AUSTRALIAN REPRINTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26616, 12 November 1947, Page 2

AUSTRALIAN REPRINTS

Literature

Ports of Sunset, by Ernestine Hill; The Getting of Wisdom, by Henry Handel Richardson; Flesh in Armour, by Leonard Mann; The Passage, by Vance Palmer. Robertson and Mullens. (Prices various.) An interesting venture in the publication of cheap reprints of popular books such as has been so conspicuously successful in the Penguin Library is now being made with the Australian Pocket Library. Already some 30 titles have been issued, including novels, short stories, descriptive writings, history, poetry, science and belle lettrcs. All are by Australian authors.

The latest additions include one travel book and three works of fiction. Ports of Sunset, by Ernestine Hill, is the first part of a three-volume edition of the author's work, “The Great Australian Loneliness.” Ernestine Hill is an Australian journalist who wandered extensively through her country in 1930. In that purely British land she says she attended “ Chinese and Japanese festivals, black-fellow burials and Greek weddings, and turned to the west with the Musselmans at the call of the muezzin.” This gives an idea of the fascinating variety of the great continent, and her descriptive style is equal to the demands made upon it. The Getting of Wisdom is by the author of the Australian classic, “The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney.” It is enough to quote H. G. Wells’s letter to the author. “Your little rag of a girl is a most adorable little beast . . . and the way it is done is wonderful.”

Vance Palmer's The Passage is a reprint of a book which won the Bulletin novel competition in 1930. This story of fishing folk in a village on the Queensland coast gives vivid descriptions of open-air life. Described by the London Observer as “in some respects the most important novel published in Australia for many years,” Flesh in Armour, by Leonard Mann, tells of the men of the First A.I.F. in France. Its value is in the insight it gives into the emerging Australian temperament