THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN LONELINESS By Ernestine Hill
CURRENT LITERATURE
The author of The Great Australian Loneliness (Jarrolds, t8s.) is a journalist who has spent five years collecting these stories of life in the wildest
three-quarters of Australia. Eleven- twelfths of the population of Australia live in urbanised areas ; the remaining half million live in scattered communities in the bush, desert, and small coastal towns of the north-west, and Miss Hill travelled 50,000 miles to interview them. She deserves praise for the thoroughness of her expedition, for her cnthusiasm, courage and able reporting. But it is unfortunate that during those years of hard adventure she did not learn the value of restraint and economy. Her material is, of course, interesting, for there are amazing characters to be found among the pearl-divers, opal- miners, traders, adventurers and abori- gines of these remote places, but she is so obsessed with her search for " human interest " and her job of " putting it over " that she forgets that though an article full of " punch'' may wake up a bored newspaper reader, a whole bookfull will put him to sleep.
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