The retelling of traditional tales, then, is fraught with dangers. Perhaps this is why, until now, there hasn’t been an entirely satisfactory version for English-speaking readers of an Aboriginal hero-tale. Bill Scott’s superb novel, Boori, triumphantly overcomes these dangers, succeeding in being a hero legend in the grand style, with all those reverberating atavistic memories aroused by great legends, yet always relating convincingly to the complex laws regulating the behaviour of the Aboriginal people of Australia rather than to those of western readers.

Boori is a chosen hero, formed of clay by an ancient wise man, not born of mortals, destined from the start to perform great deeds for his people. He is given two great quests and sent out into the world after his creator has taught him all the lore and magic and skills that he knows.

During his journey to the dry inhospitable desert from the south Queensland coast in fulfilment of his quests, Boori undergoes other ordeals, gaining strength and wisdom and experience from each. He takes heat and dust, thirst and meagre food, as natural elements of life, like the stones and the hills, the trees, and the animals and the southern sky.

Boori is at all times a proudly Aboriginal hero, a man of his people and bound by their laws. At the same time, he shares the classic heroic qualities found in legends everywhere - bravery, dignity and endurance, the power to inspire love and jealousy, the skill in combat of a Beowulf and the cunning wits of an Odysseus.

The story is excellently told, with plenty of suspense and exciting action vividly narrated. But it isn’t only a story of physical bravery. Boori’s deeds are achieved only with an expense of spirit and at the price of the loneliness of the leader who sees further and deeper than others.

The problem of heroic speech has been satisfactorily solved by the use of a faintly archaic, stately and rhythmic language, capable of many modifications:

I am weary of desert and dryness. and sick for the sight of the green grass and blue water, and the tall trees of the coast. Brothers, I am sick for the sights and sounds of my own place. There is an old man there who will rejoice at my coming, for he is my uncle and I owe him love and protection.

Grand stuff, perhaps, but there are plenty of touches of common humanity:

When the food was ready, each took his proper part of the bird; the old man taking the tender pieces and Boori getting the tougher bits, for among the People it was realized that young men have better digestions and old men fewer teeth.

Perhaps the strongest of bridges between the modern Australian reader of Boori and the ancient beliefs of the Aboriginal people is made by the vividness and subtlety of Bill Scott’s natural descriptions. ‘As high-pitched a sound as that made by bats hawking for insects in the twilight’; ‘the tea trees … standing knee-deep in the black water of the lagoons, the parrots ... shouting as they ate the honey blossom’; ‘a tune that seemed to waver on and on like wind in the branches of a river she-oak’- the landscape of Boori’s ancient deeds is still all around us.