Australian Paperbacks

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31500, 14 October 1967, Page 4

Australian Paperbacks

The unique flavour of some of the best Australian writing continues to be made available to a wider audience through the ambitious paperback publishing ventures, Sim Books, of Melbourne, whose books are issued by A. H. and A. W. Reed in New Zealand. Four classics of the outback are included among their recent titles—“My Crowded Solitude” by Jack McLaren describes a planter's life among Aborigines on the York Peninsula 50 years ago; “Big Red,” by Henry Lamond, looks at the life of the kangaroo; lan Mudie’s “Riverboats" offers an entertaining account of transportation in a bygone era; and, the best of all, there is “Journey Among Men” written and illustrated by Jock Marshall and Russell Drysdale.

“Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid,’’ an. anonymous autobiography, is also among the publications. Its ruthless honest and moving simplicity have made it deservedly famous as a tale symbolic of the struggle faced by many mothers attempting to provide for their families in the grim days of the Great Depression. Judah Waten’s “Alien Son" is another docu-mentary-type study, in tills case of a European family’s ittlement in Australia. David Martin has been described as the outstanding acquisition of Australian letters from postwar immigration. ‘TheY Wife" Is Mr Martin’s moving story of a beautiful young Cypriot who has been found a husband, sight-unseen, in Australia. “The Permit” by Donald Horne is a light-hearted satire about political chicanery and tiie petty tyrannies of bureaucracy. When a. schoolteacher’s ipiic; for a permit 37A is refused and his subsequent 42 letters to the Department of Permits ignored, he takes his grievances to a local newspaper and overnight toda himself hopelessly ntongled in parliamentary faction and intrigue. The novel has its comic noments, though the farcdci antics of Mr Horne’s characters are overdone. In “An Ornament of Grace," by Jan mith, a young joun list called Marina Hamilton tries to escape m the aimless routine ef her life by having an affair with a rich Jewish businessman. She is disillusioned, however, to And that his charm conceals a ruthless capacity to depersonalise his fellow human beings. To be loved and to love” is for Marina he moanIng of being alive, aadby the end of the novel She seems about to find fulfilment not in a dream-world of leisured living, but at her own back door. In contrast, to the urban sophisticate Jan Smith’s novel thebest of Judith Wright’s stories to “The Nature of Love** drew their strength from the Australian rural scene. Arabbiter and his aboriginal wife, a hermit living in' the bush, a fisherman's widow; these are the people Miss Wright understands best Particularly impressive are “The Colour of Death" in which • girl’s hunger for affection is warped by her arid environment, “The Rabblter,” and “The Nature of Love,” which contrasts the dreamy, half-awakened feelings of an adolescent girl with the realities of adult paaaton.