Remembers

A Poet

War-Torn

New Guinea

If you like one house to grow old in, It is probably better not to live in New Guinea New Guinea is impatient of all things durable.

So writes Eric Rolls in his book of poems, The Green Mosaic. His memories are of the war-torn New Guinea of the mid-1940s, and there is no indication that he has revisited the place since, though a remark in his preface suggests that he has kept in touch with Papua New Guinean creative writing.

The crashed Zeros have long since been carted away to war museums or swallowed up by the jungle, and today’s New Guinea is a very different place from the one Eric Rolls knew.

But some things in New Guinea are durable — the landscape itself, the birds, animals, insects and plant life, and, in spite of new life-styles, the human emotions, especially the erotic ones in which Eric Rolls takes such a lively interest.

Of these he writes evocatively.

But his insights are a white man’s in sights, and one wonders how rele vant they are in a New Guinea which now has its home-grown poets.

Nevertheless, many Australians who shared Eric Rolls’ wartime ex periences will read these poems with pleasure and perhaps with nostalgia; and our Papua New Guinea poets may well profit by studying them for their craftsmanship, even if they dis agree with, or are indifferent to,

their insights.

Percy Chatterion

(THE GREEN MOSAIC: MEMORIES OF NEW GUINEA.

By Eric C. Rolls. Published by Thomas Nelson (Australia) Ltd, 19-39 Jeffcott Street, West Melbourne 3C03, Vic. $6.95.)