Mobile Icons. "The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn and the Myth of the Frontier" by Brigid Hains and "Australia's Flying Doctors" by Roger McDonald and Richard Woldendorp. [review]

Abstract

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.Tensions between wilderness and 'home' recur at many levels throughout "The Ice and the Inland". The sublime landscape was beyond humanity, yet the ice explorers sought a language that could embrace it and 'draw it closer to their life-world'. The men of the south celebrated freedom from a domestic world controlled by women, yet worried about their absence.