Call of the Wild
The Generations of Men. By Judith Wright. (O.U.P., 45s.) WHAT drove men northward and westward from New South Wales, in the great pastoral migra-
tions of the last half of the nineteenth century.
far up into Queensland and the worst pioneering country? Miss Wright does not fully explain,
accepting without comment the necessity that took her grandfather and his eighteen-year-old wife 800 miles from home to fever-ridden country where their troubles included the 'Dawson spue' (retching every few minutes for days on end). Living in a state of improvisation and emergency they had no time to dig wells, children and cattle sickened and died, nomadic aborigines—already bestially treated by former settlers—proved in- effectual labourers, drought, fire and flood and a crazy economy dashed their hopes, debts piled up and they returned to New South Wales, where Arthur died, leaving his wife to carry out what he had taught her about stockbreeding in conditions where success was possible.
In most colonies, first pioneered either by trading companies or coherent groups, emigrants inherited the rudiments of social co-operation; but there is an arid, random violence. about Australian pioneering stories that reflects not so much the harshness of the land as the savagery of a capitalist society unrestrained by liberal scruples—laissez-faire red in tooth and claw. Miss Wright has used her talents as a poet to make this chunky slice of Australian history read- able; but English readers could have done with a foreword giving more of the background : the social and economic divorce between outback settlers and coastal cities where entrepreneurs (my grandfather included) made fortunes; the restric- tive legislation that drove settlers inland to find grazing where they could, and the consequent stranglehold of debt that was the chief link be-
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