Africa’s Colour And Form

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30965, 22 January 1966, Page 4

Africa’s Colour And Form

One Traveller’s Africa. By Cynthia Nolan. Methuen. 254 pp. Illustrated.

Cynthia Nolan is already well known through her excellent earlier work, “Outback,” the record of a journey into the interior of Australia. "One Traveller’s Africa” is a similar record of a journey by this careful and highly observant diarist. Accompanying her husband, the painter Sydney Nolan, the author travelled from the Serengeti game reserve down to Rhodesia, on to Zanzibar and through Kenya and Uganda to Ethiopia, the purpose of the journey to gather material for a series of paintings by her husband. That Mrs Nolan might be considered the greater artist is a concept supported, in the reviewer’s opinion, by the word imagery with which she has recorded the same raw material that, reputedly, inspired the paintings of Sydney Nolan, some twelve of which, in full colour, illustrate the book.

Cynthia Nolan has a gifted eye for colour and form and

her delight in the beauty of the African wildlife, and equally the beauty of the everchanging African landscape, sometimes soft and green, sometimes stark and forbidding, stands out from the printed page in what really are “word pictures.” Through her writing we not only see Africa through an artist’s eye, we also very nearly smell it. Perhaps the most memorable part of the book is the section devoted to Ethiopia, memorable particularly in that this is a part of Africa about which one hears little. Wild and yet picturesque, this ancient centre of African civilisation obviously made a great impression on the Nolan*. Even the profound utterances of Sydney Nolan, which annoyingly break the flow of colour and deeply felt experience, seem less irritating here than elsewhere in the book. “One Traveller’s Africa” is certainly a book well worth reading. Others may have seen Africa as Cynthia Nolan has seen it but none has documented the experience as originally or as clearly.