by John Clarke
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
I’m as radical as a chocolate frog
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
You’ve got to do as you’re told by someone
And it might as well be me
The Mississippi moon comes up the window of the train
Making good time down to Frisco in the early morning rain
I can’t get me no interest rates, Oh Lord, I can’t, oh no
I can’t get me no short term market, Oh Lord, I can’t, no mo’
Ain’t no one prepared to pay twenty, Great Jesus, you tell me
Please tell me how’s a workin man spose to live
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
I’m as radical as a chocolate frog
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
You’ve got to do as you’re told by someone
And it might as well be me
We got a call at work today from some guy on the road,
Crosses shifted, any distance, family business, nothing down,
Smart kid wanted with own transport, who must know at least
Three ways of getting out to Calvary from town,
And a man with bleeding feet came in to shelter from the storm,
And he said he’d take it right away but he wanted Mondays off
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
I’m as radical as a chocolate frog
Give me that old time religion
That old time religion
Give me that old time religion
You’ve got to do as you’re told by someone
And it might as well be me
Leonard Con
A deeply sensitive and wickedly humorous writer whose use of irony is greatly admired by very small children.
THE EMPEROR'S NEW ALBUM
I want you but I don’t deserve you
My soul is not healthy or clean
For a moose with undisciplined trousers
Is slightly less smart than it seems
But you'd like my friend, his name’s Jesus
He’s tall and he’s handsome and cool
He’s especially relaxed among lepers
He’s the grooviest kid in the school
I awake from a dream that I’m sleeping
In the soft magazine of your hair
It’s warm and it’s dark and it’s raining
And I’m coming to Scarborough Fair
There’s a man on the TV who’s standing
On a mountain of glasses and shoes
They’ve ambushed the train from Vienna
On the six and a half o’clock news
There are ten thousand Aryan women
In position and firing at will
I’ll take the ones in the tower
And Jesus the fools on the hill
And we synchronise watches and guide books
And our weapons, false papers and charts
General Mills on deployment of symbols
General Boon on the breaking of hearts
Then I’ll send in my troops in their millions
I’ve trained them to swim in the dark
Resistance is futile, we’re poets,
And we’ll touch your perfect bodies
With our shlong
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
Paul Dorkan
Paul is one of the most successful poets writing today. His work includes ‘Some of My Favourite Women’ and ‘Aren’t I Clever?’, both of which are collected in his anthology Look! Over Here!
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
Twenty years to the day after Edmund Hillary
Conquered Mount Everest, Terry Peterson conquered
Heather O’Dwyer
Who was at the time,
The highest woman in the world.
Exactly fifty years after Einstein discovered relativity
Mrs Glenys Simpson discovered that under the house
Without the aid of time or space,
And using only friction and an active imagination
Her son Bevan had effected an increase in mass.
In 1925 James Joyce left Dublin for Zurich, with Nora.
In 1983 Suzie Daley left Brisbane for Melbourne with Barry,
A man she’d met on a train, who had something to do with computers.
‘Don’t forget to write’ her mother had said, but unlike James she never really bothered.
Eighteen years after the famous tied test between Australia and the West Indies,
Nipper Dixon and his team ran exactly as far as the police,
Although it has to be said the police covered the distance slightly faster.
Onlookers said it was all very confused and they weren’t there
And they didn’t know where they’d got the microwave ovens.
Nearly four hundred years after William Shakespeare wrote to be or not to be in Hamlet
Owen McKenzie wrote to be in the draw for a luxury unit on the Gold Coast.
‘You can’t win it if you’re not in it,’ vouchsafed Owen within the privacy of his own mind.
Half a century after Wittgenstein had taken issue with himself and revised his entire position on language,
A plumber in Orbost changed his mind about the nature of elbow joints and thereafter did them in plastic.
Hamish Sweeney
Hamish, who translated the Australian constitution into English, is the current undisputed world heavyweight champion.
ST FRANCES AND THE BROLGAS
In the big wet, in the north, where I grew up, they couldn’t keep me inside,
The minute the new rhythm hit the roof and rain speared the red earth
I was off outside, hub-deep on the bike and pulling focus in all directions
As the dust changed partners and danced into mud, kaolin and silt.
This is the way it has always been, in this territory of grace,
And a few clicks up the road was my sister, not looking down,
Where the sky was reflected, but away and up, head back on an angle,
Her senses full of birds, corroborating and watchful.
If they had met her, had been introduced, they would sit on her arms,
Would drift down and have their young with confidence
Along her sinew and among the soft strength of her,
For she could hold no singers in higher regard
Than those who had the knowing of the season,
And below her, pressed in the flowing ground, her feet,
Washed with the earth and helping her to the sky.
Margaret Attwood
Margaret comes from the bush up near Cooma and writes almost everything produced in Cooma. As well as her poetry she has produced a number of novels, mainly about Cooma.
EVERYONE DANCES
Look Janet look.
See Janet run.
Why is Janet running?
More particularly why is she running from John?
Can anyone think of a reason why she might be running towards Peter?
How many people have spotted Janet’s mistake?
Janet wants to be a nurse when she grows up.
Janet wants to help people.
Janet is a people person.
Oliver wants to be a doctor and cure diseases.
Oliver is too young to know what doctors really do.
Oliver and Janet attain their majorities and meet at a party at Peter’s house.
They fall in love over half a bott
le of wine and a Raoul Dufy
print and they leave in Oliver’s powerful thrusting sports car.
Oliver turns out to be a complete arsehole of course.
How many of you noticed me setting him up?
Janet runs into John at a Woody Allen movie and
although John is almost as boring as the Woody Allen
movie, he offers stability and reasonable genetic
stock. They marry and Janet has two babies almost
immediately.
Janet loves her children but something is missing.
After a time of wonder, she identifies the missing
element as Peter. She meets Peter at a series of
rendezvous so as not to alert Peter’s wife. This works
well and John is not at all suspicious since he is not
that sort of person. He is the sort of person who has
been corking his secretary, the lissome Fiona, for
nearly four years.
Janet and Peter eventually find their affair becoming
slightly less magical so they give it away and go back
to civilian life. Peter makes a confession to his wife
in which he pretends to recognise her value and blames
himself in a manner which makes her feel responsible.
Janet drinks like a fish and St John the Martyr feels
justified in manipulating Fiona.
Can we all see the people Janet helped?
Can Janet see?
Look Janet look.
1 Although fragments have been found around Stratford near Horsham of a work beginning ‘Would there be any point in my drawing some sort of comparison between yourself and an absolute scorcher?’
2 ‘Pommymandius’ can still be heard in pubs but no authentic manuscript exists.
3 Stumpy Byron V.C. Best known for swimming at night across the shark-infested Dardanelles in order to light fires on unoccupied beaches and confuse the Turks. The Victoria Cross was awarded posthumously since Stumpy caught the flu and died a few weeks later.
4 Brian Browning; poet and cricket-lover. Rumoured to have seen every Test match played in Australia between 1922 and 1939. Best known for the work beginning, ‘Oh to be in April now that England’s here’.
Text classics
For reading group notes visit textclassics.com.au
The Commandant
Jessica Anderson
Introduced by Carmen Callil
Homesickness
Murray Bail
Introduced by Peter Conrad
Sydney Bridge Upside Down
David Ballantyne
Introduced by Kate De Goldi
A Difficult Young Man
Martin Boyd
Introduced by Sonya Hartnett
The Australian Ugliness
Robin Boyd
Introduced by Christos Tsiolkas
The Even More Complete
Book of Australian Verse
John Clarke
Introduced by John Clarke
Diary of a Bad Year
JM Coetzee
Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy
Wake in Fright
Kenneth Cook
Introduced by Peter Temple
The Dying Trade
Peter Corris
Introduced by Charles Waterstreet
They’re a Weird Mob
Nino Culotta
Introduced by Jacinta Tynan
Careful, He Might Hear You
Sumner Locke Elliott
Introduced by Robyn Nevin
Terra Australis
Matthew Flinders
Introduced by Tim Flannery
My Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin
Introduced by Jennifer Byrne
Cosmo Cosmolino
Helen Garner
Introduced by Ramona Koval
Dark Places
Kate Grenville
Introduced by Louise Adler
The Watch Tower
Elizabeth Harrower
Introduced by Joan London
The Mystery of
a Hansom Cab
Fergus Hume
Introduced by Simon Caterson
The Glass Canoe
David Ireland
Introduced by Nicolas Rothwell
The Jerilderie Letter
Ned Kelly
Introduced by Alex McDermott
Bring Larks and Heroes
Thomas Keneally
Introduced by Geordie Williamson
Strine
Afferbeck Lauder
Introduced by John Clarke
Stiff
Shane Maloney
Introduced by Lindsay Tanner
The Middle Parts of Fortune
Frederic Manning
Introduced by Simon Caterson
The Scarecrow
Ronald Hugh Morrieson
Introduced by Craig Sherborne
The Dig Tree
Sarah Murgatroyd
Introduced by Geoffrey Blainey
The Plains
Gerald Murnane
Introduced by Wayne Macauley
The Fortunes of
Richard Mahony
Henry Handel Richardson
Introduced by Peter Craven
The Women in Black
Madeleine St John
Introduced by Bruce Beresford
An Iron Rose
Peter Temple
Introduced by Les Carlyon
1788
Watkin Tench
Introduced by Tim Flannery