Cirrus@Austlit

While candid books on the Dominions are to be welcomed. There can be nothing but condemnation for the one in question. The author frequently lapses into unmerited abuse, and many of his statements will not bear examination. Mr Jacob lived six years in Australia, but nothing in the country pleased him. According to him, the men are ugly, the women waddle and are immoral, the food is bad, and the scenery is without beauty.... That a man should make such statements seems absolutely beyond the understanding of the average person and any colonial knows that they are utterly absurd (3 April 1914, p.4).

Charles Jacomb utterly refused to be absorbed by Australia and that is the reason he did not absorb enough of the real Australia... In the name of Australia generally, and Mildura in particular, I give Charles E. Jacomb the lie direct when he attacks as he does Australian women... and slanders Australian manhood. The trouble with Mr Jacomb was, and probably will ever be, that being what he is in physique and temperament, he affects to despise everything in the man of coarser fibre (?) From first to last throughout the 20 chapters of his effusion, Jacomb of Harrow forgets that there are in this world of paradoxes coal-heavers with soul and so-called gentlemen without. I would remind him that aesthetic temperament, finicky disposition and intolerance of the ways of others do not as a rule represent soul superiority, but instead soul inferiority of the most deplorable kind. Manhood adapts itself to circumstances (14 March 1914, p.7).

'It is a fact that customs and conditions vary the world over, and that a critical estimate of any one country can be formed only by comparing it, point by point, with surrounding lands. To make such a comparison is easy, to make it without offending is difficult. It is perhaps a difficulty that cannot be overcome' (n. pag.).