As Mark Twain tells the story in Following the Equator (1897), Cecil Rhodes, the future magnate and politician, was down and out in Sydney in 1870. Wandering along a harbour beach, he stopped to help a fisherman land and gut a shark – in whose stomach cavity he discovered a fragment of newsprint that, days in advance of sailing ships carrying the same papers, announced the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Galvanised by this intelligence, Rhodes convinced a local wool broker to lend him the money to buy up much of that year’s Australian woolclip, a purchase that helped the future poster boy of Empire get back in the game.
Fleeced: Unravelling the history of wool and war by Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw
Rowman & Littlefield, $45 hb, 224 pp
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