This Month’S New Reading

(Conducted by the Assistant Editor)

Between War And

Peace

EVIDENTLY we are on the threshold of an era of books on the Occupation of Japan.

Sowers of the Wind, by T. A. G.

Hungerford, is the third we have received within as many weeks; it is unlikely that there will be an other quite like it. Perhaps, not another as good.

Not for Sunday School prize giving, this one. The theme is crude —sordid, if you like. Much of the narrative is in the vernacular of the Australian Army; there is no moral uplift and mighty little moral, except perhaps in its demon stration that all large-scale human experiments are reduced, inevitably,

to their lowest common denomin ator, which, in this case, was the common soldier.

General Douglas MacArthur, who sat in his ivory-tower and designed the Occupation, believed that it was the greatest spiritual revolution of all time. The Occupation to these Australians meant Jap women, the blackmarket, revenge—in that order. And although the General’s picture is a much prettier one, Hungerford’s gives a greater sense of reality.

Sergeant Rod McNaughton (who is as much a hero as a novel of this type will permit) and his outfit, went straight from Islands cam paigning to Japan. This swift transition from the dangers of jungle warfare to the uneasy un reality of Occuption would be suf ficient to unbalance the most moral of men, and the Australians accepted what was offering without restraint.

McNaughton alone retains his in born sense of responsibility and an awareness of where they were go ing. But he, too, is ultimately caught in the web, in his affair with the Japanese girl, Fumie.

Hungerford does not make the mistake of endowing this with the trappings of a grand passion; it was as permanent and as temporary as all such liaisons: its end fore shadowed in its beginning. Yet it is the central theme of McNaughton’s year in Japan and had, in the end, unexpected consequences.

Technically, the book cannot be faulted, and this and his other novels ( The Ridge and the River and River slake) put Hungerford in the top bracket of modern writers.

It was written about six years ago and won a Sydney Morning Herald literary prize in 1949, but, surpris ingly has not been published until now. Surprisingly—because a great deal of literary tripe by Australian writers has seen print in those years.

Nothing had been heard of this writer until Ridge and the River, but his product has never been in the amateur class; nor, praise the gods, has it any of the arty-crafti ness that characterises most Aus tralian writing.

The present book should find a place along with The Cruel Sea and From Here To Eternity. (Published by Angus and Robertson.

Australian price, 16/-.)

What Happened When

The Lake Went Out

ANOTHER portrayer of the Aus tralian scene with a growing international reputation is Arthur Upfield. His Death of a Lake will not disappoint admirers, either: it is one of the best of his Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bona parte mysteries.

(Continued on Page 86)

However, Upfield’s mysteries are not of the most mysterious: where he excells is in placing them so accurately into the Australian set ting without making his characters into caricatures or his situations ridiculous.

“Bony” is, of course, a trifle larger than life; but all thriller writers are allowed their eccentric sleuth as the pivot on which the plot revolves.

The other characters are satis factorily true-to-type.

The lake, one of those phenomena peculiar to Australia, which carries water perhaps once in a generation, is in the far west of New South Wales. It had been dying ever since it was born three years before the story opens, and in the heat of high summer it was shrinking daily be fore the eyes of the half dozen who waited.

When it was gone, when the hollow that cradled it was once more a dust-bowl, what would be re vealed? That was what Bony, newly-arrived at the out-station of Porchester Station in the guise of horse-breaker, was there to find out.

It is a slender thread of plot that runs throughout the story yet it never palls. Here is the Australian outback: unglamorised but not re pellent. We din our lid, Mr.

Upfield—and look forv/ard to our next meeting with Inspector Bona parte. (Published by William Heinemann, Ltd.

Australian price, 12/-.»

Life And Love Among

The Fish

NOW, Lady with a Spear is a very different kettle of fish —in fact, a whole Pacific Ocean and a Red Sea full of them.

If, like the reviewer, you w<3uld rather roost in a cage full of lions than go creeping around the sea bottom equipped with a snorkel and a face-mask, then this will be a trip into the unknown for you.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in marine biology as an amateur or professional, then this really will be your dish. There are the most entrancing passages con cerning the love-life of various fish; to say nothing of how same can be inseminated artificially without any love-life whatsoever.

The lady with the spear is Eugenie Clark, part-European, part Japanese, all American, and ex tremely good looking, at that. On her own confession, she was com pletely fascinated by fish from the age of nine and in the course of time became a diploma-ed icythyologist. In this capacity she did research in Micronesia and later in the Red Sea.

The greater part of her book is taken up with her Pacific ad ventures and this will be of con siderable interest to Pacific dwellers

who want to know more about the inhabitants of their reefs and lagoons. Some of her encounters with the islanders who were called in to assist in her work, are amus ing; and in this connection she learned to eat and enjoy raw, not quite-dead squid.

Surprisingly, the book has a romantic ending at the altar, when Eugenie married Ilias Themistokles Papakonstantinou which, as the lady remarked, made the scientific names of fishes look trivial. He was a young Greek MD, living in America and “had a personality that could tempt a female ichthyologist’s interests away from fish.”

Ilias went to Cairo at the end of Eugenie’s Red Sea assignment, to claim her. For their honeymoon— you’ve guessed it—they went spear fishing ! (Published by William Heinemann, Ltd.

Australian price, 15/6.)

A Naturalist Looks

At P-Ng

NO book which has a foreword by a reigning Administrator is likely to be controversial, or over-critical of government. There fore, it is useless expecting any thing of that sort from Charles Barrett’s Isles of the Sun, which has an introduction by Adminis trator D. M. Cleland, of Papua and New Guinea.

The book has other virtues, how

ever, although more as an account of a naturalist’s wander than as a literary masterpiece. Even residents of long-standing will find consider able interest in Barrett’s descrip tion of some of the Territory’s natural phenomena, because, as the author says, Territorians are singularly unobservant on the whole —possibly as a hangover from the old-time idea that everything native was beneath the dignity of a Euro pean. • For the rest, it is pretty safe to say that Barrett Snr.’s overall opinion of the Territory differs con siderably from that of Barrett Jnr.

For Barrett Jnr. is Don Barrett, MLC, one of the Territory’s best known citizens, and he contributes to his father’s book a tail-piece, the burden of which is: “What New Guinea might be —but isn’t.”

Barrett pere, on the other hand, is content to leave politics to fils, and, reading between the lines, I think found the natural and native inhabitants of the Territory con siderably more fascinating than some of its European residents. And in this respect I couldn’t agree with him more: Those Territorians who insist on carrying the Blood-House traditions of the 20’s and 30’s into

the 50’s can be more than a little tedious.

Most parts of the Territory are covered in the narrative, as the author, on one of his visits to his son, was persuaded to become tem porarily an entomologist for the Department of Agriculture. In this capacity, he received and released the Zanzibar wasps in which P-NG pins its hope of getting rid of Rhinoceros beetle, pest of coconuts.

And, at a later stage, he travelled extensively in the Territory seeking pests of other crops.

In the course of these duties he learned that any travel in P-NG usually involves considerable dis comfort; he probably knows now, too, that if he doesn’t want to stay awake half the night listening to other people’s parties, he should equip himself with some Super- Double-X knock-out drops for a bed-time tipple.

The book is illustrated with scores of excellent photographs. (Published by Heinemann; Australian price, 22/6.) The two Tongan dancers, Palu Tatupu and Veiongo Fakaua, nieces of Queen Salote, who recently scored a London Cabaret success, have now made the first of three recordings, with an accompaniment of flute, ukulele, guitars and handclapping by a Tongan chorus.