Mark Greenwood, The Dragon’s Treasure (History Hunter), Fremantle Press, July 2024, 112 pp., RRP $14.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781760993948
Self-styled ‘history hunter’ Mark Greenwood offers up the 2nd of his four-book History Hunter series for young readers, Yr 4+, with this exploration of real-life treasure finds along the Dragon Reef, a stretch of hazardous coral reef between Perth and Geraldton in Western Australia.
It’s a subject ripe for adventurous yarn and serious speculation. This stretch of coastline has seen copious shipwrecks, mutinies, abandoned shipmates, and survival struggles; and the book is at its best when Greenwood is describing the vivid struggles of people against the elements, for example, the moments when the 17th century Dutch ship, the Gilt Dragon, is lost to its watery grave.
The book has been well researched and benefits from photographic reproductions and other ephemera that give young readers visual historic clues to the facts contained therein as well as a useful timeline and further reading suggestions.
Structurally, The Dragon’s Treasure is a series of shortish interlinking episodes, guiding the reader through real searches that occurred along this section of coastline mainly in the last century. Whilst interesting and easy to follow, the episodes tend to be quite repetitive in format, including asking many similar questions about human motive.
There are also random pieces of dialogue spoken by the human treasure hunters to bring variety to the prose, which would have benefited from more careful thought about advancing the ‘adventure’ element of each episode and revealing character. I wanted to know, for example, what these people truly thought or felt about what they were doing; the rightness or otherwise of ‘the hunt’? Why is the lust for buried coins and trinkets so alluring that some people do immoral things to get them?
Fred Edwards, the closest to a main character in the book, asks the question, but doesn’t provide any answers through his own searches and discoveries. It’s a lack that perhaps primary school teachers might explore with their students in the classroom along with discussing other questions in the handy Teachers’ Notes provided on the Fremantle Press website.
Recommended for classroom discussion, Years 4 to 8. See Kevin Brophy’s review of another book in the series, The Vanishing, here.
Reviewed by Suzanne Ingelbrecht
