Barry Dickins
Barry Dickins is an author, artist and playwright based in Melbourne. His writing for the stage spans more than two decades and includes the plays: Royboys, A Dickins’ Christmas, The Death of Minnie, Reservoir by Night and Insouciance.
This dainty, delicate, savage book is lovely and rare because it is truthful, vicious, brimming with the blue eyes of memory, the red eyes of defeat, the open mouth and congo drum of childhood. When Barry Oakley writes of his childhood, it is you booting him the footy of laughter.
He writes, wonderfully, sweetly, dreamily of taking his sore-footed mum and soft-drink-eyed son for the satiric day t ... (read more)
I’m unrepresented but still resented. By the regular writers of the pulp I contribute to to keep me and mine from the pawnbrokers; by the witless screenwriters’ minders who know how to quote Lawson, but only in jest; by the rank & file plodders who hate the public, and most of all loathed by academics who have a sort of vision of blue collar, but mix it up with art.
Who could represent me ... (read more)
It is Sunday and that is all it is. I have just read the Australian. It is not Australian. It is The Cringe. I have struggled to like Phillip Adams for years; I liked him when he was Phillip Adams – I guess he did too. He worships Mammon when he once seemed to worship cries in the street and whispers from above. No God in him.
... (read more)
It’s finally happened. I’m not funny.
All my life I’ve been told I’m a ratbag. I’m a maniac. I need help. I see life different. Hint of lunacy in the blood. Touch of madness in the haircut. Dickins, he’s crazy. Dickins, he thinks like the turn-off to Shepparton.
And generally I have to say I’ve agreed with the general view; the consensus is, always has been, that Barry Dickins is a ... (read more)
It is impossible to know who first said, ‘Get your end in!’ but that is probably the only normal colloquialism of ours left out of this beaut (if you’ve got about forty bucks) book.
Clearly, G. A. Wilkes has had his end in; we all have, haven’t we? But Australia’s greatest saying is not included. Perhaps it is Welsh.
I’m buggered if I could have summoned up the bloody patience to wad ... (read more)