Gday...

Ah yeah ... me ole mate Nino .... geez ya brought a big grin to me dial reminding me of that Gary. Took me back to younger days ... I musta read that book a hundred times

They're a Weird Mob is a popular Australian comic novel written by John O'Grady under the pseudonym "Nino Culotta", the name of the main character of the book. The book was the first published novel by O'Grady, with an initial print run of 6,000 hardback copies. In less than six months, the book had been reprinted eight times and sold 74,000 copies. In the first year of publication, over 130,000 copies were sold. By the time of O'Grady's death in 1981, They're A Weird Mob was in its forty-seventh impression, with sales approaching the one million mark. Published by Ure Smith in 1957, the manuscript had been earlier rejected by publisher Angus & Robertson, and is reputably the result of a ten pound bet between O'Grady and his brother, novelist Frank O'Grady.

Cheers - John

 

Cop this lot was good too but Gone Fishin ! was my favorite ,all books good clean and funny !

When I was a very young lad, I attended a Catholic school for one year. For one hour per week, a snooty sounding woman would give us "elocution" lessons. Imagine a room full of working class plebs mindlessly repeating "how now brown cow" and "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain", excreta, excreta.

It wasn't until I actually got a job as an announcer that I took voice lessons (10 in 10 days instead of the normal 10 weeks). When the the teacher asked me to read a paragraph of text into a tape recorder, I did. Then he asked me to read it again using what I considered to be correct pronunciation. What came out of my mouth on the second attempt sounded incredibly false and contrived. BUT when I heard both versions played back on the recorder, I was astonished to hear the first sounding like a broad Aussie working class accent and the second sounding far more acceptable. What I learned from that lesson was that we're used to hearing our voices inside our heads and become comfortable with the way we sound. To suddenly hear it from the outside, as others do when we speak, comes as a shock. So learning to speak 'proper' was a process of becoming familiar with the way my voice sounded when I de-Aussiefied vowel sounds and articulated consonants.

In the end, I modified my accent to become neutral rather than a clone of a BBC announcer (as the early ABC announcers did). And once I became used to hearing myself with a neutral accent, I accepted it as my normal way of speaking rather than a contrived attempt to sound posh.

Years later, I was surprised to hear John Laws off air. When he's on air, you don't notice anything unusual about the way he speaks, but when he speaks to you in person off air, you realize just how cultured his vowels are.

An American friend once told me how to mimic the Queen saying "Oh, hello." Air hair lair. :)