FROM AUSTRALIA.

Auckland Star, 2 September 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

FROM AUSTRALIA.

J Mr. J. J. Hardie, author of "Cuttle Camp," promises to be in the front rank of Australian novelists. "Lantana," his second book, has many merits. It is truo to life, and filled with accurate and colourful word painting. It draws attention to little known territory on the east coast, for some time past favoured by banana growers. Here is some of the most beautiful jungle country in the world, claimed equally by Queensland and New South Wales. It has been said that for a plot a novelist has but three arrangements, viz., a woman and two men. two men and a woman, or one of each. Mr. Hardie has chosen two women and a man, and the man is almost a Guy Livingstone of male perfections. One girl is of the night club and cocktail class, the other, true, steadfast, and good all through. The former loves the town, the latter the country, and both love the same man to the ultimate limit of emotion. The night club blonde subjects "Lanky," the man, to irresistible temptations, and he is saved from disaster only by a series of climatic and other events which alter the course of many lives. The character drawing is thorough and ably sustained, and tho reactions of each to circumstances care too definite and real to be imaginary. This story is one of the best which has come from across the Tasmnn in the last few years. The Macquario Head Press, of Sydney, publish it. .

"The Sow's Ear," by Bernard Cronin (Sydney Endeavour Press), is a tragic story of life in "out back" Tasmania. There is here a record of ignorance, cruelty, and sham religion, of hard work and mean and sordid living, and, more than all, the abnormal and distressing conditions in which women of all ages are doomed to spend a hopeless existence as slaves to the needs and crude animal passions of the roughest type of men colonial conditions produce. This is more like, the biography of a young male school teacher than an ordinary novel, and seems to have been written with the object of exposing a type of humanity for which Darwin wag once reported to havo said that he had less respect than for anthropoid apes. Mr. Cronin is (o bo congratulated upon his viperous defence nf ill-mod women nnd children niul his very powerful denunciation of tho lawless conditions.iu remote districts. J