Best of the Paperbacks

Question: Who are those men drinking over there by the beer keg, eating pie with sauce, avoid ing the girls, and talking about horses? Answer: Average Aus tralians.

Heard it before? Of course you have.

The image of Australians as uncultured provincials has been popular since Mayfair ladies learnt to say: “Good on yer, cobber.”

The fact that it is insulting matters not at all. What does matter is that it is boring, for there is now nothing older than an old slouch hat.

Sad to say the old image appears a lot in Cyril Pearl’s So, You Want To Be An Australian? (Ure Smith, 90 cents). Pearl gives us the same surly barmaids, the same brutal taxidrivers, the same beer-swilling men.

Thankfully, towards the end of this 96-page paperback, he does give us some good, new fun.

"Paddo"

His description of a “dry sherry conversation”, for instance, is first rate; and his advice on how to use a public phone merits a long laugh and a quote: “When you have finished your conversation, tear the telephone book into small pieces, cut the receiver from the instrument with a sharp knife, and jump on it . . .

Then eat an orange and scatter the skin on the floor, plug the mouthpiece with chewing gum, and write PIG-IRON 808 on the wall of the booth.”

That’s good and new. It’s a pity there isn’t more of it in his book.

Two other new Australian paperbacks worth reporting on are Paddo (by Arthur Staples, Humorbooks, 70 cents) and Age of Consent (by Norman Lindsay, Humorbooks, 80 cents).

Staples grew up in Paddington in the 1930’5. It was not then the “Montmartre of the South Seas”, nor was it a place to visit for shrill little dinner parties. In those days Paddington was home to a lot of good and ordinary people.

Home to Staples was a terrace house, an out-of-work dad, a hard working mum, an Uncle Charlie (who had to be persuaded to take a bath) and two lodgers. Life was good and generous, even though money was short.

Staples’ descriptions of the trams, the Saturday-night excur sions to the flicks and his visits to the City Markets (where you could buy a meat pie with peas, potatoes, coffee and sweets for ninepence) are excellent.

And his description of the death, from TB, of his 12-year-old girlfriend (she had to ask him to be her fellow because he was too shy to ask her to be his girl) is heartrending in its brevity, simplicity and compassion.

"Age of Consent"

Age of Consent, banned in Australia until 1962, is now be ing filmed in Queensland with James Mason. It’s not an appro priate setting because Consent is set on the south coast of NSW.

However, Queensland is probably better box office.

As many people will know (Consent was first published, in New York, in 1938), the book is about an artist, Bradly, who rents a shanty on a deserted beach. He meets a young girl under the age of consent and persuades her to pose for him. This causes considerable local outrage.

There is tenderness, intolerance and hilarity in this book. Lind say has a droll, and rather cruel, sense of humour, as when he describes Bradly knocking on a bar to awaken a landlord; “Bradly’s knocking roused him (the landlord) from complete to partial imbecility.”

As well as being very funny, this book paints a fascinating, and seemingly accurate, picture of an Australian coastal village in the

1930’5.

SR.