Australiana Reprinted

With the renewed interest in Aus tralian in recent years it is not surprising that Australian publishers are now turning to reprints of early works. The latest reprints are Miles Franklin’s ,( My Brilliant Career”, and “Up the Country”, and Barbara Baynton’s “Bush Studies”.

U p the Country was originally published under the name of Brent of Bin Bin in 1928, when it was acclaimed as a literary monu ment to the squattocracy.

Miss Franklin was born near Tumut, NSW, in 1879 and died in Sydney in 1954. My Brilliant Career, published in 1901, was the first of her novels. She banned its re publication for 10 years after her death—not because of any demerits in the book (although certainly her

later books showed more depth) but because the novel was taken as autobiography. Her true auto biography was not published until after her death, but My Brilliant Career certainly was based on some of her experiences.

Henry Lawson’s preface to My Brilliant Career, written in England in 1901 is still as apt a description of the work: “One dull afternoon I started to read the manuscript. I hadn’t read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once—that the story had been written by a girl.

And as I went on I saw that the work was Australian—born of the bush. I don’t know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book —I leave that to girl readers to iudge; but the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly,

painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned the book is true to Australia—the truest I ever read.

“She is just a little bush girl barely twenty-one yet, and haj scarcely ever been out of the bush in her life. She has lived her book and I feel proud of it for the sake of the country I came from, where people toil and bake and suffer and are kind; where every second sun burnt bushman is a sympathetic humourist, with the sadness of the bush deep in his eyes and a brave grin for the worst of times, and where every third bushman is a poet, with a big heart that keeps his pockets empty.”

Up the Country was the first in the Brent of Bin Bin series of squatter novels—the literature which was the final realisation of her early promise.

Bush Studies was first published in 1902—and was written by Barbara Baynton while in her thirties. She died in 1929. She published only one other book, of no account, and both books were concerned ex clusively with observations of her childhood and her youth in the bush.

Born in the bush, Barbara Baynton had several husbands, plenty of money and lived most of her life in the cities, including London. Her short bush stories were the product of her early years, before she got the things she wanted. A pity she

stopped writing.-

SI.

(Up The Country, Sa3: My

Brilliant Career, Sa3; Bush

STUDIES, $A2.50. All published by Angus and Robertson.)

Reporting South-

East Asia

SINCE 1947 roving Australian journalist Denis Warner has been reporting competently, often brilliantly, the South-East Asian scene from the Australian viewpoint. The problems of Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, or New Guinea—Warner has had, in those years, something note worthy to say on all of them. The best of these pieces have now been collected together and published in book form, Reporting South-East Asia. They make a valuable hand book of background information, bringing into focus this vital area at an interesting period in its

political life.-

SI.

{Reporting South-East Asia.

Angus and Robertson Ltd. $A4.50.)