Additions to t Bookshelf

TF for no other reason than it holds -*■ the largest concentration of Europeans in the Oceanic area, Australia is important to Island residents. Sooner or later the majority spent some time in the Com monwealth and whether they like what they find there, or not, the tendency is, more and more, for Australia to intrude into things Pacific.

There is much that the Islands dweller can learn with profit about Australia and in recent years, no dearth of books from which to learn it. Most of these books —when their authors keen away from the fiction medium—are excellent, and excellently produced.

The first two books reviewed herewith can almost be regarded as companion pieces: another, is concerned with Aus tralia’s largest post-war human experiment —migration; and the fourth comes within the realms of culture—something which overseas highbrows say Australians have not got much of! npHE FACE OF AUSTRALIA (by Charles Francis Laseron, FRZS). Many people coming to Australia for the first time from countries softer, more super ficially spectacular in the scenic sense, are repelled by the local country-side.

The red soil, the monotonous green of the eucalynt, barren hills, bare plains.

Small use to tell these folk that the country “grows on you” (as it surely does), but they might be helped to understand it better by reading Laseron’s book, for, if nothing else, they could become interested in antiquity in place of mere prettiness.

If you have the imagination this book will completely fascinate you. Forget about the Australia you know to-day— its cities, its political merry-go-round, its man-made problems of what man has done and not done—think only of a vast land, some of which came into existence 1,500 million years ago and has remained unchanged for the last 700 million years.

A land in which the forces of erosion have played an important part, yet in one area—the Barkly Tableland west of Cloncurry—where the land, 600 million years old, has never been high enough to permit erosion on any great scale and the shales and limestones that lie beneath their protecting layer of soil, remain un disturbed just as they were deposited in the sea that divided Australia into two parts in the Cambrian era.

Laseron tells us about Yilgania, a “land of such antiquity that figures alone are beyond the conceivable,” the remnants of which now form part of Western Australia, and the eastern bastion of which was probably the Musgrave Ranges in Central Australia. He tells us also of the effect of the various ice-ages on the topography of Tasmania (the warm era through which we are now passing may be just another brief—l«,ooo years or so—interlude in the last ice age!); something about the glaciers and vol canoes and great earth disturbances that went into the making of the more

spectacular scenery of the south-east and east of Australia: what caused the Aus tralian coast and the Barrier Reef to be as they are; the origin of that region of strange beauty, the Alice, and Australia’s Centre; how Australia’s typical bush and stranger flora came to the country, adapted itself and lived on.

This and much more you will find in “Face of Australia”—a book about a LAND and refreshingly not concerned at all about that upstart, man. If you are contemplating a touring holiday in Aus tralia soon, read it before you start out; better still, take it with you on your trip. (Published by Angus and Robertson, Australian price, 21/-). ★ the SUN ON MY BACK, by ’ ’ J. K. Ewers. This is quite a different kettle of fish. It goes over much of the same country as does “Face of Australia,” but this time it is the story of man, particularly man as he is in the l!)50’s and what he has done and not done with the land that was formed, maybe, 1,500 million years ago.

This is one of the best books in years about the Australian outback —those little populated regions of the Centre and the Territory and the North-West of West Australia—and its problems of black and white, of isolation, of climate, of the dilatoriness of men and Governments and the dead hand of remote Canberra control. Ewers, like many modern Aus tralian writers, is inclined to over sentimentalise the Australian aborigine.

It is obvious that all black men cannot now be good, any more than the opinion of 50 years ago, that they were all bad, could be correct. Moreover, he says him self, where black and white become as two opposing forces, black always wins; there appears to be something about the Australian aborigine that reduces the European who has to deal with him to a state of baffled frustration. Colour, however. Is one with the overall problems of the region.

Of Derby he writes: “When Japanese fighter-planes machine-gunned Dutch sea planes in Roebuck Bay, white residents took to the bush. Figuratively they are still there . . . Here are mixtures of all colours from full-blooded aborigine to blendings of Malay, Koepang, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, black, white in every known combination. The visitor feels the vitality of these people. In the resi dential area the whites pursue a round of social functions—influenced to a certain extent by the fact that more than half of them are Government officials removed from the hazards which the majority of whites shared in the past . . . Meanwhile the coloured people form a rising tide of arrogance and self assertion Obedience is no longer one of their qualities. Like hermit-crabs

they have taken over and forage for some sort of living in the ruins of the past.

They are alert, watchful, waiting—and breeding! In the shanty town along the foreshore, the coloured people are rich in their fecundity. ‘Someday we will come back,’ said Samsudin ben Kalib” (an Indonesian under threat of deportation).

Meanwhile the pearl-shell which has been worked only in a small way since the war scattered the pearling luggers matures on the seafloor and it seems no-one's business to do much about It.

Ewers writes with insight of this vast area of Centre and North which has provided platitudes for a century of politicians. Of problems that are not without solution but which will probably remain unsolved until outside pressures compel Australians to do something about it. The question is—will it then be too late?

Tourists have found the Territory now, of course, but the country and the people Ewers describes are still unknown to the great majority of Australians who could not care less about what lies beyond their cities or the narrow coastal belt and to whom the problems of the wide open North are much more remote than the mystery of peace in Korea or the private lives of our Royal Family in London.

It cannot, of course, be said that those who have peopled the North and the Centre have acquired merit simply by the fact of their being there. Most are there because they wish to be; many have taken what they wanted from the country and put nothing back. But they are a different breed of men, and women, and although so far removed by geography and climate and conditions from the dwellers in the Pacific Islands —not entirely without some of the same kind of problems.

It is an interesting book, well written and with humour “At the Governor Broome Hotel we slept three in a room my com panions maintained such a chorus of snoring I lay awake until long after midnight. One snored in high treble, the other in a deep, reasonant bass such as I have never heard before. The owner of this remarkable nasal trombone was a Scotch rubber planter from Malaya.

As we were nearing Port Hedland next morning in the plane he touched me on the back.

“ ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but would you mind telling me if I snored last night.’

“ ‘l’m afraid you did,’ I said.

“ ‘Was I very bad?’

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘l’ve never heard any thing quite like it before. It was magnificent!’

“ ‘Oh,’ he said, crestfallen. ‘l’m terribly sorry to hear that. You see, I’ve always snored noisily and I’ve had an operation to cure it. I havn’t seen my wife for 10 years and she’s waiting for me in Perth. I hone she doesn’t find it as bad as you thought it was.’

“What could I say? I have often wondered how his wife reacted to the result of the operation.” (Published by Angus and Robertson; Australian price, 21/-.)

(Continued on Page 79)

Australia and the migrant (published by the Australian Institute of Political Science from papers read at their Summer School in January, 1933).

This tells the how and why, the good and bad of Australia’s migration drive that in the peak years 1947-31 gave over half a million “New” Australians to the country.

The pros and the cons (and it was generally agreed that there were more desirable features in the experiment than undesirable ones) was debated by leading citizens and scholars of the Common wealth in Canberra at the beginning of this year. The small book that results from those discussions gives ample statistics of the economic and social repercussions that have and will result from this large influx of new people.

The human side of migration has been touched on only lightly—that is usually left to the daily newspapers and their reports of battles between the migrants and their would-be governmental bene factors who stand as father and mother to them in their new country. Migration —large scale migration—is, of course, of human problem. But this book will at least give you the figures and the science behind it. (Published by Angus and itobertson; Australian price, 12/6i.

'Powards An Australian Drama

"*■ (by Leslie Rees, Federal Drama Editor of the Australian Broadcasting Commission). The history of Australian day-writing, acting and presentation from he earliest days, through the Bland Holt sra to the present day when most of the Australian local talent in this direction s in the medium of radio.

A very small proportion of Australians ire actively interested in this form of irt expression. Most Australians at some irae listen to Australian radio plays—but he vast majority prefer to take their ntertainment at American or British novies.

The book is likely to be of considerable 'alue to those who are interested in the heatre or in writing for the theatre or adio, but is unlikely to do very much owards influencing the majority towards n interest in drama. (Published by Angus and Robertson; Australian price, 8/-).

A member of the East and West ndies Bible Mission in the NG iighlands has imported a hive of

>ees. They were obtained in New

South Wales by Mr. W. Bromley

yhen he returned bv the Bulolo rom leave in Australia. The bees

:ot their first experience of “fly

ng conditions” in the Territory vhen they were released for an

exercise flight during the Bulolo’s

lorthbound call at Port Moresby.

L-hey were given their liberty from

Jpper Port Road, and all but a ew stragglers found their way back o the travelling hive after a short nterval.

(I Dr. J. Legg, Director of Research, Yeerongpilly (Queensland) Animal Health Station, is going to New Guinea to inspect cattle imported from Queensland and to ascertain whether stock disease control measures recommended by him are being correctly carried out.

ft The British Resident Commis s T IO^ r er - New Hebrides (Brigadier H. i Flaxman) arrived in Honiara, BS Ip , by Qantas aircraft on June 22 to confer with the High Commis sioner for the Western Pacific, Mr R. C. S. Stanley, and left again by air on June 30 for Vila via Sydney