Brigid Hains

I’ve always been interested in trying new things,’ Tim Jarvis declares disarmingly in the opening  line of The Unforgiving Minute, ‘and I’m not sure I know exactly why.’ Unlike Scott or Shackleton, Jarvis has no literary aspirations but is a knockabout bloke who gives motivational talks on his adventures and who believes in a gospel of personal effort, physical challenge and – trailing these two by a long margin – the wonder of the natural world. This account of a series of polar journeys is self-consciously structured using the effective journalistic device of plunging the reader into an intense situation at the opening of each chapter, and finishing each chapter with a teaser for the next. Like most accounts of polar exploration, it is a weird blend of numbing dullness and compulsive interest. Jarvis has taken the lessons of his public speaking and turned them into a pleasing book, firmly in the self-help genre, with gripping accounts of the many crises that inevitably beset extreme adventure expeditions, not to mention the prurient details of toilet habits, tooth decay and muscle wastage.

This is a tale of a farm boy who grew up in ‘the world of the rural poor, [which] remained what it had been for generations; a day’s walk in radius, a tight, well-trodden loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot’. It is the story of James Cook’s dramatic escape from that loop, told by another equally restless soul, American journalist Tony Horwitz, who spent eighteenth months travelling the Pacific in the wake of Cook’s three great voyages of discovery.

Australia’s frontier legend is alive and well, as is John Flynn’s contribution to it in these two new books. In Australia’s Flying Doctors, Richard Woldendorp’s glorious photographs celebrate a medical service that reaches about eighty per cent of the vast Australian landmass. They are complemented by Roger McDonald’s economical personal vignettes of outback spirit.