Books: The Wide Open Species

BEYOND THE BLACK STUMP (316 pp.)—Nevil Shufe—Morrow ($3.75).

Britons are still apt to regard both Americans and Australians as colonials without much culture. In his eigth novel, British Author Nevil Shute has set up a kind of midget contest between these two “uncultivated” cultures. The contest arises when a bunch of American oilmen arrive in Australia’s spinifex country (so named for its tough desert grass). The Australians are astounded by the Americans’ ability to set up ice-cream plants in the desert, to work like madmen for oil in a country that probably lacks it and, anyway, needs water more. The Americans, in turn, are baffled by the Australians’ capacity for rum and their insistence on the right of man—state-given, if not God-given—not to work too hard.

Apart from watching Author Shute trying to decide who are the less cultured, the Yanks or the Aussies, the reader may have some fun with the locale: Laragh Station, a sheep “run” operated by the Brothers Regan. They are graduate gunmen of the Irish Republican Army who are busy populating their underpopulated principality with a brood of half-caste children, some named sentimentally for great figures of the Irish Troubles. Overproof Queensland rum is their drink; mutton is their food; and once a year a priest arrives on the scene to christen the new children, and to tell the elders that they are living in mortal sin. Mrs. Regan has been “married” to the two brothers in succession.

In these wide open spaces, Americans are a new species. Mollie Regan, red-haired and illegitimate daughter of one Regan, meets Stanton Laird, oil geologist from Oregon. His rival is David Cope, a “pommy” (Australian slang for English immigrant) who runs a neighboring station, a pint-size affair of about 300,000 acres. Mollie goes off to Oregon with the ice-cream addict, Stanton, but when she discovers that the U.S. frontier has been all softened up by milk shakes and civilization, she returns to the rum and mutton of the Australian never-never to cope with Cope.

Author Shute, himself a “pommy,” declared before he prepared to take his talents (and his private gardener) to Australia in 1951: “It is a long time since a first-class novelist has worked in the southern hemisphere.” This book does nothing to alter that situation. Before his writing lifted him into rarefied financial levels, Shute was an aeronautical engineer who helped design and fly Britain’s dirigible R.100 on its transatlantic flight of 1930.* His fiction has some of the improbable, inflated, but often entertaining quality of the lighter-than-air-machines.

* Shute’s novel, No Highway (1948), gave an imaginative account of an airliner’s disintegration through metal fatigue, which seemed very nearly prophetic in the light of the British Comet crashes in 1954.