AUSTRALIANS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 225, 23 September 1933, Page 10 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIANS.

DONALD MACDONALD'S ESSAYS

' NATURE AND MEN.

BOER WAR RECALLED,

(By A.E.M.)

There must bo many readers of the "Auckland Star" who recall the lectures of Donald Macdonald on the first year, or thereabouts, of the Boer War. He was an Australian correspondent who had been through Lady smith, and bore upon him still the marks of that ordeal. lie was fresh from tlio front of a war that was then a great war, and in vivid, (lowing language, and with humour, he described the opening fighting in Natal and tho long-drawn-out siege with its ardours and endurance.

JIo was a new name to us, but by then he must have established a reputation in Australia. After his war experience he became famous. For the next thirty years he was a busy journalist and author, and he died in 1032, working from a sick-bed to the very end. From his bed he observed his beloved birds and wrote of them. He was a member of the .staff of the Melbourne "Argus" for fifty-ontj years. His daughter has made a selection of his essays from tho tiles of tho "Argus," and these have been published under the attractive title of "Tho Brooks of Morning."* It is an appropriate memorial to a very gifted Australian, a man of tine character and quite unusual literary gifts. > A Nature Lover. Donald Macdonald was a great lover of the out of doors. He had a keenly observant eye and an easy style. Most of the Nature essays in the volume are about Australian subjects, but these have an interest for the New Zealander. He touches England in a delightful article on hearing tho nightingale in London and on the beauty of English hedgerows. Ho writes of dogs and dahlias, snakes and fish,- the lyre-bird and buslimen's beliefs. We are given the mortality from snake-bites—sur-prisingly low—and aro told that the introduction of the fox is threatening the existence of the beautiful lyre-bird. We get a glimpse of "Chinese" Morrison, famous afterwards as "The Times" correspondent and adviser to the Chinese Government—walking across Australia. And among the humour there is the story of the young Sydney-sider who fluked his way into a Bushmen's Contingent for South Africa and there made a reputation in the army for the cooking of extraordinary good damper. The secret was not revealed until years afterwards, when ho and Macdonald sat watching Jlobbs bat in Sydney. Early in the trek he had come upon a Dutch store empty save for a stock of Kno's fruit salt. He commandeered tho lot, and used pinches of the salt for his damper.

Lovers of Australian poetry of the "Fair Girls and Stray Horses" type will particularly appreciate the chapter on cattle droving. The description of droving is as striking in prose as "Ban jo" Paterson's is in verse. Jt was in a drovers' camp that Macdonald met Will Ogilvio and was presented with a copy of "Fair Girls and Stray Horses." "J

owned that volume only for about three hours. I should have known better than to leave poetry loose about a eat tic camp. The cattle-men had two ambi-tions—-to write and to ride—and the book of the words has justified them; so they went their way singing, swinging from grip to balance of the stock saddles." Isn't 'that the authentic outback Australia? Battle Pictures. Tho book closes with two chapters that place Donald Macdonald among the great war correspondents in power of description. Ho tells us how ho caught sight of the Boer wagons trekking away from tho besiegers' lines, and how the relief columns rodo in, and how natives cried with joy, and how everybody surged round tho general, Sir George White, and how ho said: "Thank God we kept the flag flying!" and how a Kafiir woman kept murmuring "The English can conquer everything but death." lie tells us how the Devons charged through tho rain on Wagon Hill, a splendid picco of proso worthy to bo put by the sido of New bolt's poem. The men lie under cover waiting for tho final charge, with tlio bullets whistling overhead. "Sow, then, Devons, get ready!" calls the colonel. They riso and charge, and in tho hail of bullets falter. It is the greatest moment of tho colonel's life.

"Steady, Devons, steady! ho cries, and then with a surging rush the regiment goes on to victory. Conditions repeated many, many times somo years later, but how this scene of tho smaller war lives!

This is a book welcome for its spirit and its art. Donald Macdonald is a man worth knowing.

•"The Brooks- of Morning," a Nature ami reflective essa.v, : by Donald Macdonald, selected by his daughter, with a foreword by Edward S.- Cunningham. (Augus and Robertson).