FAULTY, BUT BIG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 727, 19 June 1953, Page 13

FAULTY, BUT BIG

OF US NOW LIVING, by Rex Ingamells; Hallcratt Publishing Company, Melbourne. Australian price, 18/-. \ HEN the Englishman Neville Cardus wrote that there were no ghosts in Sydney, I commented that there were for Australians. This novel of 440 pages, written under a Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship, is a detailed reply. It is rich in ghosts of Australia’s varied and often murky past. Rex Ingamells’s ambitious and, I think, original plan, was to imagine a township in the backblocks of South Australia, and trace the threads of its history, through families, back to the convict days. His chief character, a schoolmistress who spends a long life in Quongdong, does most of the tracing. So the story shuttles backwards and forwards, between the township and district and modern cities, and the drama of transportation, where love and hate and ambition struggle in an environment of injustice, corruption and brutality. The tale is a reminder of the convict strain in Australian families, some of them prominent, and that this may be a matter of pride rather than the reverse. In any case, why worry? Rex Ingamells is stronger in the sweep of his plan than in many of the details of construction. At times his corridors are too lengthy, and the carpentry rough. He has a keen but not always a true eye for character. I can accept the teacher, though in her lifelong self-torturing for her early slip from virtue she is as irritating as Trollope’s jilted Lily Dale, but I gravely doubt the fidelity of the Australian who, having been refused by her, goes over to the Boers in the South African war. Most curious are the faults of style in one who has written so much and been a lecturer on Australian literature and a literary judge. He writes with zest and force, but immaturely. There are inflated words, such as’ "slumbers" for "sleep," and in dialogue a sentence like: "Whatever I am to learn about you, Miss Singwood, it cannot do anything but enhance still further the warm and affectionate regard with which I must always think of you." He seems at home in the talk of the illiterate, but his educated people too often speak in that supposed literary fashion from which "colonial" writing has been freei itself. Nevertheless, there is and impressive about Of Us Now Living, something that’ reflects the growth of a

nation.

A.

M.