TALKING “STRINE”

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31362, 6 May 1967, Page 4

TALKING “STRINE”

Profile of Australia. By Craig McGregor. Hodder and Stoughton. 373 pp. (With appendix and index.)

How many of us are capable of seeing ourselves as others see us? We in the Antipodes are not renowned for it, but Australian-born Craig McGregor has achieved such a self-assessment in this book. Mr McGregor has written an objective treatise on his country, that was three years in the making, has the statistical fascination of a year book, with the intense readability of a good historical record. The whole is held together with shrewd expositions on cause and effect—why a sufficiently-drunk “Aussie” party-goer will quote the poet Banjo Paterson, the bearing of homosexuality on the suppressed violence of the Australian male image, the reasons for the racialist reality behind the White Australia policy. The style is crisp and definite, the 14 chapter-headings alone challenge and invite our interest—“ Patterns of Power,” “The Beach Generation,” “Politics,” “The Great Australian Myths.” The publishers state, “Not everyone will agree with his opinions and assessments; but he has written a book which no thinking man can ignore." Australia, the many-splen-doured continent, in size as big as India and Pakistan together, supports around the semi-fertile fringe of its dead heart, only a surprising 11 million people, three-quarters of whom live in the towns and cities. It is these people that Mr McGregor is concerned with. This is primarily a sociological and ethnological study and the bush, the beach and the city are backgrounds for these people —for the Bondi “surfie,” the Greek restauranteur, the Queensland boundary-rider, the Melbourne housewife, the

wandering aborigine, the King’s Cross stripper, the Canberra politician. The diversity of its people, its size, and the strong State as opposed to national feeling, make Australia more a microcosm than a country. In his preface the author calls his country “complex, inconsistent, contradictory." Mr McGregor affirms the opinion of many observers, that Australia today bears many similarities to America (and after the pending influx of holidaying United States servicemen from Vietnam this similarity will doubtless be increased). This, he says, is “a society in transition.” Just as America did a century ago, so Australia today is putting her pioneering origins behind her, and with a growing prestige in the modern world, a burgeoning sophistication, is taking her place as a world power. This is a country “with a future as bright as that of any country in the world today.” Mr McGregor’s writing is greatly enhanced by the Ronald Searle-type sketches. In one, a rugged digger, weighed down with medals, a tennis-racket and an axe, stands under a blazing sun, muttering, “She’ll do mate cobber.” Grouped behind him in heraldic splendour are bottles of beer, the wife, and a portrait of that archetypal Australian Ned Kelly, which bears the motto, “Underdogs for ever.” It is all “dinkum Aussie.” Craig McGregor is really talking “Strine."

It’s wonderful how these scientific chaps can express the most profound truths simply. Or as the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority’s annual report so memorably puts it: “The situation is essentially that of plasma fluid escaping from a leaky magnetic bottle. The smaller the escape apertures the better the containment”