Authors From Australia

"Last time the wife was sick I did all the housework. It's child's play once you get used to it. The difficulty, however, is in getting used to it."

"Do I know anything about golf! My boy, I was playing golf when St Andrew's links had only one hole, and there was only two of us that played the game-me and St Andrew. I had to give up playing with him after he'd been made a saint, because he started ringing in miracles on me."In those days we used rough, three-cornered or square balls stuffed with haggis or some other non-detonating material ...""

"People have asked me which was the better-poultry farming or dairy farming.Well, you've got to milk a cow, but a hen does her own egging.Mind you, there's a lot to be said for dairy farming. A lot of farmers say it, too. I don't blame them much, although I never did approve of bad language."

"A gentleman should not talk to a lady with his hands in his pockets-unless she's his wife, in which case it's unavoidable."

"Nowadays it is hardly necessary to ask permission of a lady to smoke, unless it's opium; but be careful, if you do ask, not to use the phrase, "May I smoke?" You are simply asking for the correct answer, which is, "I don't care if you burn.""

"I forgot to mention that where the guest of honour is a man, he should take the hostess's arm when entering the dining- room. If the hostess is very far gone, another gentleman may hold the other arm, a third gentleman going in front with the legs."

"Many people are confused by the multiplicity of knives, forks, and spoons set before them, and are inclined to make a haphazard selection, thus making goats of themselves. Remain calm and do the thing systematically. First of all, use up the spoons; secondly, go through the forks; then wind up on the knives. In the case of wine glasses and so forth, select the biggest and stick to it. I do this myself invariably, and have never been tossed out of a dining-room yet."

"At the conclusion of the dinner the hostess gives the signal to rise. I am not sure how this is done, but I think that a green flag waved two or three times above the head should be sufficient, or at an informal affair, just a cheery remark, "Now, come on! You've had enough," would suffice."

"For we have here a beautiful land that none could e’er knock down, The brightest jewel that ever was known in dear old George's crown; The brightest jewel that ever was known and never can be a failure. Although the damn Labor party is doing its best to ruin Australia..."

"‘I am as happy,’ said he, ‘as a kingk, enchoying himsellef in his harem mit his queens.’"

"To-day, a Minister receiving a deputation personally promises ‘consideration of Cabinet’, in a tone that makes the deputation believe it has succeeded. To the wise the old rule persists. If a Government says ‘Yes’, it means ‘Perhaps’; and if it says ‘Perhaps’, it means ‘No’."

"I read the other day that Hindenberg, waiting to see whether Hitler would secure leadership or not, said, ‘We will see how the cat will jump, with God’s help.’ I presume he meant that God would help him to vision, and not the cat to acrobatics; but one can see how the name of God becomes formula—to be used in every emergency, if only to give the emergency respectability. Hindenberg used the formula in everything. Eighteen months before the war ended, he and Ludendorf knew that they must fail; yet to save face they kept on losing two hundred thousand men a month, and ‘trusting in God.’"

"He had the biggest feet I have ever seen; larger feet even than the feet of that Brisbane man, of whom it was said that two large alligator skins had been sent from Cairns to make a pair of boots for him."

"Politics in Australia, as in the rest of the world, are becoming duller and soberer, as the world itself becomes temperate in the use of strong waters. I don’t know the political calibre of the three-bottle men; but it is established, in any constructional thought or action, that, if the man who drinks does silly things sometimes, the teetotaller rarely does anything. Not that the drinking of liquor can make a man clever, but that the instinctive teetotaller lacks genius, although I have known one case of a teetotaller genius. Abraham Lincoln, replying to a puritan critic who said that General Grant drank whisky, wished that he had more whisky-drinking generals if whisky made General Grant do the things he did."

"Half way to Burwood there was a butcher’s shop, run by a Mrs Macnamara. She was a tall woman of great strength, working fiercely and living hard; a living testimonial to the forceful Colonial diet of beef and corn. She handled meataxe and saw as if they were toys. To see her chopping fore and hind quarters of beef fascinated me. I once heard her tell, without boastfulness, but in honest pride, that she was ‘doing six bodies a week’; which is a great tract and wilderness of meat."

"His moments of most sentimental recollection were when he thought of the beauty of the sausages he had manufactured."

"The Bible was second nature; and I had great interest in its gallery of bad men, beloved of the Lord. At least they said they were. Abraham, who represented his wife as his sister, so as to curry favour with Abimelech; Abel the lazy shepherd, who annoyed Cain so that that energetic farmer had to kill him; Noah, who ‘digged a vineyard’ and told tall stories of navigation; Jacob, who refused his brother a meal until Esau signed away his rights; and David, that pious scoundrel, who sent Uriah to death, so that he might steal Bathsheba respectably."

"Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all."

"Pretty as a picture and poor as a crow."

"The Governor was a little pink old gentleman; so soft in the skin that he seemed to be stuffed with moss."

"As salt as Lot's wife."

"Bedford could be one of the rudest of men when he chose to exercise his wit at the expense of others. He happened to be a guest at a party given by a lady of some social pretensions. There arrived to it a husband and wife—the wife, big dominant, and masculine, the husband, small, meek, and submissive. Of them, the hostess said to Bedford, ‘Mr Bedford, I want to introduce you to my friends, Mr and Mrs So-and-so.’ Said Bedford, bowing to the couple, ‘Pleased to meet you. Which is which?’"

"When he falls just short of 'fine writing' his writing is fine."

"Australia has a word for the s, a word that should be used the world over to describe a killjoy, and that word is ."

"The different men we are in conceit and in humility! Vanity is all the vitamins and all the calories; vanity can keep a man warm in winter without blankets."

"At the age of five I had begun an association with Temperance Societies; which ended at the age of sixteen—when I discovered the goodness of beer."

"'I'll never smoke tobacco, It is a filthy weed— I'll never put it in my mouth,' Said little Bobby Reed.'For there is idle Jerry Jones, As lazy as a pig, Who smoked a clay pipe all day long, And thought it made him big.'"

"It is not without design that the monkey with the rainbow stern climbs high. It is the advertisement of his sex appeal, and he doesn't climb far unless there is an audience."

"The womenfolk of early immigrants to Queensland brought cactus in a pot, because it had a ‘pretty flower’, and the ‘prickly pear’ escaped from the pot and destroyed twenty million acres of the finest land in the State; until the cactoblastis was introduced, and destroyed the pear. An old lady—craving her old-world home—brought sweet briar to South Australia; and it accounted for a few million acres in its turn. A fool pastoralist, whose most coherent phrase was ‘Tally-ho!’ or ‘Yoicks!’ introduced the fox, which has almost wiped out the lyre bird; and another fool introduced the starling. Other pests introduced were Freetraders, sectarianism, water hyacinth and rabbits."

"‘Ah!’ said Wardley, ‘the times are different from my young days. We were independent then; a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay; that’s all we asked. Here are young fellows today without any sense of independence. My two sons have taken the Old Age Pension.’ ‘How old are they, Bill?’ ‘One’s seventy-four and the other seventy-two! No pride.’"

"It is a quaint fact that the mediocre critic demands, in the one breath, a Parliament representative of all the people, and a Parliament of all the virtues and intelligences. A Parliament of genius would not represent the people, who are emphatically not genius, and Parliaments as they are, with one or two men above the average intelligence, and many men of average intelligence, and more men little better than morons, represents the nation—any nation."

"Big Money is always on the Lord's side."

"He just missed a seat in the Senate; and was sorry because he said he wanted to do a bit for Australia that had done so much for him. And he excused defeat by, ‘I’m that unlucky that if it rained soup, everybody else would have a spoon and I'd be left with a fork.’"

"There was a bushman serving at Pentridge a sentence for horse stealing. He was a very honest man. He would not think of stealing a penny, but a horse was a different matter."

"I could see the same look of incomprehension on her face that my parents often wore: ‘this person cannot possibly be related to me.’"

"I was stained with a stigma that would take me the rest of school to shake for this was Homophobe High, where any difference was immediately stomped upon by that most conservative of bodies – the teenage peer group."

"Birding gave me the excuse to get out into the bush, to lose my self in the wider world of nature, detox my mind of everything that was going on. Without birdwatching who knows what sort of basket case I might have ended up? My God, I could even have become a lawyer."

"Actually, I think that is part of the appeal of birdwatching for me – you come away from an encounter with a bird with absolutely nothing tangible to show for it other than the memory of the experience and maybe a tick in your notebook. You indulge in the experience merely for the nature of the experience. It is conquering without violence, hunting without the kill."

"Cool people don’t bother becoming dictators; they’re too busy getting laid."

"The Twitcher’s list is very democratic. Each bird counts as one tick. There are no extra points for beauty or rarity."

"Saying I was taking a year off to make a documentary seemed easier than saying I was spending a year birdwatching. In this society being a wanker is socially unacceptable. Filming yourself while being a wanker, however, seems perfectly legitimate."

"None of the locals I met could understand why I hadn’t immediately built on the land, the mentality being that if you weren’t putting your land to any discernible economic use then it was wasted land. Forget about aesthetics, forget about environmental values, unless you were running something on it, ploughing something into it or extracting something from it, then it was just a waste of space."

"When I hear of someone suffering a mental illness that causes them to be ridden with anxiety, socially isolated and prone to feelings of paranoia, I think, ‘yep, sounds like a twitcher to me.’"

"I remembered why I liked hanging out with the top rate twitchers – they might be freaks but they were awesomely brilliant freaks."

"As I settled into the sleeping bag in the back seat of the car, I revelled in the glorious stillness of the country at night. The first night away from the city you can feel the tension almost physically draining out of you as you gaze at the achingly beautiful sky and greedily inhale the invigorating fresh scent of the country."

"That was a pivotal moment in our relationship; that adolescent catharsis when you realise your parents cannot sustain you as they once did – the moment you leave the nest."

"The wildlife follows the water."

"On one side of the retaining wall were the dank, wonderful mangroves teaming with life; on the other side, sitting on landfill, were modern houses and manicured lawns. Why is it that building the Great Aussie Dream Home invariably involves destroying other creatures’ homes?"

"Everything seemed to be falling into place perfectly. That had to be a worry."

"The countdown clock tipped through to midnight and as the fireworks exploded, people erupted in a frenzy of cheering and drunken pashing. The Big Twitch was over. I was back in the real world. Looking around this world that I had turned my back on for a year, seeing the manic desperation of those around me to have a good time no matter what, suddenly my quest didn’t seem so absurd. In fact it seem to make more sense than any of the human behaviour I saw around me."