A SOUTHLAND NOVEL
STINSON’S BUSH, by Georgina McDonald; Whitcombe and Tombs, 15/-. \: FIRST novel is a curiosity; a second novel is a test. Georgina McDonald won the historical novel competition promoted by the Otago Daily Times to mark the Otago centennial, with Grand Hills for Sheep, a story of Scottish settlers in the very early days of the province, She now. presents. in. Stinson's Bush, a story of. pioneering in Southland a little later. The inspiration of the centennial and the fact that in Grand Hills for Sheep she~confined her characters to Scots, may account for that being a better book. The action of Stinson’s Bush starts, not in Scotland, but in Northern Ireland, where a Protestant small farmer deserts his wife and young family. The wife, Sarah Dyer (formerly Stinson), who carries on courageously, joins her brother in New Zealand. and fits well into the life there, is the strongest character in the story. In the New Zealand scene, the Irish predominate. They mix well with the Scots, but there is a solitary Englishman who illustrates, to the point of sheer cruelty to his family, the traditional aloofness of his nation. The story tells of taming the land and of ordinary everyday happenings punctuated by crises of emotion, birth and death. Mrs. McDonald strikes me as being more at home with the Scots than with the Irish. Her Scots ring true, but her Irish are over-sentimentalised. She seems to have derived their vernacular from literary sources, whereas she absorbed Scottish speech from real life. I cannot believe that Irish children could be so rich in the idiom. The book lacks the backbone of impressive incident or developing character. In carefully written scenes, the talk, often about domestic trivialities, flows in spate, and paradoxically, its picturesqueness helps to make it at times rather wearisome. There is too much contrivance in crises; now and then characters are jerked into action, bad and good, so that sin and repentance bear an unreal look. However, this is a detailed and sympathetic study of pioneering by immigrants who put roots into the soil and help to build a nation.
A.
M.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 813, 25 February 1955, Page 13
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357A SOUTHLAND NOVEL New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 813, 25 February 1955, Page 13
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