Randolph Bedford

"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..."

"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?’"

"As salt as Lot's wife."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.’"

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

"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."

"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.’"

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

"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."

"‘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.’"

"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."

"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."

"'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.'"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"And there was John de Baun, a Canadian builder of twenty-eight stone weight, as active as a cat, and with a little voice tuned to E Flat. He was known as ‘the elephant man with the mosquito voice.’"