BULLOCK-WAGON DAYS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23330, 23 October 1937, Page 4

BULLOCK-WAGON DAYS

LIFE AND TOM COLLINS "Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts From the Diary of Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy)." Edited by Vance Palmer. London: Cape, 17s. Few books can claim to provide more genuine entertainment than "Such is Life," which comprises a series of extracts from the diary of Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy). These memoirs were first published in Sydney some 30 years ago, and they present a cross-section of ■ life in the backcountry of Australia as far back as 1883. But for all the freshness and vigour there is to be found in the narrating of these highly-entertaining escapades the book might have been written yesterday. . Indeed, it was only because it was thought in certain quarters that these memoirs were too good to be lost sight of that they have been republished by Jonathan Cape. As Collins himself remarks, yeans of "swagging" in the Australian backblocks make either a fool or a philosopher of a man, and if the book does nothing else, it proves that Collins was no fool. For an obscure Government assistant sub-inspector, whose sole occupation seems to have been a leisurely round of calls at the various big runs in the Riverina country, during which he found time to consort with vagrants, swagmen, boundary riders, and other romantic personalities too numerous to mention, the writer displays a remarkable amount of learning and a true knowledge of his fellow men. In his introductory paragraphs he enumerates three distinct attributes that enabled him to produce the book, which is conjured from a few brief, unintelligible phrases from the pages of a diary religiously kept up for 23 years. He states that he is the possessor of " an intuition which reads men like signboards; a limpid veracity; and a memory which habitually stereotypes all impressions excent those relating to personal injuries." The system he adopted in writing these memoirs is to deal with the events of the ninth day of seven consecutive months, and the experiences he recounts, the stories he retells, and, above all, the remarkable characters that he introduces, all go to make this book a classic in its own sphere. It presents the true Australia, the writer having a proper disgust for such erroneous impressions as conveyed by novelists like Henry Kingsley, whose book, " Geoffrey Hamlyn," he describes as "exceedingly trashy and misleadThe book is unconventional in many ways. The author's vocabulary is sur prisingly wide, and he puts many words to a quaint use. He has a novel style of phraseology, and throughout the work there reigns an all-pervading sense of humour. After the first chapter the reader becomes accustomed to the writer's style, and the writer,

warming to his task, loses his first slight tendency towards verbosity and self-consciousness. By the time the last chapter is reached Tom Collins has shown that he can tell a story as well as any man. , The book is somehow typically Australian. It provokes an intolerance of all stereotyped forms of writing, and its untainted freshness belongs to the literature of a new nation. D. S. F. Youth at the Desk Mr Beverley Nichols, who caused a stir by writing his life story at 25, is made to look like an ancient by the English publishers' present predilection for youthful autobiographies. In the new season Dent is publishing "Now I'm Sixteen," by Douglas Pope, who tries to show that "these few years can be as interesting and thrilling as any number spent in fighting . or whatever it is that those older than myself do," and the Fortune Press is issuing an anonymous account of a boy's first year at a public school, "Fourteen: A Diary of the 'Teens. Governor Phillip

In January, 1938, Australia celebrates the 150th anniversary of the founding of Sydney by Captain Arthur Phillip and his little band of convicts, and to mark the occasion the two distinguished Australian women collaborators who write under the name M Barnard Eldershaw turn for the moment from fiction to history, and present a chronicle of Phillip's fiveyear governorship of the infant colony. Their book. " Governor Phillip of Australia," comes from Harrap.

Psycho-analysis The Hogarth Press announce a series of " Psycho-analytical Epitomes," edited by John Rickman, M.D., to be published in co-operation with the Institute of Psycho-analysis. At present the expert and student has as material for study in the English language large and necessarily expensive works, and there is believed to be a place for shorter and cheaper volumes. Also announced is "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence," by Anna Freud, the daughter of Professor Sigmund Freud, who is stated to show expository powers which remind the reader of her famous father.