In The Mango Tree, McKie captured through a rich and tightly controlled prose the pain and bewilderment attendant on the shifting of a child’s consciousness towards the adult. At the same time, he evoked the shapes and textures of the remembered world of a Queensland town, of a way of life in the act of changing, with a muted note of lament. In Bitter Bread, there is a curious mixture of the mellow prose of The Mango Tree and passages where McKie’s control is loose, passages which spill over into the maudlin and smudge into bathos. Its narrative has not the inner logic of the earlier novel, tending to dart off into peripheral characters and events only limply tied to the central narrative line. At times, McKie seems to be shying away from the task of exploring the central relationship of two widely different consciousnesses caught up together in Melbourne during the Depression.

It was inevitable that the phenomenon of Don Chipp’s Democrats would spawn an industry of quickie books; so far we have had two. The Third Man (which was written by Chipp himself in collaboration with the Melbourne journalist John Larkin) and now this one: Don Chipp, written by two journalists from the Melbourne office of The Australian, Tim Hewat and David Wilson. Both books are more or less bad, revolving as they do around a sort of log-cabin-to-White-House theme which is manifestly unsuited to any discussion of Australian politics. But at least Chipp and Larkin have both met the man about whom they are writing. There is no evidence that Hewat or Wilson has; and in fact their brief and boring 113 pages, padded out with an already out-of-date policy statement and a totally unnecessary index adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge, either by way of new facts or sensible analysis.

Shalom, compiled by Nancy Keesing is I think a brilliant and moving collection of short stories.

Ms Keesing, an indefatigable compiler, has brought together for the first time a selection of Jewish stories and. arranged them in three sections, each one of which throws light on a certain aspect of Jewish life, either in Europe, in Australia over a long period, or in the present Australia-Israel conflict. This is a fine and sensitive arrangement of the stories.

The first edition of the Australian Encyclopedia was published by Angus & Robertson in two volumes in 1925, under the general editorship of Captain Arthur Jose. The second edition, completely revised and rewritten, was published in 1958 and ran to ten volumes, including an index. The editorial team was headed by Alec Chisholm. This edition was later sold to the Grolier Society, which has now published a third edition with Bruce W. Pratt as Editor­in-Chief. This edition is a complete revision and updating of the second.

Don Whitington became a journalist seven years before I was born, and moved to Canberra for the first time shortly before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He died last year, after a tragically bungled series of surgical operations, before he was able to complete his autobiography, Strive to be Fair.

The title is taken from a remark one of the many editors for whom he worked made: ‘There is no such thing as a good objective journalist. If you are not sensitive enough to feel for your subject, to have a point of view, to suffer joy or agony or sympathy about a story you are covering, you will never be a good journalist. Don’t strive to be objective. Strive to be fair.’

Central to this collection of essays by Ted Wheelwright is the argument that orthodox economics is a positive hindrance to any real understanding of the problems of the last quarter of the twentieth century. A rebirth of the political economy is necessary to remove the stench (from the corpse of orthodox economics) that is polluting the social sciences.

Now, it is certainly true that orthodox economics (that is the economics taught in ninety-nine per cent of our Universities, practised by Treasuries around Australia and spiritual descendant of Adam Smith, sometimes modified by Keynes) casts little light on some of the most acute problems of our era – the coex­istence of unemployment and inflation, the (Mal) distribution of income between classes, the persistence of poverty, the power of the multi-nationals, etc.

During next month – October – we celebrate Australian Book Week, and during this week the winners of the National Book Council 1978 Australian Literature Awards will be announced. As one of the judges, I have been forced by this contest to think not only about the value of competitions in the arts, but also about what we might mean by giving any book an award for ‘best of its kind’. Certainly, the contest, like the book week, helps to bring public attention to Australian books, and brings some sort of monetary reward to the author and publisher of the winning entry. Writers in this country are so badly rewarded for their writing that this is no doubt a sufficient reason for the contest, even although the total value of the award would not pay the transfer fee for a junior and untested player in Australian Rules football, or the legal fee to challenge the new copyright laws which give all educational institutions the right to avail themselves of other people’s work without incurring any effective charge. Yet the danger remains that by choosing one book, we are limiting the attention given to all the other worthy contenders. There is some protection against this in the number of awards which are now given, but taken together they still do not allow recognition to the greater part of the excellent writing being published annually in this country.

Designing Australian Bush Gardens

By Maloney, Betty & Walker, Jean

A.H. & A. W. Reed Pty. Ltd., 1966, 127 pp

This book is a work of both propaganda and advice. Its underlying philosophy is that it is destruction of the native landscape and not so much bad individual design that makes our suburbs such a mess.

The book extends design principles, through practical advice about gardening and the care of particular plants, to enable its user to create his own environment in harmony with his needs and the dictates of nature.

The opening section deals with general questions of horticulture and design. There are then detailed discussions of five specific garden plans, including a school courtyard garden. There are then notes on regeneration planting and floral emblems.

Consumer Watch: Your guide to value for money and consumer rights

By Peter Fitzgerald

Victorian Commercial Teachers Association in association with the Herald, Melbourne, 1978, 57 pp, $1.95 pb

The book is based on a series of articles produced for the Melbourne Herald to assist consumers to benefit from others’ experiences, and to avoid the pitfalls that concern the unwary. The opening article states general principles and is followed by articles giving specific advice to consumers on how to avoid or redress wrongs. Then follow a series of articles dealing with such matters as purchasing a bicycle, obtaining a loan, and renting a house.

The book would be of use to classes in consumer education as well as to the general public. It is based on Victorian State law and practices.

ASLA V, Fifth Biennial Conference of the Australian School Library Association, Volume 2 - Papers

By School Library Association, Canberra & District.

Australian School Library Association 1976, 68 pp

NB: The proceedings and additional papers, on microfiche, are available on request at a cost of 25c. per fiche.

Although the ASLA Conference V was held in 1976, the proceedings, now published following editing by the School Library Association of Canberra and District, retain their relevance.

The opening address by the late H.P. Schoenheimer reminds us of the vision and humanity of this educator whose talk on ‘The Librarian and the New World Order’ reminds us of the vast potential for good of the school library. Other papers deal with the relationship of school and other libraries, information services, obtaining value for money, and childrens’ literature in the library.

A record of proceedings gives some of the flavour of the conference.

Australian Government Style Manual

(Revised Edition)

Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1978, XVI + 463 pp, $9.95 hb, $7.00 pb

The Australian Government Publishing Service has just issued a third and revised edition of this invaluable style manual. The contents remain much the same as in the earlier editions, but have been revised in consultation with the late Professor Grahame Johnston and Mr John Pitson. The alterations bring the material up-to­date, and new material has been added, for example, on recent developments in type­setting.

The manual has five sections, on: Writing and Editing, Copyreading and Proofs, Designing for Print, Printing, and Duplicating and Copying, and eleven appendices covering such matters as modes of address, difficult spellings, special signs and symbols, and the law relating to publication.

The manual is indispensable for anyone concerned with the written word. Its advice is simple and the reasoning behind its rulings is explained. It would be of much greater use to English and Language teachers than most textbooks prepared specifically for their assistance, although it is probably too detailed for student use.

The advice it gives for the preparation of copy would assist every professional writer.

How to Grow Better House Plants

By Leslie Johns.

A.H. & A. W. Reed, 1975, 98 pp

Another Reed reprint, this book was first issued in 1975. The photographic illustrations show what the various plants discussed in the text will look like in the house. The text gives practical advice on their care.

A Power of Roses

Bv Ruth Parks

Penguin Books Australia Ltd., Aug. 1978, 286 pp, $3.25 pb

The Big Smoke

By D’Arcy Niland

Penguin Books Australia Ltd., Aug. 1978, 224 pp, $3.25 pb

Australia’s Home: Why Australians built the way they did

Bv Robin Boyd

Penguin Books Australia Ltd., Aug. 1978, 316 pp, $3.95 pb

These Penguin reissues of well-known books will enable new readers to make their acquaintance with these authors. The Robin Boyd volume is a classic of Australian domestic architecture, taste, and social history. The re-reading of Ruth Park’s novel confirms the power of her writing.

Since its publication in 1975, Chemistry in the Market Place has gone through three impressions of the first edition and now has been expanded into a larger second edition. Successive chapters are labelled ‘Chemistry in the Laundry’, ‘in the Kitchen’, ‘in the Boudoir’, ‘in the Garden’, ‘the Chemistry of Hard and Soft Ware’ (plastics, fibres, fabrics and flammability, popular products), ‘Chemistry in the Medical Cabinet’, ‘Chemistry of the Car and other Energy Users’, ‘Chemistry in the Dining Room’ (Food additives), ‘the Heavy Metals’ and finally ‘Experiments in Consumer Chemistry’. Its 454 pages are full of tables and diagrams and drawings. It is written in a sensible but easily readable style and it seems to be absolutely sound technically. And it is a fascinating book crammed with information about the way the ordinary things around you are made, what their properties are, how to use them, what their advantages or disadvantages may be, etc., etc. I, as a university lecturer, will be pleased to give it a place on my office bookshelf, but it should sit just as happily on the home bookshelf so that the family can get to know more about the things around them – I cannot imagine that much technical knowledge would be needed to get a lot out of it, and it could well lead to people asking a lot more about things they never think about normally – always a good idea. Highly recommended for homes, libraries, and even those working as professional chemists.

One of the most durable myths about education is that it can be separated from politics. It is a myth which has allowed people to believe that education in general and schools in particular can and should be insulated from that unpleasant world in which people disagree violently about human rights and needs and social values and just about everything else. Perhaps – but one cannot be sure – the seventies will mark the death of this myth. If Ted D’Urso and Richard Smith’s collection of readings does, as the authors believe, indicate the kind of problem which will be significant in education for some time to come, then its publication is a further recognition not merely that issues in education should be considered in a social context but rather that they are themselves political and social issues. In fact, the education system seems to provide one of the principal theatres in which the central conflicts of a society are played out.

The collection is concerned almost entirely with primary and secondary education and most of the material was originally produced in the period 1974-76. The editors locate their work squarely in the uncertainties of contemporary society:

The ambiguities evident in the policies and practices of the education sector are symptomatic of an economy adjusting to a post-industrial epoch. Powerful social forces are struggling to influence the directions, shape, and function of traditional institutions under conditions of pronounced insecurity and unpredictability.

One major reference point for the collection is the establishment in 1973 of the Schools Commission, which gave practical support to many of the demands for the reform of schooling. Key themes to which the Commission attempted to give expression underlie much of the book: equality of opportunity, special attention to the needs of disadvantaged groups, devolution of responsibility to schools, community participation and the encouragement of grassroots initiative. Extracts from the Karmel Report itself on the subjects of equality and ‘Fostering Change’ provide starting points for the first two sections.

Sibnarayan Ray is the Chairman of the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Melbourne; predictably, therefore, those essays in this collection that deal with Indian literature do provoke one’s interest. Mr Ray is especially enlightening about the problems facing the contemporary Indian writer. In a revealing essay devoted to this subject he explains that, apart from English, there are at least a dozen major languages in India each with a well-developed literature of its own. Add to this eight distinct scripts in use, each cast in type, and that translations between the languages are few.

Then, there is a pronounced gulf between the creative writer and the majority of the population. Furthermore the cultural impact of the West has affected only a small proportion of the population. So it is, as Mr Ray explains, that the principal concern of almost all conscientious Indian writers during this century and the last has been that of communicating with their people without putting at risk their newly acquired individuality and cultural values. With such pressures on the writer as the contrasting ideologies of nationalism and communism and the increasing power of the State, you have a position most perceptively summed up by the author:

The position of the modern writer in India today is thus rather unenviable. Caught between an increasingly powerful State and a community which does not share his values, pressed on the one side by a revivalist nationalism and on the other by militant communism, handicapped by languages which are stratified and which are hardly adequate to express his thoughts and experiences, living on the border of starvation and assailed by the promise of benefits for those who conform, he is struggling to maintain his creative integrity. All that is finest in modern Indian writing is the expression of this struggle.

Audrey Tennyson, in a letter to her mother in January 1903, wrote:

About my letters … would you ask somebody to buy at Harrods a japanned tin box for holding them … the great thing is to keep them together as if they are in several places they are likely to get put away and forgotten. I am afraid they won’t be worth publishing but they may be of great interest to the boys some day – and Hallam might perhaps make use of them for a book on Australia.

We can be very glad that they weren’t put away, nor used by her husband in the way suggested, and that, despite the innate and characteristic modesty of their writer, they have at last been published. They are part of the Tennyson Papers, held on loan by the National Library of Australia since 1956, and it was a happy inspiration that those concerned chose Alexandra Hasluck to edit them. These letters, written by Lady Tennyson during the term of office of her husband (Hallam, Lord Tennyson) as Governor of South Australia and then as Governor General do indeed constitute, as Lady Hasluck so appropriately writes in her Introduction, ‘a unique picture of Australia and Australian society as seen from Government House by a charming, tolerant and interested Englishwoman’.

At one stage Lady Tennyson wrote, ‘… we certainly have been quite extraordinarily fortunate in having just been here during these last two years, by far the most interesting of any in the history of Australasia.’ It was true. There were the great social and political events of Federation (including the national celebration of Commonwealth Day on New Year’s day 1901); the Boer War; the Royal Visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V and Queen Mary) in 1901, and other events of the period, not least the cricket test matches against McLaren’s English XI – ‘We were wildly excited at England’s victory ... isn’t it splendid? We are so glad …’ (but alas Australia won the next four tests).

But cricket is part of the story too, and of coming events casting their shadows before them. Lady Tennyson, when she wrote of her son Lionel’s cricketing prowess as a schoolboy – ‘ … it is astonishing how Lionel has come on and he really plays extremely well and in excellent style’ – could not know that in years to come the Hon. Lionel would become a cricket international and captain England against Australia.

The handsome reissue in one volume, by Collins, of Australian Legendary Tales with illustrations by Rex Backhaus-Smith, is a most welcome addition to current publications for Australian enthusiasts and certainly well overdue.

This collection of Aboriginal myths, legends and fables was originally published in two volumes, Australian Legendary Tales in 1897 and More Australian Legendary Tales in 1898. Both’ contained illustrations by an unnamed Aboriginal artist which, for eloquence of line and poetry of balanced movement, are not surpassed by the evocatively appropriate illustrations provided by Backhaus-Smith in this new volume. However, for readers possessing both publications the contrast in artistic styles provides much food for thought.

Most praiseworthy in this new publication is the fact that the publishers have resisted the temptation to ‘edit’ the text. So often, when Europeans enter the arena of pre-literate myths, fables and legends, they cannot resist the temptation to meddle with symbols and structures and, in so doing, effectively destroy the subtle symbolism, the life-blood of the tales and the ethos informing those who originally told them.

The whole area of the nature, structure, function and relationship of myth to the sociocultural concepts expressed in any society is, particularly in westernised cultures, currently either totally ignored or woefully misunderstood.

‘I am very annoyed and disgusted with the discrimination, prejudice, ridicule and scorn, with possible disgrace and ruin of my reputation, and good name, if my family, friends, associates and colleagues ever discovered that I express my ‘feminine personality’ by dressing completely as a woman. And yet, because of my ‘feminine personality’ I consider myself to be more compassionate, more understanding, and certainly more relaxed and happy, than the average male.’ Thus wrote the president of a group of heterosexual transvestites to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

Born out of the controversy over an unsuccessful bill to liberalise the abortion laws in the Australian Capital Territory, the Commission was set up in 1973 after a motion had been passed in Federal Parliament to establish an inquiry into all aspects of social, sexual and family life. Its terms of reference were extraordinarily wide, but the main task of the Commissioners – Elizabeth Evatt, Felix Arnott and Anne Deveson – was to look into the range of matters ‘relating to the roles and responsibilities of men and women as individuals, as members of society and in their relationships with each other.’

Their report is a stunning documentation of social dysfunction. Running to five volumes, with no less than 511 recommendations, it caused quite a stir, if for all the wrong reasons, when it was leaked in the middle of the 1977 Federal election campaign. Now that the dust has settled, we can take a more dispassionate look. The report still makes much better reading than the general run of official publications, but it is an official publication. In an effort to make the material more readily accessible and assimilable, Anne Deveson has compiled an ‘edited selection’ of the evidence gathered by the Commission. The result of her labors, Australians at Risk, is a lively, informative and devastating record of the inability of Australian society to meet the basic human requirements of its members.

This is a small minor mini-pocket lexicon of how, where and when to travel abroad from Australia, starting with A (Add-on Holidays) and ending with Z (Zoos).

A person with competence and enthusiasm ‘in the field’ for this or that subject of natural history has ready opportunity to get with it in unusual haunts. Birds seem to be an obsession with such opportunity – the competent enthusiast has an instinctive reaction to give attention, and some write books about it.

The competence can range from specialised to general, and be used in manners with or without significance. With significance, for example, it may be rediscovery of a species long thought to be extinct, or occurring a long way from reported range – either being an exciting event for ‘birdos’. With insignificance, yet not entirely without excitement or potential, it would be, for example, my instinctive reaction to a suitable opportunity to look closely at sparrows, numerous anywhere in Melbourne’s metropolis, watching for the Tree Sparrow because it is much less present than the ever-present House Sparrow. (Incidentally, the Tree Sparrow is not averse to houses, nor the House to trees.)

Schools are the subject of very mixed treatment by the media. On the one hand, some publish regular feature articles, or even weekly columns; many of a high standard, dealing with education issues. On the other, news stories often focus upon criticism, all too often uninformed, by some public or political personality. Problems in schools are sensationalised, but positive achievements rarely reach the news pages.

Iola Matthews has provided a tool to help those concerned with schools to improve this situation. Media Handbook is a clearly written and intensely practical guide to local school councils and others. It tells how to write and use press releases, how to organise press conferences, how to conduct interviews with the media, and other aspects of the publicity game.

Regrettably, this booklet will probably not become well-known outside of the education sphere. It would be invaluable to anyone concerned with non-commercial publicity, no matter what their area of concern, and deserves to be a best-seller.

At the same time, perhaps this is one aspect of the book which might be criticised. Other than utilising education as a source of examples, the Handbook is about use of the mass media in general, and has little reference to the specific problems inherent in the interpretation of education issues.

Admittedly, to have tackled the complexities of how one might more effectively rebut some of the false criticisms levelled at schools would be a much more difficult task. It would be even more difficult to discuss how one might react to some of the valid criticisms, such as those contained in Becker’s increasingly well-known paper, ‘School is a. lousy place to learn anything!’ However, the failure to get to grips with these issues or even to help distinguish between silly criticisms and sound criticisms, means that the Handbook is an excellent guide to any use the media, rather than one which will make a specific contribution to education stories in particular.

Nevertheless, Australian Frontier and Iola Matthews have taken a major step forward in developing the Handbook. It poses a challenge to others who might try to emulate Iola’s clarity in dealing with the more complex questions.

Bonnie McCallum was the first publicity officer appointed by the ABC in Victoria way back in 1936. The Commission was in the early stages of becoming Australia’s largest entrepreneur in the concert field, as well as establishing orchestras in every State, and Miss McCallum’s job, as the book jacket says, was to act as ‘hand holder to the visiting artists as well as liaison officer between them and the Press.’

This is a most interesting, readable and, in a larger context, valuable book. It deals with written recollections collected from some 215 living veterans from the First A.I.F. (some have since died) – a list of their names is included as an Appendix – detailing how they felt about the War as it approached and when it commenced, and also what led them to enlist at the time. Each informant is allowed to speak for himself, with his own peculiar spelling, punctuation end style of writing; in effect, the outcome provides a broad picture of the social origins and nature of this cross-section of soldiers.

They are separated into occupational and related groups – farmers, itinerants, country townsmen, city dwellers, sailors and immigrants – in Part I, where a vivid picture is painted of conditions of life in ‘Edwardian Australia’. Part II provides a mass of detailed material describing the various reasons given for enlisting; while Part III deals with the views put forward in the past by the official war historian, C.E.W. Bean relating to the changing attitudes towards enlistment as the war proceeded, and so to the different types ‘of commitment involved, and alleged to lie behind the decisions made by successive groups to enlist.

A virile energetic people inhabits the island of Malaita in the middle Solomons. From the time of first contact Malaitamen were prized for their ability to work, but they had to be handled cautiously, or their inherited pride and confidence would turn them to rebellion. Those who live on the sea-coasts are readily adaptable to innovation when they can see value in it, but they abandon tradition with some misgivings.

Envisaged Worlds is an important anthology, not for the claims it makes, but for the claims it doesn’t.

Australian science-fiction has existed for a long time, taken from the time of the first publication of A. Bertram Chandler’s work, but as a body, an entity with something of a recognisable tone and viewpoint its emergence is relatively recent, depending on the quiet, unknown work of the writers in John Baxter’s two Anthologies of Pacific Science Fiction (A&R, 1968 and 1971 respectively), and the silent struggles of those people who were still alive and struggling enough by 1975 to attend the writers’ workshop held by Ursula Le Guin that year. That workshop was crucial to the development of a certain kind of S-F in Australia – in some ways a ‘tricks of the trade’ affair (judging from the evidence of The Altered I), it led inevitably to the second workshop at Monash in February 1977 – which consciously Australianised some of the concerns of the trade. (The View From The Edge, 1977).

Ronald Anderson’s latest book explores the potential for deer farming in Australia, and gives at least the initial information to someone wishing to establish a deer farm. By page eight of the book the profit potential of deer is already apparent. Their costs of production are relatively low, while product prices are extraordinary. For example, at the time of writing, New Zealand farmers were receiving $4.75 per kilogram for venison, some six or seven times the price of beef. As if this were not enough, there is the annual crop of velvet or immature antler, harvested without slaughter from the stags. Used as a component in Asian medicines, this returns no less than $110 to $150 per kilogram to the farmer or at least $300 per stag per year. Not satisfied? Then try the ‘by-products’ also obtained when the deer are slaughtered for venison. These range from mature antler (for jewellery) to frozen deer tails at $6 each (for culinary use) and from deer foetuses ($3 to $45 depending on stage of pregnancy) to deer penises! The last, which must be ‘...complete with testes and a tassel of hair…’, are graded (by length!) and frozen and return about $9 each to the farmer. In exploring the reasons for farming deer, Anderson raises one important issue early in the book and returns to it in several places. This is the hunter’s ‘...ambivalent attitude to deer…’ and to deer farming. To the hunting fraternity, says Anderson, deer are to be shot, not farmed. Unless, of course, they are farmed to provide stocks for shooting. The problem is that strong lobbying, based on such an attitude, would make it even more difficult than at present to obtain enough deer to stock a farm. The same attitude, prevalent in West Germany, led to a virtual embargo on the import of farm venison from New Zealand, in favor of ‘real venison’ shot in the wild, with obvious consequences for New Zealand’s deer farmers.

Karobran (Togetherness) by the late Monica Clare is not a great (or even a good) novel, but it is an important work and, as such, deserves to be widely read.

Largely autobiographical, it deals primarily with the Depression years and the experiences of Isabelle (Monica), her brother Morris and, following the death of their European mother in childbirth, the ultimate separation from their Aboriginal father, Dave Herbert.

If you’re a kid, finding a tap at school that doesn’t spurt can be what life is all about. Perhaps Glen Tomasetti’s story ‘Ella makes a Friend’, highlights the tone of The Kids’ Own Book – gentle stories to help children lean evenly into life.

But the book is not a story book. You can learn how to make masks out of old detergent containers; how to take fingerprints; how to make yummy, wafer-thin leaves out of chocolate; how to make a carrying bag out of an old pair of jeans; and how to make a fabulously slippery water slide in your own back yard with just a hose and a piece of plastic sheeting.

‘The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge’(Mao Tse-tung, 1941) Except for the word ‘often’, which Simon Leys would wish to be replaced by ‘always’, this statement is one with which he would agree, because by ‘we ourselves’ Mao means the Chinese Communist Party. In this book, which deals with China in the early 1970s, Leys appears preoccupied with four major concerns: (1) He is a deep lover of the Chinese people (2) He hates intensely everything connected with ‘the authorities’. In his view, everything good about China is due to the people, everything bad to their government.

(3) The author is a great lover of the Chinese Tradition, especially its culture. (4) With very few exceptions he appears to see foreign observers of China as beneath contempt. The book is divided into eight chapters. The main ones are ‘Foreigners in the People’s. Republic’; ‘Follow the Guide’, in which Leys relates impressions of visits to several famous cities; ‘Bureaucrats’; Cultural Life’; and finally, ‘Here and There’, which actually consists of snippets of comments with no connecting theme.

Kenneth Cook’s latest book is a parable for adults. At the end of the second millennium A.D., God remembers the duty he has overlooked at the end of the first, destroys life on earth. However, no doubt due to his advanced age, he is a little careless, and in a valley in the in the middle of the United States, two mice survive. They and their rapidly multiplying descendants inherit man’s civilization, including thought and speech, but otherwise not memory. They have to develop theory and institutions from scratch, guided by reason and reading.

Anyone who has attempted to write the history of a municipality will have felt the need to consult a history of local government to see how his particular area fits into the general scene. Now there is such a reference work, but only for New South Wales.

This book (The Advancement of Local Government in New South Wales 1906 to the Present by F. A. Larcombe, Sydney University Press, $25, 486 pp) is subtitled A History of Local Government in New South Wales Volume 3. The other two volumes are The Origins of Local Government in New South Wales

1831-58 and The Stabilization of Local Government in New South Wales 1858-1906. This reviewer has not read these earlier volumes, let alone seen them in the bookshops, but, if they are of the same standard as the third, then they form a very important contribution to our knowledge of the third level of government in this country.

Frederick Larcombe is well qualified to tackle this task, having lectured and researched in local government for over thirty years, as well as writing the histories of three Sydney metropolitan councils. He has written his history because he believes it forms the basis of the reform of local government.

Unlike most other books dealing with hiking, bushwalking or camping, the Penguin Book of the Bush will assist both first timers and experienced bush venturers to enjoy: their excursion. It is saddening to realise that it has become necessary to encourage Australians, once renowned for their outdoor image, to experience and enjoy the bush. Edward Kynaston's book includes seven chapters which do just this. He does not advocate just tramping hastily over a piece of country intent only on reaching your destination; rather he encourages you to regard the environments through which you pass as more than just a series of landmarks.

Writers of books on Australian outdoor life all too often see the landscape and everything within it either as an accomplished fact or as an alien force with which to do battle. Kynaston, on the other hand, describes the long evolution of our non-urban environment from its beginnings to its present state, and includes a description of colonisations by rabbits, foxes, donkeys and other recent arrivals. The misguided attempts to establish alpacas, curassows, cochineal beetles and other equally exotic creatures and plants are described in Chapter Five: The Unwelcome Migrants. Native plants, animals, and birds are introduced to the reader. The silhouettes of bird groups will be of particular assistance if you are interested in knowing what sort of bird you are looking at. These and other simplified outlines in the book offer convenient starting points on which to base future knowledge.

The photograph is our time’s supreme form of self-expression. Wherever we look, we are surrounded by photographs – in books, on posters, in magazines, newspapers, packaging, and of course in films and television. The photograph is universally understandable and so appears not to need explanation to supplement it. Its power to convey experience increases as superfluous details are eliminated. And it attains its highest potential when the representation becomes purely symbolic.

Local government in Australia and in England have little more in common than their name and tradition. The functions of local government in England, their size and relationship to the central government in Westminster means that they are more like the Australian States than local authorities here.

Yet there is an almost obsessive interest in Australia with the English model and English local government personalities. This monograph is therefore assured of a welcome from leading local authorities in Australia.

Education – the leading out: those Romans put their finger, as so often, on the important thing, but twenty centuries later we are still more concerned with ramming in information, rather than leading it forth. Our educational system is still based on the assumption that education consists of facts, information and rigidly ‘right’ answers which must, by fair means or foul, be crammed down the gullets of the young. The effects of such a misplaced assumption are various and depressing: most teachers feel threatened, rather than excited, by the bright student who questions a ‘right’ answer; children think of education as something aimed at and stopping at certain terminal exams; parents seize on those books which announce with such chilling effect that they aim to make learning fun.

2D and Other Plays is prefaced by an Introduction by Nicholas Tarling, a colleague of the late Eunice Hanger, paying tribute to her as a writer and as a person deeply concerned with developing and encouraging locally written drama. Her association with the Twelfth Night Theatre in Brisbane in its early days is well known. The verdict of time may well be that her greatest contribution to Australian theatre was the collection she made over the years of unpublished Australian playscripts, and manuscripts of those now published. This collection – the Hanger Collection – is now in the Fryer Library, University of Queensland. A list of the scripts in the collection is given in Appendix B of this volume.

At a lucid moment in this otherwise obscure document the author writes: ‘It strikes me that each piece is more or less obvious and I hope I’m not writing in code – suppose there’s no way to tell.’ Never has the shotgun theory had such a devout adherent. If the author can’t tell, what hope has the reader? The best one can wish for Words and Classes is that it is a deliberately nonsensical fraud, concocted by part-time schizophrenics at Outback Press. Here are the opening three lines: ‘an opportunist on crossing out the case: mind the spelling/ on trying to sell credit to he who has none: if I had the time, I’d ask you / to commit your sums you need take your fingers out of your mouth’.

For many Victorians their impressions of the squatting age have been formed by visits to Como or to Werribee Park. These mansions, of course, reflect the ultimate achievement of the squatters’ aspirations but tell us little of the struggles involved in realising those aspirations. These tangible proofs of squatter opulence, coupled with historical accounts of the squatter-selector battles, have inevitably cast the squatters in the role of the ‘bad guy.’ But to Heather Ronald her squatters, the Chirnsides, are the ‘good guys.’ ‘I dispute the oft-repeated statement,’ she says, ‘that squatters set themselves up as a class above everyone else … Many of the earliest successful squatters came from good families and were educated people; their attitudes were moulded by the way of life in rural Scotland, with its Squire and tenant system … Thomas and Andrew, in their estate management, were only following the example set by good landlords at home.’ But this was precisely why many Australians opposed them.

This book is a missive thrown in the face of a materialistic, consumerist society. Instead of urging us to look out for number one, it encourages taking a closer look at other people in Australian society and taking account of their needs the motivation being that of Christian Charity.

These six books when held in the hand make up the thickness of a novel, and cost about $30.00 in all. The amount of typesetting must be far less than a novel. Five of them are printed in Hong Kong. Several acknowledge subsidy; one suspects they are all subsidised.

This is a work immediately topical to a large number of teachers and students concerned (with much justification) about the lack of a proper link between school and employment after schooling. The tragedy is that unemployment often hits those in the fifteen to nineteen year old age group, who are unskilled and semi-skilled, ill prepared for the transition to a workplace increasingly demanding higher qualifications. The Technical Teachers’ Association of Victoria (TTAV) released a document in 1977 called Submission to the Committee of Enquiry into Education and Training, which acknowledges problems of this kind and calls for remedies in the form of Work Experience, greater TAFE funding, the greater co-ordination of government, business and teacher groups, formation of ‘clusters’ of educational institutions, and an end to discrimination against girls and women in the TAFE area of occupations.

The deer scene in New Zealand has changed considerably since I used to see the stags, self-segregated after the May belling, in herds of sometimes more than a hundred in the tussocky valleys behind the Lindis Pass. In a book on the hunting of what is curiously called ‘big game’ ex-professional deer culler Philip Holden reports that the biggest congregation he has seen numbered fifteen. While his mélange of loosely linked reminiscences conveys impressions of the wild terrain, the elusive quarry, the excitements of hunting and the fascination of the kill, it also indicates a growing disillusionment with the process of turning beauty into dead meat.