A Studentship At Melbourne

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 4

A Studentship At Melbourne

Humping My Bluey. By Graham Mclnnes. Hamish Hamilton. 223 pp.

This is the second volume of Mr Mclnnes’s autobiography, and carries on from where “The Road to Gundagai” left off to where Mr Mclnnes having graduated at Melbourne University leaves Australia for Canada, the United States, and Europe. The first book was hailed as a masterly evocation of a boyhood spent in Australia; in this book the writer no less successfully presents the life of a student The immediate background is Melbourne University, but further back there is Australia in the depression years. Mr Mclnnes’s interesting family associations recur in .this story, though as a student made independent by a lucrative oil company scholarship he moves very much along his own path. Indeed, in this section of Mr Mclnnes’s 'autobiography the family I story is rather pathetic. The

depression affects his stepfather’s business, from which the unfortunate man is gently eased by colleagues who judge—apparently with justice—that he is not pulling his weight. Graham's mother, becoming Increasingly successful as a writer, and relieved by the scholarship of responsibility for him, departs for England with his brother Colin, leaving her husband pathetically uncertain about her intentions to return. Graham remains a link which the husband strives to maintain with a woman who is shown in a few vignettes in this book to be brilliant, to be far from at home in the Melbourne environment, and to be unable to suffer fools (her husband probably Included) gladly. As the reader progresses with Mr Mclnnes through his university years he shares many memorable experiences and meets some exciting and; interesting people. Holidays'

are spent among relations in Tasmania, and trips with university teams are made into joyous pilgrimages to Adelaide and Sydney. As in his earlier book, Mr Mclnnes exhibits the family ability to write well. His mother, Angela Thirkell, and her brother, Denis Mackail, were well-known novelists twenty to thirty years ago. Further back among the relatives were Burne-Jones the artist, and Rudyard Kipling—a cultural background that, one reflects, probably foredoomed the marriage of Graham’s mother (after she, and his father were divorced) to the Tasmanian soldier, G.; L. Thirkell in 1918. Graham’s brother Colin has several best-sellers to his credit. Readers of the first two volumes of Graham Mclnnes’s autobiography will hope to see the third very soon, for as his life and the scope for his talents broaden, the best of Graham Mclnnes’s life I story is surely to coma.