Word: shuting
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Britons are still apt to regard both Americans and Australians as colonials without much culture. In his eigth novel, British Author Nevil Shute has set up a kind of midget contest between these two "uncultivated" cultures. The contest arises when a bunch of American oilmen arrive in Australia's spinifex country (so named for its tough desert grass). The Australians are astounded by the Americans' ability to set up ice-cream plants in the desert, to work like madmen for oil in a country that probably lacks it and, anyway, needs water more. The Americans, in turn...
Apart from watching Author Shute trying to decide who are the less cultured, the Yanks or the Aussies, the reader may have some fun with the locale: Laragh Station, a sheep "run" operated by the Brothers Regan. They are graduate gunmen of the Irish Republican Army who are busy populating their underpopulated principality with a brood of half-caste children, some named sentimentally for great figures of the Irish Troubles. Overproof Queensland rum is their drink; mutton is their food; and once a year a priest arrives on the scene to christen the new children, and to tell the elders...
...regardless of race; 4) improved educational standards so that children of all races can eventually be taught in the same schools. The Capricorn Society's idea for multiple votes (up to six for anyone with such qualifications as higher education, property holding and military service) derive from Nevil Shute's novel In the Wet. The society's next step: getting these provisions enacted into law in each territory...
...enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of illiterate tribesmen has its problems. Kenya's Minister for Education, Labor and Lands, Walter Fleming Coutts, appointed to study possible electoral systems, last week proposed multiple voting (an idea that Coutts had read about in Novelist Nevil Shute's satirical In the Wet), by which each voter will have voting points varying according to his educational advancement and status: if he can read, has finished high school, has served five years in the armed services, and been decorated, he can earn up to six votes. Coutts's proposals came under attack...
...BREAKING WAVE, by Nevil Shute (282 pp.; Morrow; $3.50). Why did Jessie Proctor take a bottlefull of sleeping pills? The suicide of his parents' maid is a mystery that challenges Alan Duncan, just returned from Europe to manage the family's huge sheep ranch near Melbourne, Australia. Thanks to the dead girl's diary, Duncan's sleuthing takes him less than 24 hours, but an almost continuous flashback takes him over years of personal history, etched in the common memories of a whole generation of Britons who fought in World War II. Alan discovers that Jessie...