Henry Lawson's short story 'The Drover's Wife' is an Australian classic that has sparked interpretations on the page, on canvas and on the stage. But it has never been so thoroughly, or hilariously, reimagined as by Ryan O'Neill, remixing and revising Lawson's masterpiece in ninety-nine different ways.
You'll be amused, delighted and surprised by a Year 8 essay, a sporting commentary, a pop song, a cento, a dance and many more. Inventive and unexpected, this is laugh-out-loud literature from one of Australia's finest satirists.
Industry Reviews
"In his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious book he does something stunningly original using Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife-turning it into a bravura literary game using most of the sub-forms and styles of both popular culture and literary culture (Hemingwayesque, Joyceian etc.) and has also used many of the commonplace communication shapes which some of us use and experience daily-the tweet, the crossword, the slide presentation, the mixtape, trivia quiz- and he also uses some old,perhaps forgotten, sub-forms such as the lipogram, pangram, cento, scratch and sniff (1965)-I have never read a work like this before-it is also a perfect reference book and teaching aid for teachers and students of English by illustrating the rich variety of ways we play with and use the language-it is a cerebrally imaginative tour de force."-Frank Moorhouse
In his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious book he does something stunningly original using Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife-turning it into a bravura literary game using most of the sub-forms and styles of both popular culture and literary culture (Hemingwayesque, Joyceian etc.) and has also used many of the commonplace communication shapes which some of us use and experience daily-the tweet, the crossword, the slide presentation, the mixtape, trivia quiz-and he also uses some old, perhaps forgotten, sub-forms such as the lipogram, pangram, cento, scratch and sniff (1965)-I have never read a work like this before-it is also a perfect reference book and teaching aid for teachers and students of English by illustrating the rich variety of ways we play with and use the language-it is a cerebrally imaginative tour de force. -- Frank Moorhouse