Word: ophir
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...himself was sold to a cattle thief at twelve. At this stage the reader who suspects that the novel is a subversive Australian attempt to prove that its "West" is, if not as wild, at least a great deal woollier than the U.S. West will be right. Along the Ophir River, in the far "backblocks" of Queensland in the '80s, life bravely tried to illustrate Hobbes's definition of man's existence in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short...
Tony Yates hits the Ophir River country when it is clearly the place to separate the men from the boys; the reader may find difficulty in separating the men from the animals. Tony stakes out free land (having deceived a government surveyors' party as to just where water was available), steals cleanskins (i.e., unbranded cattle), lives like a patriarch among a mob of women, and toward the end of a misspent life is so rich that he threatens to entertain a visiting royal duke, presumably the Duke of York, later King George VI of Britain. For years Tony...