Flight Plan Png An

Scape From Dullness?

One wonders what sort of people ly $5.50 for books like Eileen eenson’s Flight Plan PNG, pub died by Rigby, and one wonders so what sort of people write such ographical books.

Writing is a skill, not necessarily idowed simultaneously with the :currence of some event in a per n’s life. Writing autobiographical aterial is highly-refined skill and dy a very few have ever succeeded it: the rest have merely achieved e listing of events which have curred to colourless non-humanised irticipators in the events, Eileen Steenson is a woman. She akes this clear by saying so. But her than this—and that she drove i aircraft in Papua New Guinea /hich the title does not make clear everyone), used a sewing machine id has permission to publish in her >ok a photograph of Lord and Lady asey—nothing of her as an indi- Jual emerges from her book. Of urse not: she is an aircraft captain, »t a writer. One wonders, in fact, she had not been a woman how uch interest Rigby’s would have own in her book?

Captain Steenson arrived in Papua sw Guinea too late to experience e really exciting adventures of iation, the early days of which )bby Gibbes, to whom she gives ief passing mention in her book— d spelling his name incorrectly thout the final “e”—and Johnnie )se (to name only two) might have itten. Even passengers who hitch ed, and I mean this literally, by • in Papua New Guinea before the ys of the Department of Civil dation might have much to con bute.

I remember, only too vividly, the ung pilot who, running his own line with one aircraft, killed him f in taking off from the Goroka ip, when that strip was situated a higher plateau than it is now, d thereby caused dinner to be de 'ed while the District Officer (as was then called) arranged to have container made for the body, hen it was made, it was placed th the body in it in the dining >m while we ate our dinner with merous toasts to the occupant.

We all knew and liked him and t it would have been inhospitable have left him outside while we re eating.

And the number of aircraft which came airborne only by flipping

themselves over the edge of the air strip at Oglbeng. Twenty years and more, all of this, before our authoress had her big adventure!

I suppose Captain Steenson’s book is of interest to those who have no adventure in their lives (one reason, 1 suppose, why books are published) but it’s a pretty dull list of events to those who have. 1 cannot help feeling that such books are written by people, sur rounded by a dull family, who wish to show that they have escaped from this dullness. Other than this use, I see no useful purpose in such books: they really do not make in teresting reading except to their authors, add little, if anything, to our store of knowledge. In this case, it is doubtful if any contribution is made to the history of aviation in Papua New Guinea, whose history is so wrapped up in aviation, and which has had so many outstandingly interesting and devoted personalities in that field from the days of the old Junkers until the present time.

Captain Steenson’s experiences in Papua New Guinea, if you count up the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of pilots who had similar, and exactly the same experiences, were not unique.

What we want, please, is not only someone who has had experience but someone who, having had them, has the literary skill to record them in

their right perspective, and in doing so, not to forget entirely the many others who have done, or are doing, the same things. The experience and the ability to record it are not one and the same thing. Publishers, it seems, are beginning to think so.

Sorry, Captain Steenson: it’s not so much your fault as the fault of the publishers.

There are thousands of bikeys every week-end who collect more vivid experiences than Captain Steen son has had, and do not regard them as worth mentioning, and 40 per cent of those are women who do not regard the experiences as anything but completely self-existent and sex less.

It is time someone pointed out to publishers that people like Miss Elliott and the Misses Bronte wrote because they were writers and had something to write about, and not because they were women.

It was nice of Lady Casey to write an introduction to the book, but I think that the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts, with whose assistance the book was published, might more usefully

occupy itself.

Peter Livingston.

(FLIGHT PLAN PNG. by Eileen Steen son. Published by Rigby Limited, 30 North Terrace, Kent Town, South Australia. $5.50, cased, illustrated.)