Daren
Idriess states in his author's note "For long I have wanted to write whatever comes into my head. And here it is. I have written on man, woman, insect and diprotodon, stories, incidents, articles....". Published in 1954 it focuses on stories from Western Australia's north, but does dip briefly in to New Guinea.
I don't think I am being unfair or inaccurate when I say this book is a bit of a muddle - less organised and less structured than this authors other works. I found the fragmentation disengaging, where normally this author is very engaging. It felt clearly like he had lots of fragments of stories he couldn't work into real pieces and perhaps that had been edited from other works as they weren't quite right. There were pages in here with only semi-related stories each of a paragraph, that didn't carry the narrative for me. Seldom are eh chapters directly related, so really this is a collection of short stories, non-fiction of course.
There were also other more focused chapters which did measure up to Idriess's other works, so it is not that this book has nothing to offer, but if this was your first book by this author, it may not encourage you back.
As usual it outlines quirks in Aboriginal culture, introduces dozens of real characters, Aboriginal a white living and working in remote desert country, their experiences, some stories and plenty of oddities. There ae numerous pages of photographs (black and white) of average quality for the era, mostly illustrating the story but not necessarily directly.
Three stars.
Idriess states in his author's note "For long I have wanted to write whatever comes into my head. And here it is. I have written on man, woman, insect and diprotodon, stories, incidents, articles....". Published in 1954 it focuses on stories from Western Australia's north, but does dip briefly in to New Guinea.
I don't think I am being unfair or inaccurate when I say this book is a bit of a muddle - less organised and less structured than this authors other works. I found the fragmentation disengaging, where normally this author is very engaging. It felt clearly like he had lots of fragments of stories he couldn't work into real pieces and perhaps that had been edited from other works as they weren't quite right. There were pages in here with only semi-related stories each of a paragraph, that didn't carry the narrative for me. Seldom are eh chapters directly related, so really this is a collection of short stories, non-fiction of course.
There were also other more focused chapters which did measure up to Idriess's other works, so it is not that this book has nothing to offer, but if this was your first book by this author, it may not encourage you back.
As usual it outlines quirks in Aboriginal culture, introduces dozens of real characters, Aboriginal a white living and working in remote desert country, their experiences, some stories and plenty of oddities. There ae numerous pages of photographs (black and white) of average quality for the era, mostly illustrating the story but not necessarily directly.
Three stars.