![]() ![]() The main reason I wanted to post on Weird Mob was that, although I cannot recall reference to typewriter use in the book (probably taken as said for a magazine writer), the main character in the movie - made eight years after the novel was published - certainly carried around an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable in its distinctive blue with black strip case. Walter Chiari as Nino Culotta arrives in Sydney with his Olivetti Lettera 32 - a scene from the movie. John O'Grady's evocative work told vividly of the daily urban experience of many Australians in the mid to late 50s, which Voss did not. ![]() It's interesting to read reviews from the time, which were unanimously positive, both here and overseas. On the score of out-and-out down-to-earth humour, it's impossible to top. But as a book which captures the spirit of a people in a particular era, I think it would be hard to beat. The book They're A Weird Mob would today be considered politically very incorrect - labelled as both racist and sexist - which is possibly why it won't be found on any list of Australia's finest home-grown literature, alongside such heavy going works as Patrick White's Voss (also from 1957). Australia Day (today) seems as good a time as any, the more so because I am going to watch the movie yet again, at the National Film and Sound Archive here in Canberra, this very afternoon. ![]() For some time now I had been planning to post on an Australian comic novel from 1957 called They're A Weird Mob, ostensibly written by an Italian immigrant, a magazine writer called Nino Culotta. ![]()
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