UNKNOWN AUSTRALIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 422, 25 July 1947, Page 12

UNKNOWN AUSTRALIA

EW ZEALAND and Ausd tralia are neighbours, and should be keenly interested in each other’s doings of all kinds. Now that Taihape and Timaru can listen to Australian test matches, and a traveller may have his early morning tea in Auckland and his afternoon tea in Sydney, the thousand miles of often stormy sea that separate the countries are less of a barrier than they were, but there is still, a large amount of ignorance on both sides, It may be asked, for example, how many | New Zealanders are well informed about | literary progress’ in Australia, The ex- | cuse that it is difficult enough to keep | uP with what is going on in mother’s /house has some validity, but Australia is our sister, and members of wellordered families find time to enquire what the others are doing. I am moved to say this by the contents of two issues of Southerly, a literary "quarterly issued by the Sydney branch of the English Association. These magazines take me into a world of creation and criticism of which I knew very little. Evidently there is a _ healthy growth in Australian letters. There ‘is at least one positive surprise. I had barely heard of Christina Stead, Australian novelist. Now I find, from an article about her work, that she has written six books, and that, after seeing much of the world, she lives in America. But of William Gosse Hay, born 1875, died 1945, I had never heard at all. It is certain I am not alone in this respect among New Zealanders and I learn from Southerly that Hay is so far from. being well-known in Australia that when the editor lectured on him in Brisbane in 1945, one of the best-informed regarded Hay as a "new novelist." The larger part of one of these issues is devoted to Hay’s life and work, His life makes a pleasant story of attractive character, domestic happiness, and absorption in writing, which he loved. His novels — Stifled Laughter, Herridge of Reality Swamp, Captain Quadring, The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans, Strabane of the Mulberry Hills, and The Mystery of Alfred Doubt-are all about the early days of Australia. He was a specialist in the convict days. J. H. M. Abbott hailed Sir William Heans as "the most powerful Australian novel yet written," or "not very far short of that," and Miss F. Earle Hooper, who writes the memoir of him in Southerly, considers him Australia’s greatest romantic novelist. Katherine Mansfield gave Sir William Heans a lengthy review in The Athenaeum, and this is reprinted in Southerly. It would be interesting to enquire for these novels in New Zealand libraries-and possibly in Australian libraries, too. For the rest, I can only commend briefly the, scholarship standard of Southerly. The reviews are uncommonly well done. J. Ackroyd writes a long critical article on The Australian Language, by Sidney J. Baker, who has studied Australian and New Zealand slang. Such detailed criticism could only appear in a literary magazine of this _kind. One other item has a special interest for us. Reviewing a new edition of Percival Serle’s Australasian Anthol‘ogy, Nan McDonald says, "there is really no such thing as ‘Australasian’ literature.

In spite of the traffic of writers between the two countries, the poetry of Australia and New Zealand cannot be treated as a unity." I think there will be pretty wide agreement with this view

in New Zealand.

A.

M.