Word: clune
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WILD COLONIAL BOYS (657 pp.)-Frank Clune-Anglobooks...
What was all the banging about? As Frank Clune sees it, the old British system of sentencing petty criminals to hard labor in the colonies started a chain reaction that went on exploding for more than a century...
...Author Clune gives 1880 as the date at which the authorities finally rid the territory of the bushranger. By then, Aussie folklore was solidly built around such romantic idols as Ned Kelly (it cost ?110,000 to capture him and his gang); Ben Hall (the bullet holes in his body reappeared, it was said, as birthmarks on his bastard son); Frank Gardiner, whom a sympathetic jury stubbornly refused to hang and who ended his days as a relatively peaceful San Francisco saloonkeeper...
...Author Clune doesn't exactly extol these bandits, but there is a glow of something like patriotic pride in his prose when he sums up: "Within the limits of their equipment and opportunity . . . there is one claim which can be made for the Australian bushrangers, without fear of contradiction on the facts. Australia's Wild West period was as wild as. if not wilder than, the corresponding frontier phase in the United States of America...
...things are not so simple for the others. Clune's wife, Kathy, with whom Leda makes great friends, is half crazy with unsatisfied love of him; but he wants only Leda. Failing to get her he sets off to the War with suicidal intent. To hold him back, for Kathy as well as for herself, Leda gives herself to him, but he goes to War just the same. When she bears a child Blount, who is impotent, thinks it is his. Leda does not undeceive him. He has grown more & more powerful, more & more self-assured during Wartime politics...