AustLit

The 'Contributed Comments' column includes three brief sections discussing recently published works of (auto)biographical writing that are outside the scope of AustLit: Home from the Sea (by Sir Arthur H. Rostron); Indiscretions of a Young Man (by R. V. C. Bodley); Frank Harris on Bernard Shaw: An Unauthorised Biography Based on First Hand Information (by Frank Harris with a postscript by Bernard Shaw).

Contains a speculative discussion initiated by the influx of American tourists arriving on Australian shores. E. J. Francis writes: 'By cripes, we are discovered! Has anyone, we wonder, paused to think of the consequences?...It means that more and more tourists will pour on to these shores, until a literary market is created. That is, eventually there will be sufficient Americans who have been to Australia to make it worth someone's while to write a book about it...Of course, there have been books on Australia before, but they have been of the explorer type, written by travellers, with self-conscious superiority...But the new type of book will be something far worse than that...It will deal with us, not with our country...Shortly after writing the above, we saw in a paper that one of the expected books had been written. The author, however, does not appear to possess the qualifications...and he simply slaps at us ineffectively, like an Englishman at a mosquito, with the old remarks about crudity and immaturity...To say that a nation about 100 years old, and 13,000 miles from the nearest decent western civilisation, is immature is merely to display a grasp of the obvious.' (content appears in the monthly column, 'The Bibful', by E. J. Francis)