Got It For

The Man Who

You Tax Free

The late John A. L. Gunn became famous in Australia in the tax cursed 1950’s for three small books.

The first was called “I Can Get it for You Tax Free”, by E. Kellie (no relation to Ned); the second, “Farmers, Bushrangers, Business men”, by B. Hall (Ben Hall was a bushranger of the early pioneering days); and the third, “Tax Sputniks”, by J. A. L. Gunn and Giovanni Merda di Toro Malachi (you have to be an Australian perhaps to fully understand about bull and malarky). fFHESE books were written with wit, and in them the author had a lot of fun with such august individuals as the income tax com missioner. Their real purpose was to lead the reader in and out of the labyrinths of taxation law and show him how he could legitimately avoid paying too much tax.

Because of these books, and for the more monumental Guide to the Australian Income Tax, which he wrote under his own name, Gunn won fame in a fashion that is usually reserved only for jockeys, cricketers, tennis players and race horses. He was, in fact, one of the world’s few famous accountants.

Wife's Biography

Gunn died at the end of 1962 and just recently his widow, Dorothy Ruth, has produced his biography, which she has called A Light That Shone.

Dorothy Ruth Gunn belongs to the same school of writing as Nola Dekyvere, a pillar of Sydney society who produces a weekly page of prose for a Sunday newspaper and in which no cliche is left unturned.

While the proletariat read Nola for her scintillating light on life in high places, the bourgeois read her for giggles, wriggling i n ecstasy over her corn-fed metaphores.

A Light That Shone should have a ready-made audience in both branches of the Nola cult because Dorothy Ruth writes with a like pen, dipped in the same variety of glucose. It’s a pity her subject had to be J. A. L. Gunn, however. He was probably a good bloke, and already has his monument in the hearts of Australia’s legion of tax payers.

(The Light That Shone

Jacaranda. 29/6.)

Common Whaler

Grey Nurse

Tiger Shark

White Pointer

The five recognised man-eating sharks in Australian waters.—From “Shark Hunters”.