The Best Australian Humorous Writing

When I was nine, my brother Andy and I cut out a mail-order advertisement from the back page of our
Phantom
comic. The small advertisement promised delivery within seven days of “the world's best collection of postage stamps sourced from all four corners of the globe”. I remember the word “best”, just as I remember the expression “all four corners of the globe”.

Andy watched as I reverentially filled out the form and then we walked hand in hand to the post box at the end of Inverness Way, beyond which the known world ended.

These were the hazy days when summers came earlier and were hotter and drier and bluer. For seven days Andy and I sweated by our letterbox as cicadas roared and Mrs Pappas and the other neighbours smiled in collusion. On the seventh day, exactly as promised, the postie's whistle sounded.

It was a tiny brown cardboard box, the sort we had read about in Enid Blyton stories, the sort that never arrive now. I removed the lid and paper sprang out like square confetti.

The world's best stamps.

Andy and I painstakingly set them out in rows on the good dining room table. One hundred and thirty-seven stamps in all. Five
Australian kangaroos. Exotic triangular stamps marked Polska and Yemen featuring animals. I remember a leopard and a monster but-terfly with luminescent blue wings. A dull stamp with pictures of a city by a lake from somewhere called Helvetia. And one grey stamp featuring a profile that even a nine year old couldn't fail to identify, the visage of Adolf Hitler.

And I remember thinking, the best? The best? How can I know this is the best?

There was no doubt that the 137 stamps were good. To a highly trained 9-year-old's eye it was patently clear the Hitler stamp alone must be a scarce collector's item. Andy and I were fairly confident after deliberation that the FÃ¼hrer must have personally licked our stamp, most probably in his bunker or at the 1936 Olympic Games, and we dreamt of Messerschmitts and Jesse Owens.

But the best?

Surely there were other stamps that might have qualified for the best. We didn't know much about philately but we knew enough to recall a zeppelin stamp, an upside-down zeppelin, which had failed to find its way into our box. And wasn't there something about a Penny Black that might have made the cut?

Why had they called it the best? Who had picked the best? Was it a man? Or a woman? What did they look like? Did they have children like me? Where had they made their decisions? Was it in a room? I remember the location printed on the cardboard box was a mysterious Hornsby. Who were these Hornsby arbiters of all that is best? Was there a committee? A discussion? A vote? What did their kids say? Come to think of it, surely the Hornsby experts hadn't gone through this whole process of advertising on the back of
Phantom
and selecting the cream of the crop merely to dispatch one box of stamps? Were there other boxes of the best nestled in other canvas postie sacks in the other back streets of our continent?
Were their bests the same as our best? How many types of best are there?

I struggled to sleep each night in the countdown to the arrival of Father Christmas, certain these questions would plague me forever. Or until the arrival three weeks later of a red 26” Malvern Star, the best two-wheeler ever made.

After that long summer our lives were forever calibrated by a succession of bests.

The best showbag at the Royal Agricultural Show, a mouthwatering assortment of Bertie Beetles and chocolate frogs and cartoons, purchased as we twelve year olds trudged past sheds of bloated Herefords and arenas of axe-yielding Tasmanian timbermen, pondering how to maximise our 20-cent investment.

The best dozen Australian wine assortment, a mix of Australia's best reds and best whites as offered by Westpac in an envelope containing my monthly bank statements.

The best of the seventies, a musical compilation of original recordings, a late-night television offer: phone now and we'll toss in the best of the nineties.

The best university, the best cricketer, the best school, the best airline, the best of ABBA, the best of the best.

If the best is mercurial, the best humorous writing is totally elusive. One publisher contacted for clearance rights to an essay for inclusion in this anthology remarked of our request, “If it's supposed to be humorous, why would you want to include a piece by him? He writes about politics”. Spitting out the word politics, as though the subject were the black hole of humour. Conflating object and form. Forgetting that humour is rarely about what one is looking at, but almost always how.

It is true, some subjects are more intrinsically amusing than others. Sir Ian McKellen as Lear disrobing to reveal his mesmerisingly outsize member gives Germaine Greer a head start. And Rude
Food, the subject of Graeme Blundell's television critique, raises a smirk before a word is read.

Even if the subjects are not intrinsically funny, all of the writers represented in this collection are. Humour more than any other human condition is in the eye of the beholder. Each of these writers has a knack of beholding things through funny eyes.

In choosing works for this volume we have tried to accommodate the fickleness of subjectivity and have cast our net wide. Represented here is a large number of creators writing in a variety of styles across many media.

There is a diversity of formâessays, reviews, commentary, opinions, editorials and even poetry, such as Les Murray's distilled reflections on fame.

There is a diversity of subject matter. From Julia Zemiro's reminiscences of shoplifting and her childhood relationship with her father, to Clive James's personal encounter with climate change.

For most of 2007 the nation's attention was devoted to the prospect of an Australian federal election. Several of the works take the inexorable manoeuvrings towards November as their subject, including Mungo MacCallum's commentary on the doomed Coalition campaign; Kaz Cooke's reflections on Julia Gillard and the public's expectations of female politicians; Guy Rundle's reversioning of
The West Wing
; and Frank Devine's opinions on political schadenfreude.

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