AUSTRALIANS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27149, 19 September 1953, Page 3

AUSTRALIANS

With The Sun On My Back. By John K. Ewers. Angus and Robertson. 244 pp. Australia. Her Story. By Kylie Tennant. Macmillan and Company Ltd. 296 pp. Caddie. A Sydney Barmaid. An autobiography written by herself. With an Introduction by Dymphna Cusack. Constable. 274 pp.

“With the Sun on my Back” was awarded a prize of £5OO in the prose (non-fiction) section of the Commonwealth Jubilee Literary competitions last year. It is an intelligent and detailed record of four years’ research and exploration by the author in the half of Australia which lies, bare and unknown, north of the tropic of Capricorn. Mr Ewers’s wanderings began because of his curiosity to see aboriginal corroborees, and were continued in a series of other trips with limited objectives. From these trips a picture formed in the author’s mind of a vast half-continent, neglected,, underdeveloped and forgotten by those who live “smug and complacent” in the south. Mr Ewers advocates a single administration for ‘he whole of the north, with freedom to act, and a ready access to the finance of the south. “The north of Australia is a single unit—climatically, industrially and sociologically,” he says. “The Kimberleys cannot be satisfactorily administered from Perth, the Territory from Canberra, the gulf country of Queensland from Brisbane. In those centres there is neither understanding of the peculiar difficulties involved, nor any appreciation of the urgent need of solution.” The first task of a single administrate • j body for the whole of the north would be to break up large estates and to establish government-sponsored semi-co-opera-tive agricultural undertakings, the author claims. “Second,” he says, “there is an urgent need for the provision of water conservation projects in favoured areas. In a country where the annual rainfall is received in four months of the year little development can be expected until this water is distributed over the remaining eight months. Nor can closer settlement be expected while roads are impassable during the wet. Once these factors have been faced the potential of the north expands beyond all present expectations,” Mr Ewers says. There are nearly 50 fine illustrations. Kylie Tennant’s book is just as interesting. It does not purport to be a book with a mission, but is as informative as Mr Ewers’s in another sphere, and very well written. It is more than just another history book. Miss Tennant’s pen sketches of men who made Australia—Arthur Phillip, Lachlan Macquarie. William Charles Wentworth, Sir George Gipps, Alfred Deakin, Edmund Barton and William Morris Hughes—are really quite remarkable for what she has managed to convey in so short a space, and her descriptive background passages dealing with such things as the convict settlements, whaling, gold mining, and coaching are written in a style that is typical of the best in modern journalism. When the two Australian writers Dymphna Cusack and Florence James engaged a new “help” for their country cottage, she turned out. to be a treasure in more ways than one. A life-story as good as a novel gradually emerged over cups of tea in the intervals of Caddie’s washing and scrubbing. To the credit of the two writers, they refrained from using Caddie as copy, but persuaded her to write the story of her own life as a Sydney barmaid. It is pure chance, declares Dymphna Cusack in her introduction, that Caddie’s autobiography should be published so soon after the sitting of the Royal Commission on Liquor in New South Wales “which has exposed the biggest post-war scandal in Australia.” Caddie’s story is not written with the express desire to expose or condemn conditions in the liquor trade. It is a straightforward and simple account of her perso'nal experience, but nonetheless a valuable social document revealing the highly uncivilised drinking conditions in Australia and the rackets in the trade that have brought these conditions about. Caddie is a fundamentally decent and hard-work-ing woman who, with stubborn determination, supported her two children through the depression by her work as a barmaid. She learned all the dirty tricks of the trade and finally won security for herself and her family through her activities as an “S.P. bookie”; she relates it all without either shame or boasting and with a surprising literary skill, perhaps partly learned from her two experienced author-patrons.