The joke had a sound ancestry. Psephologists and pollsters would have been better placed in that back bar than wandering the streets of Oxley, bothering citizens with their impertinent questions. The joke would have been on more than nodding terms with the ones about Governor Bligh and the bosun’s mate (salacious), Henry Parkes and the first telephone (financial chicanery), Ted Theodore and the sixpence on the pavement (ditto), Robert Menzies and the farmer with the three-legged cow (misrepresentation), or Jim Cairns and just about anyone (all of the above).

The performance of the joke demonstrated a distinguished lineage. There was a minimum of effort directed towards the maximum effect. There was no hollering. No thigh was slapped. All parties were satisfied. The laconic is disciplined. Perhaps it’s the heat. Perhaps it’s a simple desire to keep the flies out of the mouth. Perhaps it’s an equally simple desire not to be overheard and to be thrashed with lengths of rope. Whatever the cause, the tone is local. It is meant to be overheard, not heard.

There’s a good deal of this tone in The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Humour, (move to smaller typeface), chosen by Michael Sharkey. The title suggests a sun-studded pond into which Arthur Rackham has dipped his oar and the cover illustration will ensure for this volume a long shelf life, if not sales. It’s a watery sort of a picture, a bit thirties, seemingly appropriate to a volume of best forgotten Australian artworks of its type. You have to look twice to see the two-headed partygoer and you have to look at the inside fly leaf to discover that it is The Spirit Of Drink, Rupert Bunny (1938). Once you’ve put all this together with the title, you can see what Mr Sharkey is getting at. It defies established marketing principles, but it definitely has the tone.

In order to maintain the straight face essential to his subject, Mr Sharkey then kicks off with an introduction resonant of one knee-jerking. ‘Comedy often seems to endorse the “wrong thing” in its mocking treatment of sacred cows ... ’ intones Mr Sharkey, sounding like one of those awful, bearded echoes from a basement at the Sociology Department near you.

Mr Sharkey then apologises for the lack of nineteenth-century female humourists. Mr Sharkey goes on to apologise for the absence of ‘ethnic’ humourists, makes a flying dive to try to include everyone, after all, as citizens of Ethnia, compounds his actions with a hope that Aboriginal humourists will in future be better represented, thanks everyone, and vacates the stage. If Barry Humphries or Gabrielle Lord or Ernie Dingo or Wogs Out Of Print (as they surely soon must be) could not take the piss out of this genuflection in one brisk working session, we would all be very much surprised.

Bruce Petty expressed the proper introduction to a book of this calibre in one line, two elbows, one eyebrow, and no eye contact. ‘Humour’, he noted from the depths of the embarrassment induced by the request to define, ‘is a corrective device’. Mr Sharkey, having heedlessly waxed over two pages, backed up with a splendid cartoon from David Low which is wholly ad hominem and which cheerfully settles a number of scores, then loosens his starched collar and hair shirt and calls for the first slide.

The first slide is guaranteed to repel all those browsers who have wrestled through the undergrowth at the foot of the mountain and who are now wondering whether to foul their shoes in an attempt at the north-face of the Treasury. It is Adventures On A Winter’s Night In Melbourne by George Wright (1820–1862), in a sort of heroic traminer, and it reads like it sounds. Once clear of this obstruction, the reader should find wondrous easy going .

There is absolutely no point in reviewing a book like this in a formal sense. Humour is a terribly personal problem. It is enough to note that Mr Sharkey has done his, mine, and your homework, and that he has included rich pickings from the comical­tragical, the pastoral-comical, the pastoral-comical-tragical, the suburban-pastoral-comical, the undergraduate, graduate, post-graduate comical, tragical and frankly commercial, quite a lot of splendid journalism, and a fair sized contribution from people who lean on bars and talk out of the comers of their mouths because of the heat or the flies.

It’s a joy to see Ross Campbell at his lathe again, even if we can no longer recapture the first rapture of knowing that he really was speaking on our parents’ behalf. There’s a fine burst from Lennie Lower. There’s a piece from Thelma Forshaw which you haven’t read because if you read this publication, you probably don’t queue up at the printers to buy Quadrant. Even though you do queue up at the news stand out at the airport to buy the Bulletin, you probably weren’t there in 1918 to catch the first appearance of Beatrice Florence Osborn’s piece on Fightin’ Sin. There is, as they say, much, much more. This really is a Treasury.

The selection of cartoons, paintings, and illustrations is particularly deft. Interests must be declared and there are a couple of my cartoons on page something. In addition to this display are some beautifully selected ethnic quips from the nineteenth-century; note particularly Ruby Lindsay’s cartoon on page fifty-one:

The First: Evelyn keeps her age well.
The Second: Yes; she can’t get rid of it.

You can’t fault what the Chooser has put in; you can only grindle at what he has left out, which grindling is oppressive, didactic, and solipsistic, per se. There is no excuse, whatever dummies Mr Sharkey has sold successfully, in his solemn introduction, for excluding a selection from Lennie Lower’s Here’s Life. If he is willing to tip his hat in the direction of Lennie’s workplace in his choice of a cover illustration, he might well have considered the following:

Some men, when they are worried, find relief in violent exercise, some put their faith in a cold shower, others go to their beds early and relate their troubles all night to their wives; but Flannery’s will do me. Flannery’s is a home and better than a home. You can knock your pipe out on anything and spit wherever you like at Flannery’s. Always a welcome there, a kind smile and cheery word. And if they don’t like you, they throw you out. A virile place. A place where he-men with red blood may fill their open spaces – where they fetch Grandad his old Martini and mend a broken heart with a gin sling; where every man can give his order and be obeyed; where everyone gets shot and no-one dies. Such is Flannery’s.

Proud Ethnians, under-published women, unpublished Aboriginals and all those who do appear in this book would find a warm coal glowing there. Buy this book immediately and seek out all others on the main entries, among its myriad combinations and collocations, I most missed dud and dudder, job and snot, dingo degree, singleton, cluster, tossle, squirrel-grip, to open your lunch, to pack a nice lunch, Mrs Palmer and her five daughters, Spanish Dancer and Bengal Lancer, Skip, to throw a map, sprog, spong, Mexicans, and Gringos, goose, agricultural shot, screamer, pluto, poop, pill, and surface (as in ‘How did you surface after a night of Africa speaks?’): Some of these, such as Skip (a term for an Aussie used by young Greek and Italian Australians), are oral, and may take a while to seep into our printed literatures.

How to characterise Australianisms? I’d say they were a peculiar amalgam of the ornate and taciturn, elliptical in style yet direct in content, often figurative and devious – bespeaking a code of silence more physical than metaphysical: ingenious rather than genuine, the comic language of an ostensibly rulerless class over-inclined to dodge Pompey but not inclined to rock the head sherang’s boat, the idioms of alienation and non-identify: irony, distance, rhyme, and pith.

Australianisms, while ‘fully accessible to most Australians’, should not be viewed as the expressions of most Australians. Australianisms have more to do with invention and wit.

With this in mind, I would like to cite a citation for scalper: ‘Two scalpers entered a liquor house in Springsure, ordered two pints, and passed a dingo scalp over the bar in payment.  Mrs Public-house ... handed over as change three wallaby scalps.’

Australoid also warrants a mention, given its definition: ‘Of, allied to, or resembling the ethnological type of the Aboriginals.’ B. Yamaguchi (Comparative Osteol. Study 1967) is quoted thus: ‘ ... Australoid type ... is characterized by the narrow cranial vault, flat and inclined frontal squama, protruding superciliary arches, neatly triangular orbital margins, deep canine fossae and marked alveolar prognathism.’

Could there possibly be a finer description of that noble savage, the Ocker? I have a firm belief in the powerful but undiscriminating shaping powers of natural environment. It is no accident that many of us in speech screech and squawk like cockatoos, or grunt like wombats. The rising inflection could as much be a mimesis of migratory bird sounds as a manifestation of colonial anxieties. With the decay of Aboriginal tongues, the sounds of our fauna and flora, our weathers, our landscapes, and silences, may be influencing the way we speak.

I read The Australian National Dictionary with the speed and absorption usually reserved for gripping detective fiction or rich family sagas. It gave me such pleasure that my lists of omissions seem sinless. I did not have time to fully check the select bibliography, but observed that my volume of short plays, Squibs, was not listed even though it is the source of a citation for bushfire blonde. Perhaps the selection of the select bibliography is based on frequency. Who cares? The Australian National Dictionary will always be within mind-range, if not arm-range, of my desk.