Dinky DIY’s Guide to Australian Literature

We’re championing culture, here, Dinky DIYers! Australiana is not just about bogans and beer bottles, racists and riots, meat and mullets. Let’s celebrate our southern hemispherian, up-side-down nation’s own literary canon. Put on your aprons and get ready to hit reverse on this cultural vacuum.

Firsts

Early attempts by Australian writers took to faking the English style and were obsessed with the weirdness of this new landscape. Probably because most writers were shrewdly pitching at a British audience in the hope they would do well there and be invited back home with more welcome than they were shipped off.

Our first literary foray as a nation was a challenge taken up by Tasweigian convict. Quintus Servinton: A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence by Henry Savery was published in 1831.

His biography begins with an outstanding, historical example of Australian logic where he’s sentenced to the Van Dieman’s Land colonies from England for white collar forgery and appointed in a government service position in the Colonial Treasurer’s office upon his arrival.

Following which, he dabbled as frequently in writing as he did in crime and seems to have struggled to succeed at either. All in all, I’d say his erratic life paints a somewhat un-savery picture. (ah yes, yes I did.) Yet, he was moved to thinly disguise an autobiography behind a silly little tale about a convict a lot like himself but better which, in A Bride Stripped Bare move, he attempted to published anonymously. Everyone found out and he got in some trouble. Colonial reviews were quite glowing but then, it was our very first book in history, meaning nothing much to compare it to then, right?

As Wikipedia rather drolly puts it, “It is generally agreed that his writing is more important for its historical value than its literary merit.” He may or may not have died in 1842 after cutting his own throat which seems a strange detail for us not to have certainty on but such were the mad, bad days of the wild early colonies.

Son of a feisty, literary suffragette-of-sorts , Henry Lawson (1867-1922) is Australia’s Hemingway... kinda. Depressive, deaf, drunkard, bad husband, neglectful father, oft-imprisoned, university drop-out, rebel republican, roaming ballardist for the beloved Bulletin, he nonetheless has been immortalised on our $10 note and was sent off with a state funeral for being a “distinguished citizen.”

But none so well admired, from our early days, as Lawson’s more romantically-inclined, Banjo Paterson (1864-1941.) We are a sentimental bunch when we want to be, and collectively melt into our vinyl, suburban armchairs when we hear this poet’s wistful words, conjuring the embers of campfires and wild, roguish bush-lore.

Fantasies

You can have your Hogwarts, your Faraway Trees and Wonderful World of Disneys… I have two words for you Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Yep. That’s how we roll down-under. Happy homunculi otherwise known as the “gumnut babies” who burst onto the scene with their bushwhacking adventures escaping the villainous Banksia Men during the Armistice celebrations of 1918, and have never been out of print since.

Females

Here we can see for miles and miles... Yes, Miles Franklin, the Aussie carrying on the tradition of popular female novelists assuming male names, penned My Brilliant Career. In 1937, Franklin thumbed the poms who loved the book and rejected an Order of the British Empire but came to fear that nothing she wrote would match its success and resorted to publishing behind the veil of many nom de plumes including the bizarre pseudonym Brent of Bin Bin, for fear of scathing reviews comparing her newer work to her opus. When she died in 1954 she left literature Down Under an annual literary award known as The Miles Franklin Award.

Freaks

Our first and only Australian to be granted the Nobel Prize for Literature was an oasis of creativity in a desert of spaghetti cowboy pulp fiction. 1973 Australia was in the grip of Gough but its people were still a tough crowd. Before that he had been the first winner of the Miles Franklin Award for Voss. Ah, the blinding brilliance of Patrick White. He was awarded the prize for "an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature" and sent Sidney Nolan to Stockholm to collect the prize on his behalf. Clearly he was busy that day.

Frauds

Aussie authors have picked up the knack of dropping their Anglo appellations for rather more exotic titles. These ethnic impersonators are suspected of being motivated by a preference in the local publishing industry for indigenous and ethnic minority voices. Some notable controversies swelled around this list:

• Wanda Koolmatrie (aka Leon Carmen)
• Ern Malley (aka James McAuley and Harold Stewart)
• Eddie Burrup (aka Elizabeth Durack)
• Helen Demidenko (aka Helen Darville)

Look ‘em up... the fraudsters.

Dinky DIY’s Complete Guide To Smoking

Oscar Wilde : Do you mind if I smoke?

Sarah Bernhardt: I don’t care if you burn.

Ah the smoker, that timeless neurotic who fills vacuous moments in time with the deeply inhaled serenity of curling white smoke. Like little puffing chimney’s leaning against office towers or gathered like communist peasants against the chill on the pavements outside nightclubs. Take a deep breath, dear Dinkster, for herein lies the secret’s of this exclusively doomed club. Stick this in your pipe and smoke it.

Got A Light?

It was once the perfect beginning of a beautiful (albeit short?) life together, though the cigarette light pick up trick is quickly going out of vogue. These days, in these parts at least, an indulgent drag on a fine tailor-made is a habit banned from all the classic meat-markets; nightclubs, airplanes, piano bars, hotel lobbies and restaurants. It seems the powers that be would have a girl beg for a lights on the footpath and you know what that makes you look like.... If your budget allows for cross-continental prowls there are still plenty of opportunities for a smoker in the discotechs of the former USSR or shopping centres of the middle east. But for those with overflowing ashtrays by their laptops, now you can find sour-breathed romance from the comforting fug of your own flat with websites like this . Meet a fellow durrymuncher and make asthmatic babies together for when there’s smoke there’s the fires of passion .

They smoke cigarettes professionally. The smoke is inhaled very sharply and the teeth are bared.
Then the head turns to give you a profile and the smoke is exhaled slowly and deliberately and the grey jet stream becomes a beautiful blue cloud of smoke.
What are they trying to tell us?
- Jeffrey Bernard, Spectator, 1982

Screw me.

That’s what they are saying; or maybe screw you. Whatever the message, it’s packing heat. Jerry Seinfeld laughed at smokers for thinking themselves superior due to their mastery over flame, “Smoke and fire is literally coming right out of my mouth” and it’s not exactly breaking news that smoking has always been symbolic with bad-asses and sex fiends. Oral fixations... phallic obsessions...smoking fetishists (or those who subscribe to capnolagnia as it’s called) might put a whole new spin on blowing smoke but is there a hidden meaning in these smoke signals? DinkyDIY thinks not, even Freud admitted, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But then... that was before Monica Lewinsky.

Big Tobacco

Farmed with roots mingled in slave blood and growing rich on the asthmatic wheeze of school kiddies, the all time bad boys rule Big Tomacco. Remember the “Seven dwarves” (‘Ahh believe nic-o-tine is not aaahhhdictive’ in their evil southern drawls.)

Learn the subtle genius of reverse hypothesis.

Smokin’ Hot

Cigarettes and coffee has long been reknown as the breakfast of champions and I know I don’t need to draw the dots for you brainiacs, between the very obvious correlation with smoking and supermodels. Even Nobel Prize winner, Obama, is having trouble quitting the fags. It’s kind of a nice thought that these shiny, beautiful creatures are in the desperate grips of an addiction out of control. That they too, tape plastic cups over smoke detectors in hotel toilets to get a bump of nictotine. They that have picked through the soggy remnants of morning-after ashtrays and smoked butt ends to delay the hung-over trek to the petrol station. And it makes it easier to quit. Attractive people start smoking because it makes them look cool. Acknowledge you are neither attractive, nor cool and that fagging on will only worsen your shortcomings in these areas. You will down those cancer sticks quick smart.

This might help.

What’s Your Poison

The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, has always backed Big Tobacco. He reasons a product like this can’t fail when it has such powerful brand loyalty. Benson & Hedges took their dull brand up a notch when they went gold, The Malboro Man (and all the dead models who played him) symbolised rugged masculinity but what does your brand say about you...?

Sobranie Cocktails like magical pastel coloured gelato-scoops of cancer this brand is Neverland shit and definitely = Transvesite recently returned from Asia

Cuban stogeys = God Complex

Malboro Reds = Wanna-be rockstar/Borderline Emo

Alpine Menthols = Desperate Housewife. Goes perfectly with a cheap glass of Chardy

Winnie Blues = Tradesperson/May have participated in the Cronulla Riots draped in an Aussie flag

Champion Ruby/Drum Blue Tobacco = Pothead/Backpacker

Longbeach = With mega-economy packs like these, you’re probably on the wheezy wait list for a new lung.

Breathe easy, dinskters.