Japan, Sydney,

with feeling

Our Nancy Phelan—and we still think of her as a Pacific writer although she confines her self to almost anything but these days—can produce books in many different moods. They can be deliriously funny or quite serious, with an occasional side excursion into subjects like yoga (Yoga over 40) or food, (Cook ing with Nina).

Recently she hit some sort of jackpot with two books, published simultaneously by two different pub lishers, on different subjects and in different moods. Pillow of Grass is about Japan; A Kingdom by the Sea about her own childhood in a Sydney bayside suburb.

Some years back Nancy Phelan collected me from my office one noon, drove me to a spot called Mrs.

Macquarie’s Chair overlooking Syd ney Cove where, out of a picnic basket, we ate hard-boiled eggs and black olives. She advised me to take up yoga as relaxation from rat-race living. I never got around to it but presumably she progressed beyond the stage where suburban matrons do yoga exercises for the good of their waist-lines, and achieved at least part of the spiritual meaning behind it.

Some sort of inner serenity would be necessary to undertake the kind of lone journeying in Japan that forms the basis of Pillow of Grass.

By local bus and train, with the minimum of luggage and less of the language, she wandered from north ern Hokkaido, to Satsuma in south ern Kyushu, staying at local inns, in temples, youth hostels, Shinto shrines and, occasionally, in the simple home of someone who had befriended her.

She had periods of retreat in temples and for a while joined the Itto-en community which is devoted to selfless service and non-possession.

She studied the tea ceremony and flower arrangement.

If a locality had slab-sided, glass skyscrapers devoted to the welfare of international tourists, she avoided them like the plague. If the Japanese said a place was no good, un interesting and that no one went there, she overcame mountains of obstacles, persistent officials and counselling friends and finally arrived, luggage in hand. Usually she found these unpublicised places

beautiful, simple and quite unspoiled.

She suffered the manifold frustra tions perpetrated by Japanese bureau cracy. Slept in strange places with the ever present odour of benjo; and on a futon on the floor; ate the food of the country and was oc casionally adopted willy-nilly by some strange Japanese character who had obviously been waiting all his life to befriend a foreigner.

Out of it all comes an interesting and entertaining book that has little in common with most travel books about Japan. It is written with style, deep pleasure at the beauty of the land and a feeling for ordinary people that owes nothing to the usual tourist-eye view.

A Kingdom by the Sea is a much more modest book; a fun book, ap

predated perhaps more keenly by a Sydneysider, born or adopted, who also grew up in the 1920’s and ’3o’s.

Not that there was anything ordinary, Sydney suburban about Nancy’s family. Her mother, Florence Mack, was one of 13 children of a Methodist parson; her father, William Creagh, came from dignified Elizabeth Bay.

The Macks were more fun than the Creaghs and included two writers, Louise and Amy Mack, who produced children’s stories. Louise was a rival to Ethel Turner but she sold her Teens outright to the original Robertson, of Angus and Robertson, for $lO while the more astute Ethel collected endless royal ties from Seven Little Australians— a sore point with all the Macks and their descendents.

Nancy, her sister and brother grew up in a house at The Spit, on Middle Harbour, at a time when the area was still “mainly bush, the setting for picnics and vigorous walks”. Houses had begun to form themselves into streets but gardens were still large and nights were undisturbed by Sydney traffic.

The children ran wild in the summer months, innocent yet know ing, accepting the line of demarca tion between what you told your parents and what you did not without any traumas about the Generation Gap.

They regarded their elders and family as a source of endless enter tainment, usually interpreted by Mother. There are glimpses of the personages of the day—Norman Lindsay, lon Idriess, the Hordens, Sydney Ure Smith, Judge Curlewis and his wife Ethel Turner and, of course, the literary aunts.

Although the blurb on one of the books says that Nancy Phelan con siders that she has no roots and that the whole world is her home, no one but a true Sydneysider could have written this amusing and nostalgic story of the youthful harbourside city.—JT. (PILLOW OF GRASS. M*rmillans. $7.00: A KINGDOM BY THE SEA. Angus and Robertson. $3.75).

Biggies in the Pacific Biggies, the schoolboy’s hero, has entered the Pacific. In another story by Captain W. E. Johns of his exciting exploits, Biggies in the South Seas, takes on a giant octopus, sharks and. of course, the enemy. Algy and Ginger help Biggies to find a lost pearl bed with plenty of fun on the way.

(Higgles In The South Seas.

Armada. Stg.3/6d).