IDRIESS ADVENTURE

Southland Times, Issue 23652, 29 October 1938, Page 14

IDRIESS ADVENTURE

MADMAN’S ISLAND. By lon L. Idriess. Angus and Robertson, Ltd.,

Sydney. Price 6/-. Nearly 12 years ago Mb Idriess submitted to his publishers an account of his adventures on an island in the Howick group, off Cape York Peninsula. He was advised to mix fiction with fact, introduce a heroine and add romance to the drama. This was done, and the book was published without causing any wide stir among readers. Now he has removed the romance, and rewritten the story of what really happened on “Madman’s Island”: the net result is one of the best books in his series of Australian best-sellers. His adventures began when he landed from a coastal ketch .in the company of “Charlie,” a morose bushman who believed that there was tin on the inland and wanted to search for it. The two men had provisions for a month, and it was arranged that after this period the ketch would pick them up and take them back to the mainland. At first everything promised to go well. They built a snug camp, found traces of the tin and began their prospecting with light hearts. Charlie was not talkative; but he was a willing worker and a handy man in a solitary place. The trouble began when he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to bring his “scope,” an instrument through which he had to cleanse a serious war wound. If this process was neglected he suffered severely, sometimes relapsing into a form of dementia. Mr Idriess describes the growth of tension between the two men as the physical pressure developed. Little differences of opinion were magnified; silences became oppressive; and at last there was a scuffle, a shot from a rifle, and thereafter the Sane member of the party was forced to retreat to the other side of the island. The remaining chapters describe the weight of solitude, the occasional skirmishes with Charlie, the brief reconciliations and the endless search for food as provisions ran out and there was still no sign of the ketch. Both men became expert at spearing fish in the creeks and pools among the mangroves. On one occasion Mr Idriess had a brush with a shark, and excitement came with the appearance of opium smugglers. Life on the island, its wayward beauties and secret dangers, its swarming insect life and the mystery of coral caverns—these are subjects on which the author writes with photographic clearness. This must surely prove one of his most popular books.