Australians Abroad - In the New Country

Now it would be fun to see what someone like David Foster would do with an Aussie dictionary, and I reckon we should let him loose on one sometime soon too. Here's a man who adores the colour of language, particularly as she is spoke by us in DownUnder/Godzone/Striya etc. And I think Hess ready to take us to the Next Level in terms of creative use of Aussie language.

'In the New Country' starts with a mysterious bloke winning a City to Surf fun run, notwithstanding that he is dressed in, but evidently unhampered by, a gorilla suit. The mystery is that he wins the race and disappears, leaving the country curious about all that talent going to waste. Foster uses the rest of the book as a sort of ‘whodunit’ or ‘whowazzit’ for his show everyone it seems, is curious to find out who the mysterious athlete could be (this is set in the recent past of pre-Olympic days where scouts are still out looking for the Next Big Thing in athletics, and keeping fingers crossed in the hope of finding an underdog as a marketing opportunity). But don't expect much suspense in this tale. The characters include promoter Adam Hock (ad hoc geddit?), the elusive expat and now Grammy winning Nashville star Dud Leahy (this particular surname pronounced, as the author explains in a note at the beginning of the book , - ‘Lay’, and so it goes..) and a bunch of now elderly bog-Irish descendants who've created and are barely holding together the pathetic remnants of their own little world in the charmingly named but economically fragile town of Knocklofty.

Knocklofty, in case you don't know it, is in Yarrawongamullee Shire, the New Country of the title an area Foster has placed on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales. Ad and his aged but energetic townsfolk are planning a high school reunion in the hope that they'll get a tourism boost by attracting back their former schoolmate (now celebrity Nashville star) for an intimate and sentimental get together.

The book is mostly one long series of conversations piling classic Aussie image in top of classic Aussie image to paint the quaint, obscure community that's lost just about everything, little enough though even that ever was.

The yarning old codgers clearly love their little patch of dirt and they don't have a whole lot else to do but talk 'Why do horses run so fast in New Zealand? ..they've seen what happened to the sheep' and 'turns out Hess a drip-dry, not a flip-dry. He's a she' are typical content in Knocklofty conversations. There's no retreat into dignity in age much here either. Still, it's not what you'd call a relaxing tale. This is a love letter to the pace and peace of old towns that offer a lifestyle that seems harder and harder to sustain in this ever urbanizing world.

And as ever, the journey is everything and who cares about the destination. I pretty much lost interest in the ‘whowazit’ aspect by the time the gorilla suit mystery was solved, but the images, preoccupations and sayings of the Black Irish families of Knocklofty keep popping up to make me smile.

(Could be a good place for some Australian dictionary writing )

'In the New Country', is (assuming such things are not the kiss of death as a portent of Serious Oz Lit.) hailed on its cover as having won the ‘inaugural Courier Mail Book of the Year’ in 1999. It is also a civilized size and weight and writing style for carrying around and reading in bits.