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Australia As A

Writer Sees It

Australian writers are prob ably still at their best when

writing atmospheric pieces

about their own country and Frank Dolby Davison's stories are classics in this context.

HE was a well-known short story writer of the 1930’5, mostly in the old Bulletin, and some of the best of his work has now been put together in a collec tion called The Road to Yester day. The selection is by the author who says that these are the stories he wishes to be remembered by.

The pieces are not entirely auto biographical although they follow closely Davison’s experiences in the Australian outback and else where. With the Wells of Beer sheba, called a “prose epic” of the Australian Light Horse in Palestine during the 1914-18 war, the stories provide an excellent background for the Australian mystique, as it existed until, say, 1946.

The collection takes its title from the last story in the volume —a story set in the berry-belt of the Plenty Ranges near Mel

bourne. Today they grow good potatoes there in the red soil, but before World War I it was still a forested area which had been little more than scratched by the efforts of settlers who had been allowed to take up blocks “on selection”.

The author describes through the eyes of an Australian youngster whom they employed, for little more than his keep, as the farm “useful”, the efforts of a Kentish farmer and his family to tame the Australian bush.

As he chipped the weeds from raspberry canes, sprayed apple trees or helped whittle cleared land from the forest, the sensitive lad suffers through Sims, the man of Kent, all the successive opti misms, disappointments and frus trations of trying to wring a living from the reluctant earth of a Vic

torian hilltop.-

JT.

(The Road To Yesterday.

Published by Angus and Robertson Ltd. 27/6.)