‘BOTANY BAY'

Evening Star, Issue 23729, 9 November 1940, Page 5

‘BOTANY BAY'

Telling the romantic, adventurous story of the colonisation of New South Wales, Australia, in the swashbuckling year of 1787, ‘ Botany Bay,’ an unpublished novel by James Norman Hall, has been purchased by Paramount. One of the most-sought-after literary properties of the year, the story will be fashioned as a likely starring vehicle for Joel M'Crae and a feminine personality of top box office magnitude, it was announced by William Lo Baron, the studio’s managing director of production. A sea epic of the scope of ‘ Mutiny on the Bounty,’ the new Hall novel tells the story of a young Virginia Tory who returns to England after the American Devolution, and becomes a highwayman, lie is captured by the authorities and sentenced to the Crown’s new penal colony at Botany Bay, where ho meets a young girl who has been unjustly convicted of a petty crime. The pair fall iu love and plan an escape, but are separated and reunited only after hazardous adventures which carry them halfway round the world.

Although no details have been announced, it is understood that the novel will be serialised by a national magazine soon and brought out in book form before the end of the year.