Literature and Politics

Encrusted and overgrown with layer upon layer of national myth, They’re a Weird Mob by Nino Culotta (John O’Grady) presents the cultural historian with a particularly difficult text for analysis, simultaneously transparently obvious, yet complex and opaque. Perused decades after its heyday, the book resists any attempts to position it within a dialectical schema of Australian social and cultural history. Were its effects progressive and productive, opening up a textual space within which the previously narrow social strictures of Anglo and Celtic Australia mixed with those of southern Europe to reform as a tolerant, culturally diverse entity? Or was it a conservative exercise in containment, a tactical occupation of the speaking position of the immigrant other on behalf of the paranoid voice of the dominant political and ethnic assemblage?

Perhaps one reason They’re a Weird Mob is so difficult to define is because it did in fact produce both of these effects together, it was at once progressive but conservative, open and closed. Added to these complexities is the fact that the book in question became much more than just a book: in the decade after its publication, They’re a Weird Mob generated something of a minor cultural industry in itself. O’Grady followed it—his first published work—with a string of remarkably successful sequels, initially under the same pseudonym of Nino Culotta, and then under his own name, whilst the phenomenon would eventually culminate in 1966 with the production of a feature film, also titled They’re a Weird Mob, directed by the British filmmaker Michael Powell.

This paper will briefly examine these questions raised by They’re a Weird Mob, Australia’s most popular novel of the 1950s, as well as contrasting it with a contemporary from the other end of the literary and class spectrum, Patrick White’s The Tree of Man.