AUSTRALIA’S LONELY PLACES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23517, 4 June 1938, Page 4

AUSTRALIA’S LONELY PLACES

THE JOURNEYS OF A BIOLOGIST

" Flying Fox and Drifting Sand.” By Francis RntclifTe. Illustrated. London: Chatto and Windus. £1 4s.

The Commonwealth of Australia presents much greater anomalies than are to be found in an almost universally fertile land like New Zealand. Between the proud cities and the outback farms, where pioneering is still progressing—and that by a progression of good years alternating with devastating setbacks —the art of contrast finds its perfect exemplar. Mr Katcliffe, a biologist who has been twice in Australia on practical scientific research into two widely-different phenomena, has succeeded in “Flying, Fox and Drifting Sand” in presenting a picture of two aspects of Australian outback life which will impress and surprise the people of the Commonwealth as much as the reader abroad. His first commission in this only partially tamed land was to investigate the life and habits of the flying fox, the giant fruit-eating bat which ranges over a 2000-mile belt north to south, from Queensland into New South Wales and Victoria. Most of his work was done in Queensland, and the reader first obtains from this book a graphic account of the-conditions of life in the tropic forest lands and jungle of the north. Then the scene shifts to South Australia, whither Mr Ratcliffe proceeded, after revisiting his native Scotland, to report to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research upon the problem of erosion and soil drift in this State. Thus we obtain a description of the great Australian /‘kingdom of the dust.” as he calls it, through which he travelled thousands of miles over stony desert lands, through floods and sand. The most vivid and impressive feature of this survey is the picture that emerges of the Australian settlers themselves, who equipped the visitoi with “an unshakeable belief in the fundamental decency and kindness of the human race.” The men and women of the arid pastoral districts, living in primitive conditions under a merciless sun, as often as not with their cattle dying, their farmlands submerged by sand, endure more than most settlers had to experience, even in early colonisation days in New Zealand, and Mr Ratcliffe’s conclusion, from more than a passing acquaintance with them, is that “the more desolate and cruel is the land, the finer, in their simple way, are the people.” It should be emphasised that his most readable book is not devoted to an account of the scientific work which brought him to these two Australias, but to the general aspects of the country which are of interest to the average man. If his trained faculty for observation has stood him in good stead, it has not cramped a capacity for fluent and vivid narrative. The book has an introduction by Julian Huxley, and our copy is from Whitcombe and Tombs. McG,