Book Reviews
p. 87 · Read in the full issue
Be Black And
Be Thankful
The experiences of lan Downs as a public figure in New Guinea for more than 30 years—as patrol officer, District Commissioner, coffee planter and member of the Legislative Council and House of Assembly—would fill many books. It may surprise many therefore that his first book, The Stolen Land, published this month, is a novel, although it will surprise none who have known him that it is done with his usual competence.
More than competence. It is a good novel, which can stand up in the same company as Monsarrat’s Richer than all his Tribe, with which it has certain fundamentals in com mon.
Writing and characterisation are excellent, it has its modem sprinkling of four-letter words and passages of explicit sex. If you had never heard of New Guinea you could still read it as a straight-out story, its momentum carrying you forward to the last pages of climax. But those of us who know New Guinea and have not yet learned to read straight stories about it, but look for messages, portents and predictions, will get from it much food for thought.
Although the author makes no predictions, the messages and portents are obvious, and it is certain that he chose this method of writing about the country to which he is still psycho logically committed because it gave the widest scope for portraying his own feelings and beliefs about the place and the people.
How one interprets the message is up to the individual reader. Basically it is the story of Joseph Makati, a New Guinea Highlands orphan boy, educated in Australia, who returns to walk the tight-rope between the black man’s life and the white man’s.
Driven by ambition into politics, he is finally engulfed by them, unable to control the people he has aroused and who have elevated him to the position of a messiah.
In between times there is the
whole panorama of New Guinea life-at-the-top the Administrator’s cocktail parties, the dumb officials,
£ sr&fiStsjsis
s?s' ?” a [ e supposed to be especially funny hut who will give Temtonans a lot ot laughs.
Meantime, Joseph pursues his schizophrenic path right to the end ri; p g , c ° nnaence . * n Plgh whde Pl aces > plotting against them at the s&me time and yet, somehow, manag
ing to remain quite honest with him self.
He falls in love with an Australian girl and is rejected; is courted by university radicals, goes to New York, is not brain-washed by communists but is seduced by sundry white females anxious to prove they have no colour prejudice.
The story does not show where Joseph went wrong but rather that what he does is inevitable. Perhaps the real “message” of the novel comes from the mystery character in the story, Michael Hardie, who both started and ended Joseph’s political career.
“The first thing,” Hardie had told Joseph early in the piece, “is to re member you are black and then be thankful. You are born in an age when the twilight of the white man in this country is clear and the day of the coloured man very close . . .
You should be thankful that you are coloured because this gives you a whole wide range of opportunity and excitement. Think how dull it would be if you were white. All you would have to hope for would be some kind of rearguard obstructive action . .
I’ve read many novels about New Guinea, published and unpublished, and this is the best one yet. Although political, it’s never dull but maintains something of who-dunnit pace. And although it makes good reading just as a novel , for Territorian readers it has the added spice that it could be, sometime, and maybe, just too terrifyingly true.—JT. (THE STOLEN LAND. Jacaranda Press.)