Among The He-Men At

Australia's Top End

When Keith Willey says, part way through his book, that “for me the death of a pub is always sad,” he is almost establishing the lietmotij of Eaters of the Lotus , an account of life in the Top End of Australia. Almost, but not precisely.

ALTHOUGH there seems to be an inordinate amount of grogging-on through the 180 pages of his book, there are compensating plums of wisdom.

The theme of the book is Aus tralia’s empty north, but unlike many other writers on the same subject, Willey spent 6i years there, working first as a newspaperman and later as a crocodile shooter.

His wanderings and the scope of his story stretch from Darwin, south along the Bitumen to Alice Springs and west to the Kimberleys, the Ord River Scheme and Kununurra with its vision of new-type pioneering, to meat-works at Wyndham and to Hall’s Creek, Derby and near-busted Broome.

And woven closely in with the pen pictures of these places are pen pictures of the white, black and brindle humans who live in them, and the legends and stories that have grown up around them—stories pathetic and bawdy, scurrilous, sordid, and frequently very funny.

"Gin-burglary"

There is little that is soft and sentimental in this account of Top End pioneering; if men entertain any romantic ideas of “going west, young man”—or north— they hide it well under a tough exterior in which the ability to live rough and the

pastimes of pubs, bars, grogging-on and “gin-burglary” (what in New Guinea Pidgin is termed “pulling Marys”) get top priority.

Men also, of course, raise cattle, prospect, go pearling (although in very small numbers, now) or work at the meatworks of Wyndham and Derby during the brief killing seasons.

Willey’s book captures the spirit of the outback as it no doubt is; but whether its predominant slant towards odd-ball characters will inspire young Australians to go north and pioneer a new frontier (as Willey’s publishers hope the book may), is something else again.

Man With Ideas Most successful pioneering efforts have been built on normality—home, Dad, Mum and the kids—but while Australia’s empty north has been singularly short on this commodity, it has always been long in rugged individualists such as a large propor tion of this book describes.

Willey is a young man with ideas which he expresses well and pungently and which, if they happen to co incide with your own, are fun; but which, if they don’t, probably raise the blood-pressure.

He has small use for proliferating public servants who now infest such places as Darwin; or for Government muddle in the north or dilatoriness.

He thinks that the 38,000-square

mile Arnhem Land aboriginal reserve has outlived its usefulness and that it could be more usefully used other wise. He would like to see Alice Springs and all the territory south of Tennant Creek returned to South Australia, with which it has an affinity; and all the rest of the north, right across to Broome, included in a new administrative and development area called Kimberley.

Most of his ideas are soundly based; some—such as the idea of throwing this northern area open to controlled “Polynesian and Mel anesian migration”—seem off the beam.

Most Polynesians of my acquaint ance would as soon go to the salt mines of Siberia or the guano diggings of Peru as to the undeveloped north of Australia, and 1 doubt whether many Melanesians would be enthusi astic at the prospect, either.

Entertaining

Just as a story, this book is enter taining; and if you can get your sights over the empty beer-cans, gives considerable scope for mental exercise.

It is illustrated with 45 black and white photographs, remarkable mostly for the number that show men drink ing something, and for the fact that no white women and only about three aboriginal women appear in any of them.

Keith Willey recently spent a year or so as a newspaperman in New Guinea, and is currently living on the north coast of NSW. —IT. (EATERS OF THE LOTUS. Jacaranda Press. 39/6.)