Bufflehead And The Boys

It was inevitable that Norman Lindsay’s Saturdee, the story of Australian boyhood, would be compared with Tom Sawyer, the famous story of American boyhood, yet I can’t see that it matters much.

“T>OOK for book, I enjoyed and still " enjoy Saturdee more,” says Aus tralian critic and poet Douglas Stewart. “It is more consistently amusing than Tom Sawyer, it is more lifelike, a more authentic picture of boyhood; and consequently it evokes and sustains more firmly those recol lections of one’s own boyhood which are one of the chief pleasures such essentially reminiscent works pro vide.”

All this, Australian readers, new and old, will heartily agree with, and because such books do evoke recol lections of one’s own boyhood, American readers will probably still prefer to stick to Mark Twain’s work for their reminiscencing. Boys might be boys, but their spheres of opera tion are different.

Discover Girls Norman Lindsay’s boys grow up in Redheap, a fictional town in the Ballarat district of Victoria, where Norman Lindsay himself grew up.

Saturdee was originally published in 1934, so this new edition just pro duced by Ure Smith will re-introduce Lindsay’s scallywags to a new genera tion wno will get just as much enjoy ment out of Ponkey, Stinker, Buffle head and the gang, and their views on Mums, Uncles, and Other Blokes, and their discovery of Girls.

Uncle Ferdinand, for instance, “was long and lank, with a furtive, tender nose and mournful beer - strainer moustache . . . bent on putting for ward a fiction that he was a spritely fellow, whereas he was the dankest uncle alive. Not a wink in him”.

Pointer Brindle was “a boy much denounced by mothers and therefore well worth going with. He had a sharp, foxy face looking out from between a large pair of ears, which had got a start in the race for life and arrived at Manhood before the rest of Pointer Brindle”.

'The Lasher' And there was the gang’s view of Rev. Critchet—the “lasher of rumps”.

“What is one to make of such a man, who emerges from the remote potterings of his adult status to in trude actively on the real world of your affairs? Adults, under any terms, are hard to classify, always ex cepting grooms—a noble race—and school teachers, whom you all know about by an enforced investigation of their idiosyncrasies. Chinamen are known by your business relations of theft, gambling and the sport of being chased by them. Old fossickers you know, because they frequent your do main of the creek levels, and are a leisured race, sitting on mullock heaps to smoke while you puddle with their pans and sluice boxes. But this Reverend Critchet . . . at a rough classification he was a bloke who’d give yer a chase, although old Monkey Ah Soon would do that.

What of his terrible proficiency with his flexible walking-stick, not being a schoolmaster and licensed to lash?

For not only did he play his instru ment on the backside of Snowy Critchet, his legitimate property, but he practised freely on rumps going strictly about their private affairs . .

Today Norman Lindsay is 82 and behind him stretches a lifetime of writing, drawing, painting, etching and cultural activity, yet he has several works yet to be published.

s.I.

(SATURDEE. Published by Ure Smith, Sydney. 21/-.)