THE UNEXPECTED

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20956, 9 September 1933, Page 15

THE UNEXPECTED

♦ The Unexpected. By Frank PermSmith. Jonathan Cape. 312 pp. (7/6 net.) "What a wearisome account this is becoming, of struggle, small success, and then overwhelming defeat! Decade after decade, like the cycle of a machine-hammer." Mr Penn-Smith has had as many vicissitudes as St. Paul and has lived equally undaunted. This book has two great advantages over the majority of such records. Naturally an artist with both brush and pen, he was prevented by poverty from developing either talent till in old age he has had leisure to set down his memories and thoughts. lie writes with a sureness and strengtn that never falter and give an unbroken flow to his narrative. He has the observing eye of the artist, and sees the essential beauty of the African iungle or a Tasmaman flower. His second superiority as a writer of adventures is that unconsciously he has written the autobiography of a man who creates civilisation in dark places. At Lugeni, in Central Africa, he had to tame and retain the goodwill of a cannibalistic tribe of hillmer.. He became their worshipped overlord, and thereby did service to the British cause during the war, as lib supplies of tin, won by the co-opera-tion of his people, were unexpectedly copious and regular. But this was only a short phase of his life. Had he not ruined the texture of his fingers when limeburning in Tasmania, he would have become a wool-classer; as a young man he carelessly waved aside the opportunity of meeting Carlyle; he knew the dreariness and terror of the waste places of Australia; he witnessed the almost unknown brutality and slaughter of the Red Strike in South Africa in 1922.

Pointing to where the main road cut across, uphill, he [a respectable grey-bearded Dutchman 1 said gleefully, "I've potted three policemen, one after the other, as they came out past that corner."

At whatever he undertook he worked hard. Leaving Central Africa after the war with heart strained and body helpless through dropsy, from mining engineer he turned farmer, but when at last he saw a competence within his reach and no longer had to support ( his parents, the strike ruined him. Such reverses were the more intolerable for one whose youth had been set in luxury and refinement. From first to last Mr Penn-Smith makes no complaint; rather has he found in his struggle "Reassurance . . .

that which every man must pass through before finding Reconciliation with the Powers Unseen." The book is most impressive in its restraint. At one moment he may speak of the terrifying utterances of a lion as "booming:? through a drainpipe." At anothor he describes the still, rainless tracts of Australia by confessing that ho mistook buggy-tracks made six months before for fresh ones. Tins restraint marks his attitude to men. His parents were plainly incapable of grappling with colonial lifo in Tasmania, even as late as the eighties; but he gives no hint of regret at his vain exertions on their behalf. Nor does he reproach the business men who used him and did not treat him justly. Unconscious also in his forbearance towards the difficulties of jungle and desert, he found happiness in doing, not achieving, and preserved that calm simplicity and sensibility which have enabled him to record the' life not only of a man of action, but of a man who could not be blind to goodness and beauty.

THE LYREBIRD The Lore ot the Lyrebird. By Ambrose Pratt. The Endeavour Press, Sydney. (5/- net.) The Magric Voice. By K. T. Littlejohns. Ramsay Publishing Pty., Ltd. From Robertson and Mullens, Ltd., Melbourne. (5/- net.) The Australian lyrebird (Menura novae-hollandiac), though a natural wonder in a land of unique wild life, hides itself away in bush fastnesses and so far has managed successfully to avoid universal recognition. A New Zealand child, for instance, knows about the kangaroo, the duck-billed platypus, and the kookaburra, but would probably look blank if asked to describe the lyrebird, which, if anything, is the most extraordinary Australian of all These two booklets should, therefore, play missionary parts. They are both by competent naturalists who love their subject. They describe the lyrebird as it lives in the rain-soaked bush along the eastern and south-eastern Australian coasts, depicting its weird love-making and attitudinising and describing all its characteristics, the beautiful tail, which is fluttered in a remarkable aura while the bird sings and dances in unison, and its unequalled power of mimicry. The photographs, also, are as good as their subject demands.