About the Author: James Vance Marshall
Pseudonym of Donald Gordon Payne.
He lives in Surrey, England, and has four sons and one daughter.
The Children, later known as Walkabout, though published under the name James Vance Marshall, was actually written by the English author Donald Gordon Payne as were a number of Payne's later works for children. The Children and other works were apparently based on Marshall's travel notes and diaries, and in the case of The Children, Marshall may have drafted the work. Marshall claimed the work as his own during his lifetime while Payne has also claimed it as his own. Following Marshall's death, and with permission from the family, Payne continued to publish novels for children and adults using Marshall's name. There has been confusion about the status of the works in numerous sources.
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James Vance Marshall, Lee Siegel
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Paperback, Published in Jan 2012 by NYRB Classics
ISBN10: 1590174909 | ISBN13: 9781590174906
Page count: 125
A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia,
and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South
Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary
and her younger brother Peter set out on foot, lost in the vast,
hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting
with an Aboriginal boy on walkabout, who teaches them to
find food and water in the wilderness, but whom Mary can’t
bring herself to trust.
Though on the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, darker
themes lie just beneath. Peter’s innocent friendship with the
Aboriginal throws into relief Mary’s no longer childish anxiety,
and together raise questions about how Aboriginal and Western
culture can meet. And in the vivid descriptions of the natural
world, we realize that this story—a deep fairy tale in the spirit
of Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal—must also be a story about
the closeness of death and the power of nature.
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