Lost in the Bush t
Summer's Tales I. Edited by Kylie Tennanren1 The Penguin Australian Song Book. Compilelett by J. S. Manifold. (7s. 6d.) loll Winter's Tales has acquired a stablemate Summer's Tales is to be an annual collection op e stories from Australia. An existing yearly Aus• tralian anthology called Coast to Coast has for'ea some time now been finding it extremely difficult,',ch to maintain a reasonable standard, but this doe5"le not necessarily indicate a real dearth of publish',C° able material, and the appearance of anotherottl regular market may well act as a stimulus.
That said, it has to be admitted' that this,' present collection, edited by Kylie Tennant, 151\C
hardly likely to stimulate anyone. Miss Tennant's task was a difficult one; there are two or three
writers in Australia who produce superb short stories, but a great amount of the stuff that finds its way into print there is embarrassingly and amateurishly unoriginal. Also, too many author' 1,1 see themselves first and foremost as Australian i(i authors, and feel committed to turning out either nostalgic yarns of a romanticised childhood c)1 „i daring little exposes of the boringly sheltered eon- is formity of Australian suburbia. For the former, NI one requires the precise touch and ironic edge \,,„ of a Hal Porter; for the latter, the malevolent al genius of a Patrick White. But these two writer: ECTATOR, JULY 2, 1965 en't any equals: the rest of the local field 1 long way behind. Very few deal at all A, Patently with the surface realities of Aus-
tan life, fewer still have the imagination to mpt anything else.
if the fifteen stories in Summer's Tales 1, Y four can be read with any degree of en- ment. Patricia Rolfe's `Another Melba' isn't bad. Conventional, woman's-magazine stuff, readable. A proud, eccentric old ex-singer ,her genteel starvation in Paris to the charity ner well-off relatives who offer her a home in stralia. 'Australia—I'd sooner die.' And Hal rtees 'Boy Meets Girl' positively sparkles. It's Otte nearest thing to a really satisfying story in book. It isn't simply that Porter really can te• 'Boy Meets Girl' stands out not only by A, ue of its author's style, wit, imagination and V iniientiveness, but also because of his immedi- in Y recognisable personality. So much else in i , book might have been signed 'Anon.' al inclined to dismiss the remaining eleven ries en bloc as sentimental tat: there certainly t any point in being rude about each of them ividually. I scribbled in the margins such Intnents as 'boring old outback nonsense,' II sea stuff,' can't write,' slightest of anec- s, es,' `Kath. Mansfield?,' desperate,"tearful
Yarn,' makes an exciting subject tedious,' and Io
On In one story, I have simply underlined is e sentence, 'Anaparoo the buffalo was old and led.' I admit to a prejudice against bush stories, ole Aussie's escapist literature; though, as I came I, realise when I once edited an Australian 4thnicgy, better a bush story than no story at m• The banality of most of Kylie Tennant's liplleetion, however, is deeply depressing. What 1.1 ,--"save the mark l—am saying is a word ilees.Y prefer not to print in Australia. My advice or) Macmillan for next year: ask Randolph Stow it," Hal Porter or Judith Wright to edit Summer's ales u.
,o A somewhat warmer welcome to two new anthologies of Australian ballads and nngs. Russel Ward's collection of ballads suffers ront its length: far too high a proportion of f , ts churned-out doggerel, but there are some 'ne things as well. Many of the early nineteenth- ItenturY convict songs are written in a style I can !ascribe only as 'high-flown illiterate': `I was con- ,i1±icted by the laws of England's hostile crown,/ -"nveyed across those swelling seas in slavery's t°ters bound.' The simplicity of the authentic
'best is not to be sought here, yet at their , St these cocky and sentimental verse-tales have 41 certain vigorous charm.
Svveet, too, to renew acquaintance• and make r3ence with those old enemies from my Australian 1tellooldays `The Women of the West,' 'Where 5the Pelican Builds Her Nest' and. Adam Lindsay 'Cordon's 'Sick Stockrider.' One of the bush 'ballads I'd never come across before was 'Mad • lck, s Cockatoo.' The bird is addicted to booze. ReVing had one too many at the old Swagman's st, • • . it jerked out the pegs from the barrels and kegs,
Knocked the bottles all down from the shelf. With a sound like a cheer if dived into the beer And it finished up drowning itself.
John Manifold's Song Book is a more serious roPosition. He has confined himself to the real olk or popular ballads, many of which he has 0,11ected from old bushmen, swaggies and lay- bouts, and contributes an introduction which s both more scholarly and more sensible than r: Ward's. He also gives the tunes, a few of which, nal, played on my German melodica, sounded almost sub-Schubertian: though most of them
are pretty uninteresting compared with European or American folksong. Curiously, the first six bars of `The Little Fish,' a foc'sle song from the Queensland coast, are absolutely identical with those of that un-Australian, un-folk ballad, `Smilin' Through.' Perhaps Dick Fitzgerald of Charleville and Jack Wright of Coogee, Mr. Manifold's sources, remembered the tune from Jeannette MacDonald's movie.
CHARLES OSBORNE
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