WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

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

WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

Australia: World of Difference. By John Bechervaise. Rigby. 263 pp.

The average New Zealand tourist, asked for his impressions of Australia, generally starts talking about Sydney. In this book the cities are almost totally ignored; the works of man and the surging growth that characterises Australia for so many people do not concern Mr Bechervaise. Cities are to be found anywhere, and Australian culture, although It is not without achievements, does not have anything to compare with the old civilisations of the Northern hemisphere. Mr Bed rvaise remarks that for him the lure of Europe

'is strong, but Australia is impossible to leave. The reason is that in its landforms, its animal life and its vegetation Australia is unique. It is a world of its own, with a beauty and a fascination that no city can match. New Zealand is itself noted for its natural landscapes, but the appeal is of a different kind. There are few places In Australia to which a tourist is taken in the way that he is taken to Rotorua or Mount Cook; Australia is a spirit to be experienced, rather than a collection of sights. It grows in the imagination, and lingers in the memory; it is not a name to be ticked off In the course of a world tour. When foreigners ask Mr Bechervaise what thing first comes to mind when he thinks about his country be finds it difficult to answer. Usually, he says it is the smells and the sounds, not, as he was probably expected to reply, the places. He remembers “lucerne pods crackling in the sun, the carolling of magpies, the quality of golden sunshine falling and re-radiated from a granite headland above slow breakers. . . . Like other expatriate Australians, I burnt gumleaves, and recalled the extraordinary freedom of the scented bush; of the hot, wide beaches. . . .” None of these things are, by themselves, remarkable, but together they evoke rich memories of a continent of remote and brooding beauty, whose eerie atmosphere of timelessness seizes the imagination. Early European visitors were almost unanimous in thei distaste ifor the inhospitable land-mass. William Dampier, the first ng man to visit Australia, wrote in 1688: The Land is ef a

dry sandy soil, destitute of Water. ... We saw no Trees that bore Fruit or Berries. We saw no sort of Animal, nor any Track of Beast, but one.” Neither was the native population Impressive. The Aborigines were “the miserabiist People in the World,” who, “settling aside their Humane shape . . .

differ but little from Brutea ...” These judgments were to remain standard for years. The British settlers of the nineteenth century were determined to make this barren land as. much like home as possible. They planted oaks and tried to ignore gums; their artists rendered the scene with the meticulous romanticism of the Royal Academy. Love of the country for its pwn virtues is comparatively recent, and, as Mr Bechervaise remarks, is well exemplified in the vigorous brushwork and grotesque shapes of a now distinctly Australian art.

There are some excellent photographs in this book, but it is by no means the normal travelogue. Australia’s size and emptiness and its many strange phenomena have been frequently noted, but seldom explored so thoroughly outside a specialist treatise. Mr Bechervaise not only knows his country—nearly every chapter is reinforced with personal memories of camping trips—but manages to convey his love for it, and to describe the spirit of the land to the reader. It should be emphasized that this is not Intended to be a guide book: its concern is only with that part that makes the subcontinent “a world ef difference." This labour ef love has been splendidly achieved. “The strange, as it were, invisible beauty" that excited D. H. Lawrence is here made dearly explicit