Background To Australia

Pick Of The Paper-Backs

Maybe Australia’s Foreign Minister, Mr. Bowen, should read a modest looking Pan paper-back which has just reached the bookstalls. While in the United States early in October, Mr. Bowen set Australia, and in particular the Australian Labour Party, by the ears with an attack on the ALP, but it wasn’t that which upset most people. It was his description of Australia— “at present small and relatively insignificant” he said.

Was he right? Obviously not, according to Sydney-born Kyle Tennant, author of eight novels, a biography, a play and “Australia: Her Story”, the history of the continent capsulated into just under 300 pages.

When it was first published in 1953, it was immediately successful but, as a hard-back, it came hard on some purses. In paper-back, Kyle Tennant has added more pages to bring her very lucid history up to the 19705.

For the newly-arrived New Australian and for the descendants of the First Fleeters, as well as the in-betweens and, for that matter, the people of the Pacific Islands who should know and understand the background of their nearest and biggest neighbour, “Australia: Her Story” contains some thing of everything that has happened to and in Australia in her rise to greatness —yes “greatness” whatever Mr. Bowen thinks. It sells for $1.25.

Patrick Turnbull’s “One Bullet for the General” (Pan 80c ) is described by top thriller writer Alistair Mac Lean as “the finest war book I have ever read”. One critic, writing of this very satisfying story of war against the Japanese across the Chindwin, said: “Patrick Turnbull knows his jungle from the leeches to the smell of the enemy”. But he doesn’t know his history. He has the Americans transferring their successful aerial ambush of Admiral Yamamoto over Bougainville to a destroyer between Guam and Mindanao.

Other Pan Books just out include Virginia McKenna’s excellent story of some of the animals she met in her film career, “Some of My Friends Have Tails” (80c); “The Broad Highway” (95c), Regency romance by Jeffrey Farnol; and a spy thriller “The Sad Variety” (80c) from the prolific pen of Nicholas Blake.