A Helpful Compilation For

The Month's New Reading

A Helpful Compilation For South Pacific Planners

Another book by C. Hartley Grattan is an authoritatively written historical survey of The Southwest Pacific Since 1900.

Coming now, just when most of the countries of the Southwest Pacific are in the throes of far-reaching political change, and read in conjunction with the same historian’s The Southwest Pacific to 1900, this new book could be of great help to scores of top administrators and politicians. The latter are trying to find answers to South Pacific problems which, literally every day, increase in number and complexity.

T Hartley Grattan’s new book - should happen to lack value as guide to our harried statesmen, could be useful as a weapon of efence: one blow from its 800 ages of heavy paper could fell and ill any pesky commentator who emands that the bureaucrats come p with some really practicable plan )r the future of the South Pacific erritories.

Hartley Grattan, again, has done d enormous job of research. Some f it is indicated in the 46 closely rinted pages of “Suggested Read igs”, at the end of the book, 'herein is listed, it would seem, very scrap of known printed matter earing on the history of the South acific Islands.

More than a score of industrious riters have produced books on the

history and geography of the Pacific Islands in the last decade and, presumably, more such delvers into records will produce books in the next decade. The work of all such researchers will be simplified by Mr.

Grattan’s bibliography; here are all the Pacific Islands references, worthy and unworthy.

The new book is in four impressive sections Australia; New Zealand; the Islands; and Antarctica. The history of the Islands is surveyed and summarised very competently in 150 pages, by a man who has a clear understanding of the com mercial and political implications of hundreds of seemingly unconnected events. An index has been pre pared, painstakingly, for the help of the harassed man in Canberra, or London, or Paris or Washington who might want to use this record in seeking more data on some of the international problems now crowding in on the South-west Pacific.

The summary of historical events in relation to Antarctica should be especially valuable.

This has not been done, in this way, previously, and something of the kind now is needed by the nations which are crowding into that ice girt wilderness. It has just been announced, for instance, that Antarctica is likely to become a popular tourist resort!—RWß.

(The Southwest Pacific Since

1900. Published by the University of Michigan. Our copy from Ure Smith Pty., Sydney. 80/-.)