REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31107, 9 July 1966, Page 4

REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

Up The Country. By Brent of Bin Bin. Angus and Robertson. 272 pp.

Written in 1927, this book is the undated chronicle of the settlement of the “Squattocracy” of New South Wales and Victoria, circa 1850. The characters are so numerous it is sometimes difficult to sort out the Identities of the men and women in the new and vivid society crowding the book. Their loves, mostly unrequited, and the broad Irish brogue in which a good deal of their lengthy dialogues are couched, tend to become a trifle wearisome to readers not familiar with the period literature of that time. These are the only critical comments which can be made on a book which is otherwise a highly credible picture of the midVictorian age, with its shibboleths, class-distinctions, decorum, and enormous families transported 10,000 miles to a new colony. Certain aristocrats, such as the Mezeres, of 800 l 800 l stand out as social leaders, while Mrs Mezere, country-born, and an admirable wife to a violenttempered English husband, is of the stuff of real heroines. Her crossing, by night, of a dangerously swollen river to .tend a poor woman in childbirth, is one of the most unforgettable episodes in the book. The author, who died in 1954, and whose curious pseudonym masks a female name, must have been steeped in the lore of the Australia of those days, and no doubt many present-day Australians will recognise the loves rivalries and feuds of their not-far-distant forebears.