AUSTRALIAN STORIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 325, 14 September 1945, Page 12

AUSTRALIAN STORIES

DRIFT, by

Peter

Cowan.

Reed and Harris,

Melbourne:

(Reviewed by

Frank

Sargeson

N recent years far too few Australian books have reached New Zealand. The war is to be mainly blamed no doubt, but it has meant that far too few New Zealand readers are aware of what Australian writers are doing. And one could, I think, go further than that and say that far too few present-day New Zealand readers are aware of what Australian writers have done in the past. Ask your younger friends if they have ever read For the Term of His Natural Life, or Robbery Under Arms, or the stories of Henry Lawson, and mainly, I’m afraid, the answer will be no. Yet in all these books it is possible to discern values that it would be as well for us to keep in mind, particularly in these times of stress and change; and more particularly if you happen to be New Zealand or Australian born and bred. We are, I should say, in acute danger of losing the few distinctive colonial values that we have developed. And in these circumstances it is nice to see in New Zealand this book of stories by Peter Cowan, a West Australian writer

whose publishers claim for him that he is an upholder of the Henry Lawson tradition. To some extent, however, this claim must be disputed. Lawson in his stories, as everybody who has read him knows, represented the Australian scene very faithfully; but at the same time he did something more than that. Implicit in practically every story that Lawson wrote there is a personal outlook; and to be able to blend your personal outlook with your story in the satisfying way that Lawson did, is, in this reviewer’s opinion, one of the marks of a good story-teiler. I cannot see that Mr. Cowan does this to any great extent. I feel indeed that it hardly occurs to him to try to do so. He is, in a sense, a literary photographer, concerned mainly to make a few simple re-arrangements of his scene and people, and then exactly describe them so that the reader will see them very clearly. But the reader naturally seeks to penetrate imaginatively to the inner meaning of all this clearly described life: and the imperceptible hints that would help him out (and that Lawson was so good at providing), seem to me to be lacking. Nevertheless I would emphasise that Mr. Cowan’s stories are very good ones of their kind, Every one of his people, whether of the town or the country, is very definitely a dinkum Aussie; and possibly even better than the rendering of the people is

the rendering of the Australian country-side-if, of course, the word "countryside" has any meaning when applied to those vast spaces. Anyhow, it is some time since I have felt the Australian sun, in Australian literature, as I have felt it in these stories.