Norfolk's history

outlined by Merval Hoare

Merval Hoare’s Rambler's Guide to Norfolk Island has now gone into its third printing and is doing nicely, thank you. and undoubtedly it will go into more editions yet, because it fills a very practical need.

Visitors to Norfolk Island buy that valuable little booklet because it supplies detailed maps and informa tion on what they should do and where they should go on Norfolk Island, and treats them en route to a fascinating background chat on Norfolk’s colourful history.

Most visitors to Norfolk, which was the second British permanent settlement in the South Pacific (hav ing been occupied in 1788), will continue to want nothing more than the Rambler's Guide. But those who want to delve more deeply into Norfolk’s past now have the oppor tunity of doing so painlessly with the help of Norfolk Island: An Outline of its History, 1774-1968, just pub lished by the University of Queens land Press. The author is again Norfolk resident, Mrs. Merval Hoare, but this work is a far more detailed account of Norfolk’s history, with sources, an extensive bibliography, index and plates. Yet it is neither large nor expensive and deserves to attract a steady readership.

This more detailed work did not grow out of the Rambler’s Guide— the Guide in fact grew out of the original MS of this longer history which Mrs. Hoare compiled follow ing several years’ research.

There is only one suggestion that could be made to the publishers when they contemplate a new edition —that is that a number of very short chapters at the end of the work, some of them less than a page in length, be combined as sections of a single chapter. The present very short chapters tend to break up the con tinuity of the MS. There is also some repetition in the text that minor

editing could remove.

SI.

(Norfolk Island; An Outline Of

ITS HISTORY, 1774-1968. Published by Queensland University Press. $3.95.)