Review:
Jim Hobden's Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt
By Jim Hobden
Self-published 1988
By Jim Hobden
Self-published 1988
Catalogued Genre: History
True Genre: History
Research: Extensive
Source-references: Detailed
Accuracy: Largely reliable but with some serious errors
Hobden was clearly a man of many talents but drawing was not one of them. His truly dreadful illustrations are a serious detraction from what is otherwise an extensively researched and useful addition to the library of Thunderbolt publications. However his maps are extremely helpful, reflecting knowledge gathered over a lifetime of interest in his local community.
The extent of Hobden’s research is evident from his source-referencing which covers a large body of primary-source and secondary-source references. Interestingly, he obtained information from issues of the Crime Reports (the predecessors of the Police Gazettes) and from newspapers that do not survive in official collections. Disappointingly his research has not survived, so this information is now lost.
Some of his source-referencing is poor, which is unfortunate because he evidently examined local newspapers for decades into the twentieth century and found some interesting anecdotes (although he sometimes placed too great a reliance on these anecdotes, ignoring the accurate primary source references that he clearly had access to!). He used abbreviations that he forgot to add to his key, and provided no shelf-list references for material found in State Records of New South Wales. He quoted publications that do not appear in Trove or in Google searches and he failed to document the record repositories in which these minor or privately-published works can be found. This is frustrating because he discovered useful information that is not documented elsewhere.
Hobden had an attention to detail that is not found in Cummins’ Thunderbolt, published the same year (see Review), however he was sometimes completely confused. While Cummins, for example, determined that Mary Ann Bugg did not die in 1867, Hobden was left floundering and reached some absurd conclusions.
A remarkable addition to the Thunderbolt debate is found at the back of Hobden’s book where he recounted and attempted to refute many of the Thunderbolt resurrection stories in a chapter delightfully named “Fact, fancy, fabrication and flagrant falsehood”. He would no doubt be appalled to find that some of these “flagrant falsehoods” are still being loudly proclaimed today.
True Genre: History
Research: Extensive
Source-references: Detailed
Accuracy: Largely reliable but with some serious errors
Hobden was clearly a man of many talents but drawing was not one of them. His truly dreadful illustrations are a serious detraction from what is otherwise an extensively researched and useful addition to the library of Thunderbolt publications. However his maps are extremely helpful, reflecting knowledge gathered over a lifetime of interest in his local community.
The extent of Hobden’s research is evident from his source-referencing which covers a large body of primary-source and secondary-source references. Interestingly, he obtained information from issues of the Crime Reports (the predecessors of the Police Gazettes) and from newspapers that do not survive in official collections. Disappointingly his research has not survived, so this information is now lost.
Some of his source-referencing is poor, which is unfortunate because he evidently examined local newspapers for decades into the twentieth century and found some interesting anecdotes (although he sometimes placed too great a reliance on these anecdotes, ignoring the accurate primary source references that he clearly had access to!). He used abbreviations that he forgot to add to his key, and provided no shelf-list references for material found in State Records of New South Wales. He quoted publications that do not appear in Trove or in Google searches and he failed to document the record repositories in which these minor or privately-published works can be found. This is frustrating because he discovered useful information that is not documented elsewhere.
Hobden had an attention to detail that is not found in Cummins’ Thunderbolt, published the same year (see Review), however he was sometimes completely confused. While Cummins, for example, determined that Mary Ann Bugg did not die in 1867, Hobden was left floundering and reached some absurd conclusions.
A remarkable addition to the Thunderbolt debate is found at the back of Hobden’s book where he recounted and attempted to refute many of the Thunderbolt resurrection stories in a chapter delightfully named “Fact, fancy, fabrication and flagrant falsehood”. He would no doubt be appalled to find that some of these “flagrant falsehoods” are still being loudly proclaimed today.