left school, he tells us early in Question 7, he worked as a chainman or surveyor’s labourer, ‘a job centuries old set to vanish only a few years later with the advent of digital technology’. Chainmen would have followed the surveyors who mapped Van Diemen’s Land and the rest of the British Empire; their task was to ‘drag the twenty-two-yard chain with its hundred links with which the world was measured’. The clanking surveyor’s measure evokes convict chains, and it demonstrates one of the principles at the heart of this book: that the past lives and redounds in the present. The chainman is a descendant of convicts, and he insists that ‘there was no straight line of history. There was only a circle.’' (Introduction)