The Best Australian Humorous Writing (13 page)

It was also, alas, the beginning of my suffering. My antennae for linguistic anomaly were extended and I could never afterwards draw them in. Even today, half a century later, I can't use a word like “antennae” without first picturing in my mind what kind of antennae I mean. Are they metal antennae, like the basket-work arrays of a radar station, or are they fleshly antennae, as on a bug? Having decided, I try to make something else in the sentence match up, so as not to leave the word lying inert, because it is too fancy a word to be left alone, while not fancy enough to claim its own space. Having finished the piece, I comb through it (what kind of comb?) to look for what I overlooked: almost always it will be a stretch of too-particular writing, where the urge to make everything vivid gets out of hand. But I will still question what kind of urge gets out of hand, and I might even have to look up the origin of “out of hand”, to make sure it has nothing to do with wild cards.

Purple patches call attention to themselves and are easily dealt with by the knife. The freckle-sized blotches of lifeless epithet, unintended repetition and clueless tautology are what do the damage. In the first rough draft of this piece, in the first paragraph after the quotation from Mr Harman, I had a clause, which I later struck out, that ran thus: “with the bonus of its proud owner's barely suppressed grief”. But “barely suppressed” is the kind of grief that any journalist thinks a subtle stroke; and, even less defensibly, “bonus” echoes “onus”, one of the key words of the fragment under discussion. All that could be said for my use of “bonus” was that I used it without tautology. In journalism, the expression “added bonus” is by now almost as common as it is in common speech. (My repetition of “common” is intentional, and
the reason you know is that you know I must know, because the repeated word comes so soon.)

Too many times, on the way to Australia by air, the helpless passenger will be informed over the public-address system that his Qantas flight is “co-shared” with British Airways. The tautology is a mere hint of how the Australian version of English is rapidly accumulating new tautologies as if they were coinages: as an Australian police officer might say, it is a prior warning. Already the spoken term “co-shared” is appearing as “code-shared” when written down: I saw it this year at a Qantas desk in Terminal 4 at Heathrow, and Terminal 5 isn't even built yet. If the language goes on decaying at this rate, an essay consisting entirely of errors is on the cards. In the television studio it is already on autocue. (In America I could have said “cue-cards” for “autocue” and got a nice intentional echo to make “on the cards” sound less uninspired, but it would have been unfair: American English is the version of the language least prone to error at present—or, as the Americans would say, at this time.) But when all the nits are picked, and the piece is in shape and ready to be printed, one can't help feeling that to be virtuous is a hard fate. Most of the new errors I couldn't make if I tried. In the Melbourne
Age
of 27 August 2001, an article that it took two women to write included the sentence “The size of the financial discrepancies were eventually discovered.” I couldn't match the joyous freedom of that just by relaxing.

What I would like to do, however, is relax my habitual attention to the sub-current of metaphorical content. Most of the really hard work is done down there, deep under the surface, where the river runs in secret. (Watch out for the sub-current and the river! Do they match?) No doubt it would be a sin just to let things go, but what a sweet sin it would be. It is sometimes true of poetry, and often true of prose, that there are intensities of effect which can be produced only by bad writing. Good writing has to lay out an
argument for the collapse of a culture. Bad writing can demonstrate it: the scintillating clangour of confusion, the iridescent splendour of decay. A box of hoarded fireworks set off at random will sacrifice its planned sequential order, but gain through its fizzing, snaking, interweaving unpredictability.

The handcart of culture has to go a long way downhill before the hubs wobbling on its worn axles can produce a shriek like Mr Harman's prose. You will have noticed how, in my previous paragraph, I have switched my area of metaphor from chaos to decay, and then from pyrotechnics back to chaos. I would like to think that this process was deliberate, although there is always a chance that I undertook it in response to a reflex: the irrepressible urge to turn an elementary point into a play of fancy. If it is a reflex, however, I hope it lurks in a deeper chamber than my compositional centre, and so leaves room for conscious reflection—a word from the same root, by suggesting a very different tempo.

Mr Harman's reflex occupies his whole mind. But he should worry: look at what he can do without pausing for thought. In his classic sentence, Mr Harman does not commit a single technical error. It is on a sound grammatical structure that he builds his writhing, Art Nouveau edifice of tangled imagery, as if Gaudi, in Barcelona, had coated his magic church of the Sagrada Familia with scrambled eggs, and made them stick. Mr Harman has made a masterpiece in miniature. There is an exuberant magnificence to it. As Luciano Pavarotti once said, I salute him from the heart of my bottom.

SHANE MALONEY

Come yesterday, I'm whiling away a stray hour in the County Court, watching the fine grindings of the wheels of justice, when into the courtroom comes a certain inmate of the Barwon prison: to wit, Mr Carl Williams, also known as “Babyface” and “Big Fella”.

Now, Mr Williams is not a party with whom I care to share a vicinity, on account of what I have read about him in the newspapers, even if it is not all true. Such is his history of discreditable activities, indeed, that he has been enjoying an enforced sequestration from the wider community for the past two years, hence his address.

Bearing in mind the potentially fatal consequences of proximity to Mr Williams, I am immediately tempted to evacuate myself. My nerves are soothed, however, by the presence in court of a quartet of stony-faced jacks from the Purana taskforce, a body of coppers whose dedication to the eradication of criminal violence is legendary. The merest glance from these gentlemen could peel the rust off an iron bar and their leader, Inspector Ryan, is so tough he makes that Mullett chap from the police union look like a member of the Pussycat Dolls.

Positioned safely behind the wallopers, I study Mr Williams as he is led to the dock, a sort of glass-walled corporate box at the
back of the room. As his nickname suggests, Babyface is not a man of egregiously frightening mien. With his moo-cow eyes, his bland dial and gormless expression, he could easily be taken for a slightly bewildered first offender on a drink-drive charge. But Mr Williams is not here to face charges of blowing above the limit on Pascoe Vale Road. He has taken time off from his busy schedule to explain to judge Betty King why he deserves the court's mercy as concerns sentencing for the near-total eradication of the Moran family of drug dealers, a crime to which he pleaded guilty at his last appearance before her. These slayings come on top of the bumping-off of a notorious hot-dog vendor and narcotics peddler, a transgression for which he is serving 26 years in the Acacia maximum security unit.

To lend moral support, various members of Mr Williams' family begin to arrive, positioning themselves on the seats immediately below him. For the occasion, his former wife, Roberta, has chosen a fetching yellow beanie which she has teamed with a hoodie and yellow-top trainers. She immediately takes the opportunity to address some disparaging remarks to Mr Williams' current inamorata, Renata, who is seated a short distance away. Renata, who is younger and more blonde, responds with frosty silence.

The proceedings, what with legal argument about what can and cannot be published, take the best part of the day. To begin, Mr Williams' silk, Mr David Ross, QC, reprised the circumstances of the murders perpetrated at Mr Williams' behest. These involved guns of various shapes and varieties, a wheelie bin, large amounts of cash and drugs and statements by the prisoner to the effect that he did not entirely trust the police, that he was taking a lot of self-prescribed medicine at the time and that he was once shot in the tum-tum by Jason Moran.

Judge King, resplendent in red robe and funky specs, reminded him that she had heard most of it before, but she would be giving
his plea all due consideration. With that, Mr Williams was escorted back to Barwon, where every day is, in Mr Williams' words, “like Groundhog Day”.

CLIVE JAMES

In my household, I'm the last man standing against the belief that global warming is caused by human beings.

Three women with about a dozen university degrees between them have been treating me for years now as if I were personally responsible for the forthcoming death of the planet. They're probably right. They were right about the cod.

After it was impressed upon me by my daughters that the number of cod in the sea had declined to the point that there were 20 miles between any two cod, I stopped eating cod, and immediately the cod-stocks began to recover.

I couldn't help noticing, however, that there were no complaints about the declining number of haddock.

Since it was crumbed haddock fillets that I took to eating instead of crumbed cod, by rights there should have been a noticeable and worrying decline in the number of crumbed haddock being caught in the North Sea. There wasn't, but if there had been I would have listened to the evidence.

Hard, observable evidence should convince anybody sane. I know the sea is polluted because I can see plastic bottles on the beach. Whether the sea is indeed rising might be a matter for computer modelling, which is evidence only if it suits your prejudice,
but you know what a couple of hundred plastic bottles are when they come in riding on a wave like a flock of dead seagulls.

Where I used to go on holiday in the Bay of Biscay in the days when I could still swim over-arm, the empty plastic bottles on the beach were only a few centimetres apart all the way from France into Spain.

I marvelled at the perversity of people on board ships who, after drinking the contents of the bottle, would carefully screw the cap back on so that the bottle would float forever, unbiodegradably carrying its unwritten message of human imbecility until the ending of the world.

Some countries litter more than others. Sometimes the same country litters less than it used to. Australia was a litterbug's paradise when I first left it in 1961. Fifteen years later, when I first went back, the littering had largely vanished, because a government campaign had actually worked.

At present, the same global coffee bar chain has cleaner forecourts in the US than it does in the UK because, in the UK, dropping trash is a yob's right. But wherever you are, in Birmingham or in Birmingham, Alabama, biodegradable packaging in general is clearly a necessary and welcome step, well worth paying for if you've got the money.

The fact that only a very small proportion of the total human race has got the money we can leave aside for now, because this is really about us, the people who can afford to do the right thing after we've either agreed what it is or been prevailed upon to do it by a government which has proved its competence in other areas, such as finding a use for the Millennium Dome.

This week, for a packet of organic tomatoes still gamely clinging to their own little vine, I gladly paid extra because the packaging was almost as enticing as the contents. By means of a printed sticker, the packaging promised to disintegrate at some time in the future.

It would have been a help if the exact time in the future had been specified—perhaps about the time when the last remnants of the human race left for the planet Tofu in the constellation of Organica—but at least the green promise had been made, and I would be able to put the empty tomato packet into our wheelie bin devoted to compostable matter.

In Cambridge we divide our garbage into two wheelie bins, marked compostable and non-compostable.

The two classifications don't apply to the wheelie bins, both of which are made of heavy-duty, non-compostable plastic, but do apply to their contents.

As the dolt of the household, a mere male and therefore little more than a brain-stem with a bank account, I myself am correctly regarded as too stupid to decide what goes into each bin. My job is to substitute one bin for another in the garden shed according to which week which bin is collected.

Only women are clever enough to plan this schedule but only men can do the heavy labour involved, employing the brute force for which they have been famous since the cave, when everything was biodegradable.

A world nearer to a bone-strewn cave is one to which some in the green movement would like us to return. I can say at this point that the eco-wiseacre who has just been elected Australian of the Year foresees an ideal population for Australia of less than a third of the number of people it has now, but he doesn't say whether he includes himself and his family among the total of those to be subtracted.

Each time I change the bins I almost subtract myself from the present total of the inhabitants of East Anglia because for evolutionary reasons I am unable to lug one bin out and push the other bin in without impacting my forehead into the top frame of the shed door.

After the first time I fell to the flagstones clutching my bisected skull, when I jokingly suggested to the three watching eco-furies
that if I croaked in mid-manoeuvre they could always recycle me, I was informed that this possibility was on the cards because just outside of town there is a cemetery where they will bury you in a cardboard box.

There is also a graveyard called All Souls which has two wheelie bins standing outside it, one marked “All Souls compostable” and the other marked “All Souls non-compostable”.