Australia Infelix

BOTANY BAY -- Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall -- Little, Brown ($2.50).

Whatever damage they are doing elsewhere, the Japanese are currently boosting the sales of Nordhoff & Hall's Botany Bay. Reason: U.S. curiosity about the Pacific Ocean in general, about Australia (a potential anti-Axis bastion) in particular.

The South Seas are almost a Nordhoff & Hall property. Joseph Conrad's domain was the Indian Ocean and the East Indies, which, in the guise of simple sailors, squatters and scoundrels, he populated with the greatest crew of 1890 neurotics to be found in 20th-century literature. Nordhoff & Hall's sphere of influence is east of Conrad's, and humanly much less complicated. Not the first who ever burst into that silent sea, they were nevertheless the first U.S. writers to take some 130,000 readers along with them (Mutiny on the Bounty") and still keep a good percentage for a second and third voyage (Men Against the Sea and Pit cairn Island).

Before Nordhoff & Hall, popular notions of the southwestern Pacific were of an earthly paradise--"summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea." Actually, it was a region almost inhuman in its vast emptiness, sparsely broken here & there by tribes as different as the primitive Australian Black Fellows, the highly evolved Maoris and Kanakas. The dark question mark of its prehistory was embodied in its one permanent monument, that avenue of stone giants on remote Easter Island, who seem to stare not so much toward the secret of their origin as into utter vacancy.

Into this region the white men brought immense dislocation, suffering and death. Nowhere was this suffering more methodically macabre than in that triumph of Government planning, the British penal colony at Botany Bay, Australia, which furnishes the backdrop and title for Nordhoff & Hall's latest novel.

The Book. Hero and narrator of Botany Bay is Hugh Tallant, a young Marylander, who with the rest of his family fought for the King during the American Revolution. Result: Hugh presently found London a safer spot than Baltimore, but no more hospitable. Since the British Government showed little inclination to reimburse him for his lost estates, Hugh decided to refinance himself, turned highwayman. Caught on his first holdup, Hugh was eventually shipped out for life in the first convoy of criminals to settle Botany Bay.

There were eleven ships in the convoy, 756 convicts. There were "folk in their sixties and seventies, and boys and girls of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Some [had been] condemned ... to seven years' transportation for such offenses as stealing a petticoat, poaching a hare in a gentleman's park, cutting down a tree for fire-wood." But also there were "murderers amongst us, footpads, housebreakers, coiners, and river thieves ... a good half of them were as complete villains as could have been found in the whole of Europe."

The voyage took eight months. When their shackles were finally struck off, the women convicts promptly took advantage of the new freedom. One morning half of them were drunk. The captain, a quiet, shy man questioned them. "One bold-looking wench had been fighting, for her face was scratched and bruised and one eye swelled shut. ... 'I ain't been fightin', Captain. Oh, no!' said the woman with a leer at the others. 'Ye see . . . just as I was dishin' out the tea, the bloody ship rolled, and I had the cursed luck to go arsy-varsy and tread upon me eye.' 'Never believe 'er, sir,' yelled another. 'She's a bawdy-house bottle got cracked for bein' empty!' 'Silence!' said Captain Gilbert, his face as red as his hair. 'Hip, Michael! Yer head's on fire!' 'Ye'd best come down and play rantum-scantum with us, old chicken-hams!' "

On the coast of Australia stood tall, lean, stark-naked black men, who shook spears and shields and shouted with commendable prescience: "Warawara!" (Go away!). "By God!" said one of the convicts, "we've been pitched out like dirt by them at home, and even the bloody savages won't have us!"

When Botany Bay proved uninhabitable, the convoy moved down to Sydney harbor. "No man," writes Convict Tallant, "who sees Sydney for the first time today can form the least conception of the harbour's unspoiled beauty. . . . Forests of gum and cedar trees stood at the head of nearly every cove. Clouds of snow-white cockatoos [and] bright-coloured parrakeets rose in thousands from the trees. . . . In one cove a pair of black swans floated majestically. . . . We were the first white men to gaze on these scenes of unsullied loveliness. . . ."

First thing some 800 convicts and sailors did on landing was to get roaring drunk. First thing Convict Tallant did was try to escape. He failed. The rest of Botany Bay is chiefly a description of the excitement of colonizing a not too fertile coastal strip with a horde whose behavior would have baffled a board of expert penologists.

But gradually houses were built, crops planted, order enforced. The best of the convicts began to find the right jobs. Highwaymen Tom Oakley and Hugh Tallant became hunters. Ex-farm woman Nellie Garth became an agrarian expert. Sneak-thief Mortimer Thynne became a bureaucrat. The lives they were leading were better than they had ever led in England; yet their one thought was still to escape. At last the cleverest of them did.

In an open-boat voyage, reminiscent of Captain Bligh's, Hugh Tallant and seven others fled from Sydney to a point south of Timor (some 3,000 miles), eventually reached England. But Convict Tallant found London tame after the Antipodes. Pardoned because of his services as a U.S. Tory, married to the daughter of a man who had been transported as a U.S. rebel, Tallant returned to Australia to farm among convicts and aborigines.

Nordhoff & Hall are highly skilled, careful, straightforward literary artisans. Their main purpose is to tell a good story excitingly. In Botany Bay they do it again.

The Authors. In a Nordhoff & Hall novel, readers often wonder which wrote what. In the case of Botany Bay the answer is simple: Nordhoff wrote the odd-numbered chapters, Hall the even. They had previously divvied up the research, roughed out the story together. That took them six years. They wrote the book in eight months. They exchanged chapters as they finished them, hacking and cutting each other's work, gradually blending it into a single style.

Their remarkable collaboration really began a few weeks after the Armistice when Nordhoff was sitting around the American Air Service headquarters in Paris. An officer, whose name he can't remember, introduced him to Hall. Nordhoff had been in the Lafayette Flying Corps. Hall was in the Lafayette Esquadrille.

Watching treaty making in Paris, they decided that the world they had known was finished, determined to go off together to some lonely place to write. Their first lonely place turned out to be New England. William Kissam Vanderbilt, who largely financed the Lafayette Flying Corps, commissioned them to write its official history. Then Harper's offered Hall a contract to visit the South Seas and write travel stories. Nordhoff wangled "some sort of contract" out of the Atlantic. They set off for Australia, touched at Tahiti, made their home there.

At present they have no plans for another book. Says Nordhoff: "What can we do? This is not the time to write our kind of story. To hell with those ivory towers. Both of us are trying to get some kind of war work. What, I don't know, since we're both 54. Hall tried to join up with the Canadian Air Force, but was turned down. Best I can do immediately is write and work for the Federal Union group. I can't understand how Jane Austen could have written her Pride and Prejudice during the Napoleonic wars."

Hall returned to Tahiti last May, with his wife and daughter. Nordhoff is living with his young, pretty second wife (he and his native wife are divorced) and three very beautiful daughters on the old Hope Ranch near Santa Barbara.

Nordhoff always gets every edition of Jane's Fighting Ships. Says he: "For years my great love has been the U.S. Navy. I know more about it than most nonprofessionals. I know every ship. Nothing in my life has ever hurt me as much as what happened at Pearl Harbor. What a horrible thing those in charge did. They owe for the lives of every man killed there. Maybe the Japanese have something in this hara-kiri business."

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