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Don Whitington became a journalist seven years before I was born, and moved to Canberra for the first time shortly before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He died last year, after a tragically bungled series of surgical operations, before he was able to complete his autobiography, Strive to be Fair.

The title is taken from a remark one of the many editors for whom he worked made: ‘There is no such thing as a good objective journalist. If you are not sensitive enough to feel for your subject, to have a point of view, to suffer joy or agony or sympathy about a story you are covering, you will never be a good journalist. Don’t strive to be objective. Strive to be fair.’

A person with competence and enthusiasm ‘in the field’ for this or that subject of natural history has ready opportunity to get with it in unusual haunts. Birds seem to be an obsession with such opportunity – the competent enthusiast has an instinctive reaction to give attention, and some write books about it.

Schools are the subject of very mixed treatment by the media. On the one hand, some publish regular feature articles, or even weekly columns; many of a high standard, dealing with education issues. On the other, news stories often focus upon criticism, all too often uninformed, by some public or political personality. Problems in schools are sensationalised, but positive achievements rarely reach the news pages.

Iola Matthews has provided a tool to help those concerned with schools to improve this situation. Media Handbook is a clearly written and intensely practical guide to local school councils and others. It tells how to write and use press releases, how to organise press conferences, how to conduct interviews with the media, and other aspects of the publicity game.

Bonnie McCallum was the first publicity officer appointed by the ABC in Victoria way back in 1936. The Commission was in the early stages of becoming Australia’s largest entrepreneur in the concert field, as well as establishing orchestras in every State, and Miss McCallum’s job, as the book jacket says, was to act as ‘hand holder to the visiting artists as well as liaison officer between them and the Press.’

This is a most interesting, readable and, in a larger context, valuable book. It deals with written recollections collected from some 215 living veterans from the First A.I.F. (some have since died) – a list of their names is included as an Appendix – detailing how they felt about the War as it approached and when it commenced, and also what led them to enlist at the time. Each informant is allowed to speak for himself, with his own peculiar spelling, punctuation end style of writing; in effect, the outcome provides a broad picture of the social origins and nature of this cross-section of soldiers.

A virile energetic people inhabits the island of Malaita in the middle Solomons. From the time of first contact Malaitamen were prized for their ability to work, but they had to be handled cautiously, or their inherited pride and confidence would turn them to rebellion. Those who live on the sea-coasts are readily adaptable to innovation when they can see value in it, but they abandon tradition with some misgivings.

Envisaged Worlds is an important anthology, not for the claims it makes, but for the claims it doesn’t.

Ronald Anderson’s latest book explores the potential for deer farming in Australia, and gives at least the initial information to someone wishing to establish a deer farm. By page eight of the book the profit potential of deer is already apparent. Their costs of production are relatively low, while product prices are extraordinary. For example, at the time of writing, New Zealand farmers were receiving $4.75 per kilogram for venison, some six or seven times the price of beef. As if this were not enough, there is the annual crop of velvet or immature antler, harvested without slaughter from the stags. Used as a component in Asian medicines, this returns no less than $110 to $150 per kilogram to the farmer or at least $300 per stag per year. Not satisfied? Then try the ‘by-products’ also obtained when the deer are slaughtered for venison. These range from mature antler (for jewellery) to frozen deer tails at $6 each (for culinary use) and from deer foetuses ($3 to $45 depending on stage of pregnancy) to deer penises! The last, which must be ‘...complete with testes and a tassel of hair…’, are graded (by length!) and frozen and return about $9 each to the farmer. In exploring the reasons for farming deer, Anderson raises one important issue early in the book and returns to it in several places. This is the hunter’s ‘...ambivalent attitude to deer…’ and to deer farming. To the hunting fraternity, says Anderson, deer are to be shot, not farmed. Unless, of course, they are farmed to provide stocks for shooting. The problem is that strong lobbying, based on such an attitude, would make it even more difficult than at present to obtain enough deer to stock a farm. The same attitude, prevalent in West Germany, led to a virtual embargo on the import of farm venison from New Zealand, in favor of ‘real venison’ shot in the wild, with obvious consequences for New Zealand’s deer farmers.

Karobran (Togetherness) by the late Monica Clare is not a great (or even a good) novel, but it is an important work and, as such, deserves to be widely read.