Some local histories are counter texts, written to serve the needs of particular families, a town council or even a single hero mayor. It can be fun to read such hooks, noting the skill with which the author highlights some achievements, downplays others and sometimes conceals unpalatable facts. Netta is gently diplomatic at times, but we never get the impression that she is writing for a certain patron. There is always a feel of integrity about her book.

A few local historians take every opportunity to grind axes. Hal Porter’s lively study of Bairnsdale, for instance, speaks of Gippsland pastoralists as a ‘badgered, litigating transient lot’ and is equally bad tempered about the growing Aboriginal population in the town. Netta’s approach could not be more different. It conveys a persistent generosity. As you re-read her book in its new edition, take note of the way she treats the Aborigines, the settlers, the surveyors, the convicts, the clergy, the gold diggers and virtually every other group in the community. She even tries to understand what led people to engage in bushranging - the behaviour of the police, the miserable condition of the lives of the poor, the lack of education. When Netta speaks of women in Braidwood history, she is especially eloquent. She lists the vast range of duties of rural women - the cleaning, washing, candle and soap making, leading the stove, preserving fruit and so on - and emphasises the fact that they were trapped in a never-ending, ever dangerous series of pregnancies.

Netta shows sympathy for people, reminding us just how hard life could be. Apart from the discussion of women, look at what she says about the early surveyors - they worked with the bitter cold, the rain, the mud and the scorpions. Describing such conditions, one is struck by her talent for conveying images. Like many good historians, she has a painter’s touch and we see it in her descriptions of the living conditions of the early settlers, of a six-hour boxing match on the gold fields, and of a 1912 journey by bike through the countryside by a eucalyptus oil agent. The agent encountered the most primitive settlers’ huts and found that a sign of affluence was the use of Worcestershire sauce.

Netta’s talent for describing is especially evident when she seeks to explain why the Braidwood district has attracted artists and writers. The natural environment, she says, can be an inspiration to the creative spirit and Braidwood has the advantage of being encircled by a ‘rim of dark blue mountains’

and her ‘streams flow over ribs of pink granite’. There is also ‘the marvellous canopy of the sky, unpolluted by industry, constantly changing colour and mood, the tall eucalyptus and luxuriant ferns’. Netta tries to convey the character of Braidwood in other ways apart from its physical presence. She stresses the remoteness of the district - the failure of the railway line to reach here, the steep mountain approach, the surprising fact that only in 1957 did Braidwood get on the state electric grid system. She notes, too, the possibility that the preservation of so many nineteenth century buildings shaped the character of the community. There is a social conservatism in Braidwood as well, but Netta reminds us that this is accompanied by a real capacity for absorbing newcomers.

It is also a remarkably civilized community - one that has fostered a broad range of cultural activities, and not only in recent times when we have achieved a national reputation for the quality of our writers, painters, jewellers, weavers, quilters and potters. In 1929, the Braidwood Dispatch observed that “Braidwood without the Literary Institute would be like the play of Hamlet without the ghost”. The Institute had been a success for many decades before that - Terence Murray of Yarralumla, for instance, gave a lecture there on ballad poetry in 1862, and Charles Harpur another poetry talk three years before. It is worth asking whether the people of Braidwood today appreciate just how fortunate we are in our connection with Charles Harpur. He is Australia’s Wordsworth - Judith Wright, certainly Braidwood’s most eminent literary figure in recent decades, wrote of his work with enthusiasm. She began and concluded her 1965 survey of Australian poetry with discussion of Harpur and declared that ‘the first of (Australia’s) poets’ had never been given ‘his full importance in (Australia’s) literary history’.

Why was Braidwood such a centre for the arts? Among other considerations, Netta notes the role of some of the leading graziers - members of the Bunn, Hassall and Maddrell families, for instance, in giving different types of patronage to the Literary Institute. She also notes how some of the early settlers - holders of original grant land - created remarkable centres of civilization and hospitality in what were once very remote situations. It was at the Gordon’s ‘Manar’, for example, that the great landscape painter, Gruner, worked in 1922. Was it the sharp sense of remoteness that helped to create the tradition of hospitality in the Braidwood district, and the desire to foster literature and the arts?

Not everything is good in Braidwood - we have our tensions, many of them foolish but Netta, in writing about a place she clearly loves, reminds us what is good about living here. In this sense, Netta’s book is one of those local histories that actually help to create a greater sense of community in the district they describe. She has given Braidwood, as I have said, a local history that is marked by a generous spirit. It is a searching account that seeks to explain things, and, in addition, is written with a painter’s eye. It is a book that discerns the texture of life in Braidwood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Read the book, or read it again and, most of all, see if it does not make you feel even more warmly about living in Braidwood.”