Twenty-Three SAWBACK AND THE SPORTING PROPOSITION
Tex plays riffs all up and down the scale of language in this piece in a virtuoso register worthy of English satirist P.C. Wodehouse. The Indian fishing story trades on stereotypes about Aboriginal people as fascinating and yet uncultured, certainly, but it also gently lampoons the “sportsmanlike” fishing of the white protagonists with a slightly grudging nod to the efficiency and practicality of Aboriginal food-gathering. One senses here a form of reverse Romantic sensibility about the Noble Savage but this time the “Siawash” [aboriginal people], ironically called “noble aborigine.;],”1 are the really sensible ones; while white fishermen insist on “sporting” conduct in an impractical way.
—AG and JR