Guy Rundle - 50 People Who Stuffed Up Australia

Go, little book, satiric? Shocking?

Go now, and stuff those stockings

Sharp, smart, Christ hopefully funny

Take wing and for good folding money

Permit the stumped, frustrated donor

Rejoice! Their gifting problems over.

Inscrutable uncles, smart-arse nieces

This tome will have them all in pieces

Fly to those come from afar

Odd family friends (you know who you are)

But not just birthdays, Christmas.

The book stands alone! Also, barmitzvahs.

Heres love and work, the furrow tilled

Something more than stocking-fillery

Perhaps product of wisdom, distilled

But certainly, of a distillery

this is not legally binding

ANY BOOK IS LIKE A SET OF PIPES. Putting it together involves assessing the diameter of the carry-through, and matching flange-casing to bolting choices. Plastic versus metal is always a dilemma, and of course corrosive power of the casing element has to be factored into a final choice. Maybe thats obvious, or maybe its because Im the manager of one of Essendons leading plumbing supply firms that I think that, and also that someone at the Hardie Grant office screwed up. But Ive got child support so I signed the contract they faxed over.

Personally Im not a big book person. Read the Guns of Navarone when I was twenty-three, liked it, didnt seem much point in keeping going. Youd only be disappointed. I like movies more, horror mainly. I like ones where something sharp goes in someones eye and comes out the other side of their head but the guys still alive and the guy who did it says something like, Ive got my eye on you. Oh sorry, other way round. Then you hear the dogs. Also films like say where someones made a machine to take all of someones skin off but still keep them alive and then theres a sequel. I really like those films. If I built a sex dungeon in my house, groundwater wouldnt be a problem, let me tell you.

Enjoy!

I HAVE BECOME A VICTIM of poppy-lopping syndrome, the late Robert Hughes remarked after he had nearly decapitated another driver with his car, while returning from a fishing jaunt, Picassoed as a newt. Actually he had become a citizen subject to the procedures of law and order, but he wasnt the first distinguished Australian, caught in extremis, to claim that the country has a unique capacity to do down its high-rollers. Trouble is, every country claims it does that, or the great and good of it do save in the United States, because its fucking mad. For the rest of us, there is a need from time to time to take stock of where we have been and where we are now, and wonder where it all went wrong. For it has always gone wrong, it will never come good, you have always known that it would never be all right, as Portugals Max Walker, Ferdinand Pessoa, wrote in the yuk-a-minute Book of Disquiet. We assess what could have been, take stock of all the moments where it failed to happen, and when we have nothing but a collection of failed moments, drawing us away from what is now a null set of hopes and possibilities, then that is who we are, before death transforms us from first draft to unfinished manuscript. No, dont thank me. In investigating Australia as simply the precipitate that remains from a series of stuff-ups, it became clear that it was often the dead and unknown who had had more sway in the process, rather than living higher-profile people with the best lawyers. It was also clear that there were people too close to my heart, who nevertheless deserved some attention. Thus I asked a right-wing commentator friend to take on a couple of the bigger beasts, to which he agreed on condition of a nom de grrrr. This volume began as a thesis on mid-century Australian romance fiction, Phar Lap and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria for Edith Cowan Universitys Department of Cultural Geography and Space Knowledges, before being repurposed as a pitch for a Packed To the Rafters episode. Subsequent versions included one featuring a fish-out-of-water inner-city Melbourne detective, and a screenplay for an AFFC film about a laconic young woman who mistakes sex for love in a rural/suburban setting she is trying to get away from. The finished product you now have in your hands is currently being adapted by a leading avant-garde theatre company as a retelling of Wozzeck through the mirror of Badiou in a first nations language TBD. It will be the entire contents of the 2014 Norfolk Island Festival of Ideas; Paul Grabowsky is going to jazz it; and one copy has been placed in the panic

Gstaad-Cardiff-Esk, 2013.

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this introduction, please call Samaritans Australia or, if busy, Catherine Deveny.

for that image my thanks are due to Brendan Fevola

The Man from Showy Drivel

There was amusement in the nation, cos by constant proclamation

Old A B from Binalong had got his way

And though the country was part suburb, and part vast and dull sheep station

A more heroic take would have its day

So amidst the tort and probate of a Sydney lawyers shop

Young Albert told a tale of wild affray

Of wild horses, daring deeds, of stirrup, whip and crop

Then he closed his books and took a tram home by the bay

And when published in its glory, the public loved this story

Deeds of daring in a wild and untamed land

For even if its hoary theres nothing like hortatory

Odes for nations otherwise intent on being bland

So in train and tram and villa, from Bellevue Hill to Bonegilla

We went all the way with Banjo on the slide

Every clerk and grazing farmer was in his mind the raffish charmer

Who rode to fortune down the mountainside

And from that moment we were cactus, a nation forced to act as

If we were all wild, outdoorsy types manque

Though to drop-ins it was clear, our lives were less frontier

Than an endlessly restagd Wye-on-Hay

Despite all evidence concerning, this absurd heroic yearning

We were settled city-slickers from the start

But a timid mans reflection, cant bear too much inspection

So in hunger for the real we turned to art

Now, we wield the whipper-snipper, and read Xmas books by Dipper

Were still on the young lads mountain run

From Bloemfontein and Gallipoli, to Tobruk and to Tripoli

You can just stand back and point us to the guns

Were still charging through the sharp rocks, saving someone elses livestock

From Iraq to mining tax, our rep abides

Thanks to Banjo and the kid, well reliably bring the stupid

You can always take an Aussie for a ride, boys

You can always take an Aussie for a ride.

THE MOUTH HAS MORE than a slight touch of sadness about it, the corners downturned, as if its owner has seen too much suffering, too much human folly. It is a face that is impossible to hate. The soft Germanic voice is quite unlike the caricature of that language. It draws not anger, but deep empathy. So wrote George Orwell about Adolf Hitler.