Books: Wild White Woman

JOHN GRAHAM, CONVICT (129 pp.)—Robert Gibbings—A. S. Barnes ($3).

Land of Lags and Kangaroo,

Of ‘possum and the scarce Emu

The Farmer’s pride but the Prisoner’s

Hell

Land of Bums—Fare-thee-well!

That is how one lag (longterm convict) apostrophized Australia in the early years of the last century, when the continent was turned into a British penal colony (a direct consequence of the American Revolution, after which British convicts could no longer be transported to the American Colonies). In short order, the very names of New South Wales and Botany Bay were enough to send a shiver up the spine of a London pickpocket or Galway poacher. In a brilliant fictionalized reconstruction of this period, Irish Artist-Writer Robert Gibbings has produced that most ingratiating of books—a tragedy with a happy ending.

With a fine command of Irish idiom, Cork man Gibbings tells the story of two people who were forced to live the lives of Stone Age man and woman in the Australian bush. One was John Graham, a feckless County Cork boy, who was transported for seven years for stealing six pounds of hemp. Assigned as convict-servant to a brutal farmer near Sydney, Graham grew sick and sore at a system by which a man might get as many as 1,600 lashes of a cat-o-nine-tails in a three-year period. He absconded into the bush, preferring (he thought) life among savages to being the prisoner of a civilized state.

In the bush, a more primitive mercy than the King’s justice awaited him. The “blackfellows” regarded white men as the returned ghosts of their own tribesmen. As a ghost, Graham was welcomed into a tribe, claimed as a husband by a lubra (squaw) and became a hunter of goanna lizard, a grubber for grubs. Author Gibbings’ narrative suggests that to a lively Irishman this simple life was simply and literally a bore. Eventually, Graham gave himself up to “the authorities.” But after he was back in irons, rumors came through to the New South Wales penal settlements that there was a wild white woman living among the savages. Graham was accepted as a volunteer to rescue her. She was Mrs. Fraser, wife of the master of the Stirling Castle, which had foundered off the Australian coast. Stranded in the wilderness, Mrs. Fraser was drafted into a tribe whose men roared with laughter at her inability to climb trees after honey, and sped her up the eucalyptus with blazing brands applied to her rump. She was fed on the entrails of snakes and fish.

The happy ending to this tragedy? Graham found his naked Mrs. Fraser, liberated her and was rewarded by a ticket of leave, i.e., conditional pardon, and £10 for his trouble. Happiest of all, Mrs. Fraser and her rescuer were not misled by the romantic situation into any foolish notions about marrying, but blithely went their separate ways. Mrs. Fraser left Australia almost as quickly as she could put on some clothes and Graham followed as soon as he was allowed to take off his leg-irons.