to put their conformity

Telling Australians where to put their conformity

. Y-P ou J Irn all right!” is an indelicate Australianism which expresses the view that one’s duty is to safeguard the personal interests of No. 1, and everybody else can go to blazes. An upturned thumb, jerked ttfn OC ht aS^ nal m there he anv Hnnht^f^h sh P u , d meaning Y speaker’s . • Australian journalist lan Mofiitt, iP s ’ exam n es the principle behind the expression in an original paperback titled The U-jack Society Au^al, !v 3 S n a ,ndXt^? he baCkside ° f Australian indifference.

Australia is no lucky country, he says, but a lackey country that titters and toadies to the defunct ideals of Empire, or to great and powerful fnends such as America; a country whose politicians don’t really want to change anything but merely react piecemeal to occasional pressure and resort to short-term political bribery to damp down domestic crises; a country whose people are the world’s most suburbanised, and British—or American—or Japanese to the bootstraps! People who distrust excellence, live for conformity, and whose deep conservatism inhibits them from open public expression.

Mofiitt is not without hope for his fellow benighted Australians; he sees pale shoots of hope springing up

everywhere” (he doesn’t say what they are), yet we are still “so passive, so conventional; government exploits our fear of freedom: why must such a young race be cursed with such caution?” he cries.

Despite his strictures, there is no doubt as to where Moffitt’s heart is.

H e’s Australian, and his book is clearly from the heart, as his personal contribution to the fight against the conformity that he sees destroying the Australian soul and which might one day deliver us to our enemies.

His book will attract criticism for an overstatement of the facts that support his arguments and for omis sion of some hopeful signs of grow ing Australian independent thought.

But he cannot be criticised for the accuracy and the timeliness with which he selects his theme: that Aus tralians are not the sun-bronzed individualists they consider them selves to be, but suburban medio critics who have lost the habit and possibly the need to think for them selves, and what do they intend to do about it?

MofTitt’s attack will help get some people moving. But it surely will not have the impact his important message deserves. Moffit is no Anthony Sampson with an Anatomy of Australia. There is no depth of research of the kind we got in the

Anatomy of Britain. While certainly Moffitt’s book is a personal view of his country, he still has insufficient straw for his bricks. He builds his book mainly from honest indignation cemented by his considerable literary powers of persuasion.

Perhaps though this is merely the first assault in Moffitt’s war. Now that he’s blooded with his first book after a career of writing newspaper articles, he’ll perhaps sharpen his lance to a finer point for a more carefully planned attack. Stuart Jnder. (THE U-JACK SOCIETY: An Experience of Being Australian. By lan Moffitt. Ure Smith, Sydney. $1.50).

The Australian Book Of

Health Food Cookery, By

Joan Haddon, published by Pan at $1.95 is an answer to the criticism that a vegetarian diet is monotonous.

It includes 240 meatless recipes for every course at table, with additional menus for weight-watchers. The 140 pages include colour photographs.