Geography Readers - a Summary
Verena Visits New Zealand tells of an English girl sent to recuperate after an illness to relatives who live on a sheep farm in the South Island. During her stay she visits some of the country's tourist attractions, learns the merits of the New World and, in the end, persuades the rest of her family to emigrate to join her.
Sharlie's Kenya Diary is a travel diary told in the first person by the daughter of an English businessman who comes home one evening (p.9) and tells his wife,
"Well, they're sending me to Kenya on the inspection tour, Car. What's more, I'm taking you and Sharlie along. We sail in six weeks' time. All right?"Again, Sharlie gets to see some of the sights of the country and learns something of the white Kenyans' way of life.
Bess on Her Own in Canada has more plot than the others. Bess lives in the prairies of Saskatchewan. Her father has had an accident and needs help on the farm and Bess is despatched to find a cousin somewhere in British Columbia. She travels by train and boat, meeting only kindly well-wishers along the route. One of them happens to know her cousin's whereabouts, so she finds him and brings him back. On her way she sees quite a bit of western Canada and learns about fruit farming.
A Quintette in Queensland is, by contrast, almost completely devoid of plot and possibly the weakest of the four. Brent-Dyer's account of a sugar-cane plantation must surely be one of the dullest tales ever told. Moreover, the author made her characters locals, instead of describing everything through the eyes of an English person as with Sharlie and Verena.
Today the whole enterprise seems preposterous. Why couldn't Chambers have commissioned native writers to do the readers? Or at least English writers who had been to the places they were describing? Perhaps, in a sense, authenticity was precisely what was not required. Geography in the 1950s still upheld an imperial ideal; Sharlie could write in her Kenya Diary (p. 59):
Since the First World War we have had charge of Tanganyika which was a German Colony before that, and it all comes into British East Africa, along with Kenya, Uganda, and Nyasaland ...
The indigenous populations of the African states are described with kindly but patronizing interest - "some people have an awful time with dishonest boys", Sharlie notes (p. 19) - though the Maoris of New Zealand fare better; the Queensland Aboriginals are conspicuous by their absence, accurately reflecting white attitudes of the time.
Brent-Dyer's value system is no better and no worse than that of other educators of her era.
In Africa, wild animals exist to be shot: Sharlie's father "hopes to bag a lion" (p. 19). Gender roles are what you would expect: mothers don't work outside the home and, since domestic help is hard to find in three of the four countries in question, our girl heroines spend a lot of time making beds and cooking for the boys.
All families have mothers and fathers and no man takes advantage of 15-year-old Bess travelling alone across Canada.
Such a book could not be written today.
Rosemary Auchmuty - adapted from an article in New Chalet Club Journal 4, Autumn/September 1996