Australian Outback

Two-year-old Eric Taylor apparently ate insects and sucked wet foliage to survive while he was lost for five days in the Australian outback, rescue workers said Monday. The toddler, wearing only a disposable diaper, wandered into the bush near his home in the remote north Queensland town of Cooktown on Wednesday. When a rescue party found him Sunday, sitting naked in a scrub patch, the toddler grinned and stretched out his arms.

The lure of the Australian Outback is mysterious: Why should people want to live in the most inhospitable territory imaginable? Why, indeed, would two self-described middle-age dropouts want to tour a country where people say there is nothing to look at for hundreds of miles on end? Where "doing a perish" is an expression reserved for deaths in the bush "to distinguish that form of demise from garden-variety deaths"?

Alice to Nowhere by Evan Green (St. Martin's Press: $16.95; 285 pages) Once, while making a long train journey across Australia, I awoke to find we weren't moving. The train had broken down and stood silent on the tracks. Out the window of my compartment lay a barren and forbidding landscape. Hours passed and nothing moved except the heat waves, apparitions rippling the gum trees and a straight horizon of red clay. By noon, help arrived from Port Pirie, and we were once again on our way.

Steve Elkington didn't win the Los Angeles Open. He finished in a tie for eighth. But Elkington did finish first among all the pro golfers who are natives of the Australian Outback and are allergic to grass. And this is nothing to sneeze at. Elkington, who began Sunday's final round in a three-way tie for second place, began life in Inverell, in the northeast section of New South Wales along the MacIntyre River, 220 miles from the big city life of Newcastle.

In Dick Alexander's piece on the Australian Outback (Alice Springs) 12/6/87, he mentioned his guide, Geoff Purdie, twice, but did not tell how to get in touch with Purdie. Geoff does make wonderful damper bread and does several tours. An evening dinner tour, an Alice Springs people tour and a tour to a sheep ranch. He is assisted by his wife, Denise, and children. To contact Purdie, write P.O. Box 206, Alice Springs, Northwest Territory 5750. Shirley S. Huffman Orange

Most people would be delighted if they struck oil in their back garden. Not Dick and Irene Stevensen. They wanted water. The Stevensens, who farm a small property in the parched Queensland outback, put every cent of their savings into drilling a bore hole. Down and down they drilled until, at 3,840 feet, they struck water. Sadly, the supply was little more than a trickle and the Stevensens went away to think about what to do next. When they returned, the trickle had turned black--oil.

Were the intrepid explorers Stanley and Livingstone able to bring along a film maker to document their exchanges with native tribes, the pair might well have chosen one Dennis O'Rourke.

The sheep dogs of Australia don't drink beer, advertise airlines, make crocodile movies, walk on the wrong side of the road, sail yachts, wear slouch hats or come to work hung over on Monday morning. They do what their families raised them to do: herd sheep. That they do with the amazing brilliance of a mind reader, the endurance of an Olympic athlete and the doggedness of Winston Churchill. They also sit when they're told. "My old dog here, Broc, can herd 4,000 sheep at a time.

Christmas at Longtime by Hesba Brimsmead (Angus & Robertson/Salem House: $12.95) So many simplistic, cute and ordinary books about Christmas are published each year that it is a special delight to read one that is individual, sensitive and appealing to readers of all ages. Teddy Truelance is a winsome heroine, a typical 10-year-old girl, but from a particular family, time and place: Australia in the early years of this century.