This is a corker read if you’re dying. It is funny and interesting. As you peer at the tiny type you can actually see one or two Golden Syruped Diggers having a mag in the side bar of Young & Jackson’s, where talk started.

Good talk anyway. I call that pub The Great Window because as you sit there getting rotten, you see all. The starry Rank & File. Depressed computer wits heart-attacking off to slavedom at The Gas & Fuel Building only a few jars up the track.

The only worry with this supersonic effort is life. Obviously, it is nice to read of life; things sworn, sung, sneered and leered in life, the street psalms and filth and lovely just-made-it-up words that filter into our vernacular like couch-grass in your catcher.

I just like these sayings in the air. Alive, alive-O!

All museums have a dead life in them; former fish, moth-eaten gent’s underwear and Zulu typewriters that operate on bellows. A booming book this, a bottler, but it is a folding museum. A Phonebook full of funnies funnier up the pub. But I give it the nod. It’s better than giving someone a sad root.

The earnest Asian Playwright living in Richmond will find it invaluable as source material for a play about convict life in 1786 and 1986. G. A. Wilkes must have read every book on earth to dig out this amount of information. Good on ya, G. A.! There’ll be a cheque in the mail!

He gives us the meaning and origin of ‘tray-bit’ and ‘deener’ and a billion other friendly slang words. But what about ‘Footy Record’? Or ‘I’m going to have to job this prick’? Holy, those two are.

I am now of the opinion that Australians are not funny or good. They do not understand comedy and as there is no war on at the moment (outside the suburban bedroom) there is no insolent and ‘up against-it’ humour either. We all seem to work for Westpac.

As a student of the gutter, I would go so far as to say there is not much lavatory comedy about either. Just as men used to laugh in each other’s arms in bars and bright windows; they are now simply kicked to death. Oblivion is the new colloquialism.

Also, with the demise of The Pram Factory Theatre, and other courageous and chaotic institutions wherein poor language was preserved with nightly and matinee regular utterance, a whole heap of unique sayings from the comedy of abuse have disappeared for keeps.

I hope this book finds a ready and grateful market. It is a rare and good book because the things we say are ourselves; you lose that, and you lose the fuckin’ lot.