The Gubbays on

the North Coast

Australian author e. v. Timms once wrote readable stories. At least this reviewer, when very young, thought so. Something about Hannibal and his elephants; or the French revolution is vaguely re membered. But some years ago, Timms began to write an Australian saga, which, God knows, has suf ficient material for high dramatics.

The result has been unfortunate, and the latest offering, They Came From the Sea, worse than that.

The book has the germ of a good story: 14 survivors from a sea disaster drift for 12 days in an open boat and are cast ashore on the North Coast of New South Wales near a primitive community of cedar cutters. The coast between Sydney and the Queensland border lacks nothing in the way of sub-tropical scenery or history to make it an ideal setting for a pioneering novel.

Yet at Timms’ hands it becomes an endurance test of long, stilted conversations sandwiched between slabs of local history evidently taken from official documents or from the files of early newspapers. His cnaracters are wooden and the tneme ol the story seems com

pletely purposeless except as a vehicle to drag in, like persistently recurring decimals, some of the characters from all his earlier books —the insufferable Gubbays who, in a period when a 20 miles journey was a considerable undertaking, have appeared (in succeeding books) in Western Australia, the Victorian goldfields, NSW, Sydney, and now the North Coast. In this respect the series bears a striking resemblance to the Pollyanna books.

According to his publishers, how ever, these Australian books of Timms’ are “powerful” and he has an “immense following.” This is quite likely so. There is just no way of accounting for Australian taste. (Published by Angus and Robertson, Ltd., Sydney. Australian price, 16/-.)