purpose.’ Fair-minded though, he conceded that possibly ‘my experience as a police officer might tinge my appreciation of poetry’. Who would have thought that judges and cops had such a delicate feeling for words? ‘Tinge’, ‘quibble’—I’m not sure that Flaubert could have done any better. And how about the sort of verbal sixth sense which enabled the detective to affirm that while he didn’t know what ‘incestuous’ actually meant, it had an unmistakable whiff of indecency about it?
I hate to think of Detective Vogelsang and his peers being forgotten. They gave so much pleasure to so many people. When will some sedulous anthologist come along and produce a monumental sottisier to preserve their solemn inanities? It mightn’t be a bad idea at the same time, I must admit, to envisage a second volume of excerpts from the literature some of us were turning out at that time. In our own way, we avant-garde sophisticates could, and now and again did, show ourselves right up there in the same class as Detective Vogelsang when it came to inanity.
Australian bookshops used to be overloaded with imported literature, no argument about that. Not any more. What. hits you now is the Shenandoah-like flow of remorselessly nationalistic compilations: Historic Australian Shearing Sheds, The Bumper Book of Australian Cockroaches, Everybody’s Album of Australian Barbed-Wire Fences, Whither Australian Bottle Tops? Go into an Australian bookshop nowadays and you may not find the book you’re looking for but you’re certainly left in no doubt as to what country you’re in.
It’s extraordinary that nobody so far has undertaken what I’m confident would be a runaway best-seller—The Australian Treasury of Unabashed Cretinisms.
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