Wilder than the West?

WILD COLONIAL BOYS (657 pp.)--Frank Clune--Anglobooks ($5).

"I say once more, leave them horses" said the [outlaw], "or I'll blow your b-----brains out, you b -----wretches!"

Bang! Bang! barked the police revolvers.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! from the [outlaws] . . .

Every U.S. boy used to be raised on such firewater, with Injuns thrown in to boot. Any who feel like a fresh snort from the old jug could do worse than sample this Australian distillation. Wild Colonial Boys is written in standard Wild West prose; it begins banging almost from the start, and is still banging after more than 600 pages of close print. The blurb on the jacket says it "should be read by every Australian, for it casts a new light on our national heritage." For once, the b -----(for bloody) blurb is right.

What was all the banging about? As Frank Clune sees it, the old British system of sentencing petty criminals to hard labor in the colonies started a chain reaction that went on exploding for more than a century:

The jury says, "He's guilty, sir!"

And says the judge, says he--

"For life, Jim Jones, I'm sending you

Across the stormy sea.

And take my tip, before you ship

To join the iron gang,

Don't be too gay at Botany Bay,

Or else you'll surely hang ..."

But by and by I'll break my chains;

Into the bush I'll go;

And join the brave bushrangers there--

Jack Donahoo and Co.

By 1840, when the last convict ship reached New South Wales, the colony had received 83,290 prisoners. Each convict had to work out his stretch at something close to slave labor, either on a private farm or on state works. Brutality drove many to escape and outlawry, so the old petty larcenist became the new bushranger--a combination of rustler and highwayman. In the public mind, he also lost his criminal record and became one who "robbed the rich and helped the poor, and never harmed a lady."

It was, as always in such stories, the agent of law & order, the unhappy cop or bumbling sheriff, who bit the most dust. Governor after governor struggled to bring the vast new territory into a lawful state; each arrived with a new broom under his arm and left trailing it behind him. Australia's yellow press and its best and gayest ballads flourished in the sort of soil that gave Jesse James to the U.S.:

At gentle speed, on snow-white steed,

And singing a joyous song,

To the beckoning light in the shadowy night

The Bushranger rides along . . .

Up started then Sir Fred and his men

With cocked carbines in hand,

Andcalled aloud to the 'Ranger proud,

On pain of death, to "stand."

But the 'Ranger proud, he laughed aloud,

And bounding rode away,

While Sir Frederick Pott shut his eyes for a shot,

And missed--in his usual way.

Author Clune gives 1880 as the date at which the authorities finally rid the territory of the bushranger. By then, Aussie folklore was solidly built around such romantic idols as Ned Kelly (it cost -L-110,000 to capture him and his gang); Ben Hall (the bullet holes in his body reappeared, it was said, as birthmarks on his bastard son); Frank Gardiner, whom a sympathetic jury stubbornly refused to hang and who ended his days as a relatively peaceful San Francisco saloonkeeper.

Author Clune doesn't exactly extol these bandits, but there is a glow of something like patriotic pride in his prose when he sums up: "Within the limits of their equipment and opportunity . . . there is one claim which can be made for the Australian bushrangers, without fear of contradiction on the facts. Australia's Wild West period was as wild as. if not wilder than, the corresponding frontier phase in the United States of America."

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