The Outcasts of Foolgarah by Frank Hardy

Author:Frank Hardy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-09T20:43:42+00:00

Chapter 11

Come all you affluent Australians who wander free of care—the time has come to ask yourselves a question. Ask yourselves a question and answer it without any of your put it on the notice paper, sworn to secrecy by the Yanks backing and filling.

How long could a modern city function? How long now (considering the matter fairly) could a modern city function if the garbage collectors ceased to collect, the shit carters ceased to cart, and the piss pumpers ceased to pump? But needless to say, nobody is going to answer that question. That’s the way of the Silver Tails’ world: they think only of affluence; abundance, wealth, prosperity, influx or, to coin an exact phrase, of the flowing in; they don’t think of that which flows or issues from any body; in other words, they don’t think of the flowing out, they don’t think of effluence. That’s why they don’t ask the right questions and the scale of values stands on its head.

At the top of the topsy-turvy scale of your affluent society are the Vice-Regal representatives of Her Husband and Her (whom we did but see passing by). The new sire has improved the strain (take a gander at the jug-eared Prince), breeding out the worst hereditary diseases like pox and haemophilia, but inversely the new monarchic strain is resistant to all antibiotics, including republicillin and antipodestrine, ensuring that Australia will become the last stronghold of Royalty. If you manage to win an Olympic medal they play God save Her, but Sneed Hearn the leader, will try to change all that (give the devil his due), so you might get the Star Spangled Banner played as a Waltzing Matilda with Tricky Dick. On the top rung, too, but hidden in the shadows, as it were, the absentee landlords, investing in pastoral properties for a consideration (fifty cents per square mile per year, a tribe of Aborigines chucked in and no questions asked). Not to mention the local Pitt Street farmers like L. J. Hookem (of Hookem and Scalem, the real estate people, needless to say) and other up you for the rent uppity members of the upper bracket; the shipping magnates, steel barons, bankers who lend money only to people who’ve got plenty, munitions manufacturers, Wall Street oil drillers and mineral miners, drug manufacturers, bringing to mind newspaper tycoons who sack telegram boys and keep the press free for millionaires.

Gentlemen all! According to Who’s Who—but when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?

A few rungs down the affluent scaly ladder you find the hirelings of the capitalistic State machine, the lurk detectors, rule makers, triplicate men, wardlers of mercum, bureaucrats and forced move enforcers, the likes of your generals, Court criers, repossessors, judges, detectives, coppers’ narks, debt collectors, politicians, pimps, aldermen, process servers, bailiffs, conciliation commissioners, and shire clerks.

Then you drop down the topsy-turvy scale to the usefully useless barnacles on the body politic of the private enterprise system (there are more ways of making a buck than you could poke a stick at).

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