A trip to ‘the big smoke’ has become a ‘standard’ in Australian storytelling. The contrasting lifestyles and attitudes of city slickers and bush folk, and the ever-present danger of losing your true values and sense of self in the city, or finding redemption and peace in the bush, are themes that occur again and again.
The ‘city slicker’ versus the ‘country hick’ has been a constant source of inspiration for stories, verse, yarns and jokes from the earliest colonial days, through the era of gold rushes and ‘new chums’, and through to the stories of Steele Rudd and Henry Fletcher.
Many of Banjo Paterson’s most famous poems, like ‘The Man From Ironbark’, ‘Geebung Polo Club’, ‘Been There Before’ and ‘Clancy of The Overflow’, are based on contrasting city life to rural life.
The iconic figures of the gullible bushie and the confidence man, or ‘spieler’, turn up in many guises. The many ruses used by the ‘spieler’ to outwit the ‘bushie’ include some, like the ‘Uncle from Fiji’, which became stereotypes in themselves.
The opening poem by Edward Dyson (written for The Bulletin under his pen-name ‘Billy T’), in which a woman’s ingenuity proves to be more than a match for both bush caution and spieler, is one of my all-time favourites.
The story by Gavin Casey adds a different and darker dimension to the old theme of bush camaraderie and alienation in the city.