Archive

‘The feelings aroused in us by our old buildings are difficult to define. But they are none­the-less powerful feelings. There’s something of a dream-like quality in going back into the past; of projecting oneself into history; of identifying oneself with outstanding personalities and events in our national story; or perhaps with the simple and unknown pioneers who patiently laid the foundations of today. We, as heirs to this story, become one with our history. And the old buildings, which are visible reminders of that history, become ours in a very personal way.’

One late afternoon in early summer I went to the launching of Helen Arbib’s Looking at Cooking (Helen Arbib Publications, $3.50, 80 pp) in a beautifully restored and reanimated old house in the Rocks area of Sydney. On the way to Lower Fort Street I’d indulged in one of my favourite meanderings past sentimental landmarks. Among these is a section of Windmill Street, and the Hero of Waterloo Hotel.

This is an attractive book with its colourful dust jacket, clear type and layout, and delicate line drawings of individual herbs. The body of the book is an alphabetically arranged treatment of forty-two herbs, giving growing requirements, history, how to harvest and store and uses in medicine, toiletry and cooking. The recipes are original and include such interesting combinations as Pork au Santolina (which I tried and found worthy of a dinner party), and Lavender Beef.

This is the jubilee history of a unique Australian institution. Legacy, initially a club of World War I veterans, aiming to help each other re-establish themselves in civilian life, quickly became an organization concerned to assist the dependents of dead or incapacitated servicemen. Though the age of legatees is rising, the number of elderly widows increasing, and the number of dependent children declining, this remains its raison d’être. Forty-seven Legacy clubs today spend nearly $3,000,000 annually on some 100,000 widows and children in addition, personal assistance – leading youth groups, acting as advisers to bereaved families – continues the paramount part of Legacy’s service.

I think it was Judith Wright who once remarked that Lawson as a poet wasn’t important; that he seems, usually to have turned to verse as a journalistic medium or as a weapon for propaganda, and that the few of his better poems were such rather because of the intensity of feeling than through any technical or poetic gift.

Eucalypts for Wood Production is a highly professional reference work produced by a team of Australian forest scientists most of whom work in state, government forestry services, CSIRO or the Department of Forestry at ANU. It consists of a series of reviews of scientific literature bringing together all that is presently known of the growth habits of eucalypts from the point of view of their management as hardwood crop plants. The editors’ purpose is to draw attention to the potential of eucalypts and thereby to point the way to a national strategy for hardwood production. For those in the industry, its appearance is timely. Both softwood and woodchip production are under attack on several fronts, perhaps the most important of which concern the chemical and physical deterioration of soils associated with the harvesting of tree crops. Improvements in techniques for the profitable management of native hardwood forests may overcome some of these problems, and perhaps alleviate some of the pressure for increasing the acreage (hectareage?) of cleared land at the expense of our prime native forests.

Australian children’s literature has its own established heavies, writers whose work is well enough known both here and abroad, frequently in translation, and whose names would be well up in the Public Lending Right cheque lists. Some are so much in demand these days, that the time taken in preparing and giving speeches at conferences of librarians and others leaves them little time for the actual business of writing. However, they continue to dominate; each new work from them is eagerly awaited, read, reviewed and avidly discussed, if not by children then certainly by the growing adult following.