Browsing through the interesting
library
of a reverend gentleman
who has
collected books for
many decades and
is often encountered rummaging about
in boxes at
garage sales , a slim volume inside a plastic sleeve attracted
attention .
On
extraction , at first glance , it seemed to be a worn
World War 1 book , Lights & Shadows
In Wartime – An Australian Tale , by S.
N . Hogg , the cover illustration
showing soldiers aboard a
troop transport waving goodbye at Sydney.
On
opening , it
was found to be the
covers only , with
a battered , insected copy of “ This ,
My Son ” , its covers missing , by Joan Kinmont , published in Hobart 1943 , with
an illustration of
a boy watching
an aeroplane. Originally started as a play
in verse , it is a collection
of poems opening with
a lament for peace
and then follows the life of a first
born son eventually killed serving in
the RAAF.
It proved incredibly popular during the
grim war period , ran to several reprints
and sold 100,000
copies . Republished
in England in
l945 , it contained a
preface by Prime
Minister John Curtin . Another
book of her poems , Two Little Girls , first published
in 1945 , also popular, was illustrated with
her own photographs.
Kinmont
, born in South Australia , one of four
daughters of a doctor , attended Adelaide’s renowned Wilderness School , and was
encouraged by her father
in her interest in theatre
and writing.
A one act
play of hers won first
prize in an Adelaide Repertory Theatre competition. In 1937,
a schoolteacher , she
married a distant cousin,
moved to Melbourne and
then Tasmania . A widow, she died
from cancer , aged 77.
In the case
of
Lights and Shadows In Wartime , the author , Samuel Nisbet Hogg
, born in India in 1849 , a bank manager and vegetarian , who
contributed to colonial
fiction , proceeds from the sale
of the book went
to the relief of Australian soldiers who had
“suffered the tragic loss of sight” treated
at the Sydney Industrial Blind Institute . It
contained a letter
written on a Braille typewriter by Private W. S. Noland , a soldier who had
felt hopeless due to
his blindness , but after two weeks’
tuition at the Insitute
a new world had opened up for him.
The illustrated
novel told how
a bank employee ,Tom, marries
Maud, another bank staffer.
The tune, Come into the Garden , Maud , gets a
run as does The Sun newspaper, in which old Cyclops
once worked. After the sinking
of the Lusitania by the Germans , Tom joins up , goes into camp at Liverpool , near Sydney, and is
placed in the famous Light
Horse
Brigade.
Banks
loomed large in author Hogg’s published
works . One was Lights and Shadows in
Banking . Others were A Banking Tale
, Why Some Bank Managers Should Retire
Early, Some of the Guidelines for Successful Branch Bank Management .
Other books dealt with a trip
to the Solomon Islands , Balmain Past and Present and Romance and Reality , the “ sad tale of Fleurette, a young vegetarian
lady of sensitive disposition , whose life is made miserable by living
in a society that has no
consideration for the plight of animals”.
