From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Feb 19 2002 - 22:35:51 MST
At 09:01 AM 2/19/02 -0500, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>You mean that australians can write? ;) That astounding fact makes it
>assured that a book by an australian will at least corner the curiosity
>market...
>Elle McPherson makes up for the rest, though.
True.
In fact, those few who can rite do so (as the National Poet Banjo Paterson
put it) with `a thumbnail dip'd in tar'. (Or it might have been the
National Poet Henry Lawson.)
Generally speaking, Australia is the place where you win a Gold Medal in
the Winter Olympics by being so far behind that when all the other
contestants fall over each other you can cruise past and pip them at the
post. Australia is the place where, when a young women throws herself in
the air from a high place and twists around a few times and lands without
killing herself (explaining breathlessly that she did it by switching off
her brain and letting her body do the walking) and gets a Gold Medal in the
Winter Olympics, the Premier of the state I live in rushes to offer her a
State Reception when she returns in glory. No riter that I can think of got
a State Reception, no, nor any scientist nor technologist nor artist nor
computer nerd neither. But that how it is with states, after all (the
mandatory Mark Walker crowd-pleaser).
Damien Broderick
[thumbnail dip'd in lemon essence; no, silly, for the fragrance]
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