AUSTRALIA’S FAR NORTH
BAD MEDICINE. By Victor C. Hail, Robertson and Mullens, Melbourne. HERE is a big, empty expanse at the top of the map of Australia where foutteen thousand aborigines eke out their lives, watched over, exploited, and controlled by three thousand white men. This is the territory that Victor Hall describes in this novel-the story of one small episode in the life of a constable up there in the desolation. It is an artificially and badly-constructed novel, but the story is powerful and absorbing. In any case the novel is incidental to the tract embodied within the novel-a plea for better understanding and treatment pf the native population of Australia. Without natives, he claims, no activity in North Australia can be carried on. They work in the mines, they run the cattle stations, they help the police track down their own kind. Yet their basic wage is 5/- per week, they are unrepresented in Parliament, and the Ministry of Native Affairs that controls them operates from armchairs in Canberra. Hall is loud and fierce in his denunciation of the Ministry of Native Affairs.
Australia, he cries, holds mandates over other native races. What about the mandate she holds over her own?
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 439, 21 November 1947, Page 13
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203AUSTRALIA’S FAR NORTH New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 439, 21 November 1947, Page 13
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