ANYONE who has sat through a session at Govan Police Court will know that survival in that leafy suburb of Glasgow naturally equips the citizens for life on any wild frontier you care to name.

They bred them tough as rivets and as gallus as get-out among the sandstone canyons.

It naturally follows that in my ongoing researches tracing stories of Scots immigrants to the ends of the earth, I've encountered Govanites aplenty in the front line.

Also, on occasion, I'm asked which Scotsman has left the biggest impression on me from among the legions who left willingly, or otherwise, to seek a new life in foreign parts to help shape their adopted nations for better or worse.

As it happens, it's not a man at all, but a formidable lady called Agnes Buntine, Glasgow's very own Calamity Jane, a lass from the Govan back-courts who made such a memorable stir in the young State of Victoria in Australia that she's remembered to this day in the Gippsland district as the White Mother.

Mauchline, in Ayrshire, from where the family set off on their great journey, also has a claim to Agnes, who was one of Australia's few women bullockies or ox-cart drivers. She married Kilwinning man Hugh Buntine soon after arriving in Victoria in 1840.

Her biographers describe her as showing all the qualities needed for a pioneer's wife - toughness, self-reliance, and a willingness to tackle all the jobs her husband might encounter.

Powerfully-built, she was once memorably described as a ''steam boiler on horseback'' and a surviving portrait of the lady shows strong, heavy-set, almost masculine features, her clear, intense eyes being her most marked attribute.

In an age when women generally wore crinolines, bonnets, and shawls, Agnes cut an impressive figure around the tough goldmining communities with her cabbage-tree hat, a long kilt over breeches which were tucked into her boots, and a heavy overcoat.

The story is told in Bald Hills of how Agnes, finding a drunk harassing and insulting a local girl on the sidewalk, took the bullwhip to the villain and ''damned near thrashed him sober''.

Many tales are told of this formidable woman, who after her husband started to ail, took over the business and rode around the country with a pair of pistols in her ''capacious'' belt.

On one occasion she was caught in a particularly ferocious bush fire and riding out the blaze on a clear patch of ground was badly burned, saved only, it's said, by her thick clothing and boots.

Remarkably, in the past few months, I've come across - via one of my bush correspondents - a lady in Victoria who appears to be Big Aggie reincarnated.

This woman is known at the Rules Football ground at Sale in Victoria under a variety of nicknames such as the Green-Eyed Assassin, the Canvas Terrorist (because she wields her brolly to such effect), or the Despicable Diplomat.

This veteran uses her brolly in deadly defence of the Sale boys and should anyone within range be foolish enough to abuse her team, they are liable to get a wallup behind their knees or the handle of the brolly around their throat.

For a hundred miles around she's known to the football crowds for her antics, yet the self-same lady is a generous soul, one of the district's biggest charity fundraisers.

You won't be stunned to learn that she's from Scots stock and related to the Buntine clan through marriage - an adopted Govanite, in fact.