Ruth Park In Junior

And Senior Sizes

Ruth Park, one of the most prolific of Australia’s crop of post-mi writers, is now producing books in twos , published by different publishers in the same month. “The Hole in the Hill" is a childrens story’ background New Zealand: “The Good Looking Women , fully adult based on the usual lower-middle reaches of Ruth’s Sydney suburbia.

|7*OR her children’s story, the -T author has capitalised on her own early childhood in New Zealand and her later, long residence in Sydney. She whisks Brownie (aged 14) and Dunk (aged 12) across the Tasman by plane so that their father can sell an old farm that he has inherited, and sets them to finding out the essential differences between the arid brownness of one land and the green mistiness of the other.

Before long they have tumbled into a cave and a baffling lot of adventures and mysteries. The pub lishers have done a neat job of presentation and most pre-teenagers will love it.

Since Ruth Park produced her prize-winning novel, Harp in the South, just after the war no one has disputed her claim to being a creator of characters. Her good-looking women (four sisters a nun, an escapee from marriage, the mother

of eight children, and an o\ protected, after-thought) are ct acteristically well-drawn. They co be said to be typical Sydneysi(| except that they could equally J be typical New Yorkers, because Ruth Park’s books suffer from a thing they suffer from the fact 1 Ruth, like Elva, her mother of eij is a Good Catholic Woman. I Graham Greene, she lets her relig show in her work.

There is nothing wrong with! except that it perpetuates the not that while (a) life is tough; (b)l for a Catholic is tougher.

If it weren’t for the Catholic, of this novel there would be no p< to it, as the whole thing pivots the fact that Geraldine, the young over-protected daughter of the 1 good-looking daughters of Rosa!

Wally Pond, began to see Vision Our Lady, Herself. No Presbytel or Congregationalist is likely ever

;en any sort of Vision—or to een believed if she did. is, nonetheless, an excellent >f a close-knit family and its iry attachments whose diverse ers rub against each other and ; not only bonds of love but that sometimes develop into rations.

Hole In The Hill And The

LOOKING WOMEN. Published rely by Ure Smith, at 18/-; and nd Robertson, at 21/6.)

ralia's

I Heritage

coy reluctance of some pub icrs to “give”, leaves Wild one of the “Australian Out juides” sitting alone like an because no one has thought the list of the other “Guides” re in the book. ;ver, if this is meant as a of something more to come, uite good. It is written by Morris, BA (no other details I), and illustrated (colour ick and white) by Margaret author has made things easier lateur naturalists and bush by indexing the flowers by mmon names and giving their il names secondary considera d by dividing them into groups ig to colour—white and cream pink flowers, yellow flowers, as Australian animals are i pieces, so are Australian fers, many of them existing 5 else on earth except in d form. And, despite its y arid nature, the island it is rich in the variety of its g plants and shrubs, ugh some wildflowers—such Australian brown boronia NSW Christmas-bush—thrive Ted damp places, most native ans grow in the poorest, soil with the minimum of ;. Through millions of years ye developed complicated and e root systems that make xistence possible; moreover msplant very badly and do etted, domesticated surround oming of European man with sion for taming the wilder earing the land for farming rting bush-fires; and no less passion of the wandering motorist for tearing up wild by their roots, has reduced i where they grow to all but g point in some places.

FLOWERS. Angus and Robertson /-•)