Sheep Opera

ROGUE YATES (349 pp.)--Tom Ronan --Putnam ($3.95).

The sunburnt dash-dash stockman stood, And, in a dismal dash-dash mood,

Apostrophised his dash-dash cuddy; "The dash-dash nag's no dash-dash good . . ."

This, on the testimony of Robert Graves (in 'Lars Porsena' or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language), is an antipodean ballad in which is celebrated Australia's addiction to a certain adjective which goes as profanity in Britain, i.e., "bloody." The lines more or less tell the story of Rogue Yates, a relentlessly robust novel in a little-known genre--the Australian western. Author Ronan's sunburnt bloody stockman is a dwarfish near-albino of repulsive appearance and character, named Tony Yates. His father, an ex-convict, used to beat his gin-sodden mother with his wooden leg; a sister was active in a sort of open-air bordello, and Tony himself was sold to a cattle thief at twelve. At this stage the reader who suspects that the novel is a subversive Australian attempt to prove that its "West" is, if not as wild, at least a great deal woollier than the U.S. West will be right. Along the Ophir River, in the far "backblocks" of Queensland in the '80s, life bravely tried to illustrate Hobbes's definition of man's existence in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Tony Yates hits the Ophir River country when it is clearly the place to separate the men from the boys; the reader may find difficulty in separating the men from the animals. Tony stakes out free land (having deceived a government surveyors' party as to just where water was available), steals cleanskins (i.e., unbranded cattle), lives like a patriarch among a mob of women, and toward the end of a misspent life is so rich that he threatens to entertain a visiting royal duke, presumably the Duke of York, later King George VI of Britain. For years Tony had lived in a shack and never learned to read, but he employed a man to read good books to him--like Rudyard Kipling's.

Old Tony Yates dies at last, after guzzling lukewarm champagne from the bottle, but not before he has shown himself tougher even than a U.S. visitor who thoughtfully retired to the more civilized climate of Texas. U.S. readers will appreciate Author Ronan's narrative gusto, his authentic, sometimes stomach-turning local color, and the chance to compare the U.S. and down-under forms of the western. Some differences spring to mind at once: Australian cowboys are called stockmen; they use 21-ft. whips rather than lariats; the noble redman of the plains is an ignoble blackfellow, i.e., aborigine; most important, the police are not star-spangled sheriffs hunting down bad men--they are the bad men.

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