Oakley grumbles about being the enemy when he sits in judgement of a play written by someone he likes; the drama critic ghost knowing the go peering into mateship’s dingo eyes. Sitting down or standing up with this book is to cough in the morning barber’s; to feel sudden respect for Queensland for inventing the banana. Jim McNeil, dead writer and jail bard, whom Pop never met. lives by default in the affectionate paragraphs of sun. Barry saw him once banging on a doctor’s door and never forgot the can look in his eye. In fact, this book is all about eyes. Writers’ festival’d to death, Oakley sweats it out in snide and unairconditioned last-class hotels, there to write about bad writing, arrogant overseas geniuses who missed the talent bus a thousand advances ago.

The helicopter Oakley eye sees the lot: the poor, doomed pricks articled­clerking their lost way onto last trains to nowhere. Canadian bores and Canadian bears, clambering their bluff way towards fame in Australia by behaving like sensitive Hitlers. Failed German wags drinking others’ wine in the ferny Dandies.

He who blew life into Max Gillies· strutting with him on the lucky lino of the Pram Factory; writing for his friend and putting jokes into both his hands, grooming Max for eventual stardom, and Max is lucky to have met him.

Melbourne martyrdom to dog vomit Sydney; working script-editing others’ raves at that sepulchral cheer-up centre, the ABC. Servant of syntax blow soft rather than blowhard the only thing stopping Barry Oakley making it big in Sydney is his charm. I first got onto just how hard it would be to make a bardic bob in Sydney in l 979. I asked Curtis Brown Star literary agent to the Mighty, for an artistic hoist up fame’s rotting and rickety ladder. He gave me a dollar. (In ten cent pieces; I’ve never spent it.)

It’s the love of Melbourne that smokes and pops like corks through the tramline text. Smokes, men stepping into a newsagent to find out from the Late Extra if they’re still alive.

He is at his best describing Clive James a float in a pool. Too famous to chat with someone as funny as Ken Horler in a wig. Brazen as braised steak, tough as a tram ticket, whimsical as fog on a possum’s snout seen on stout in the Treasury Gardens, Barry Oakley is the best writer we’ve got.

Of all the plank that was or is, wit’s the best drop; and the wag of miniature terraced Paddington has it on tap. I know, because like bloody hundreds of desperate penners from Melbourne I’ve had a taste of his and Carmel’s kindness in their ante-gloom-chamber. His description of Barry Humphries on the stage is so good you hold the ancient melting Jaffas in your hands. He is one who has loved others and so now, others must love him. This newie, this beaut book is a must for all who hate Australia.

It is the skilful capturing of early morning fuzziness, early evening backstabbing, late night wisteria witticisms and oblivion coming in the shape of dream streets where one whom you loved forty years ago is still running between wickets.

Oakley, who has had his filmscripts fucked up by real smarties who wouldn’t know a choc wedge from a ferry to Manly. This cultivated victim of Sydney stupidity needs a run in a paradise pasture; and it won’t be too long before it happens. He has the fantasy runs on the board. Ferries bedaubed by faint rain over the harbour. Rats in alleys of the Literature Board backstreets; it’s all there. I hear you, Dick Hughes, playing the piano upstairs at the AJA bar in Chalmers Street. I hear you, Barry Oakley, laughing with a table of confused writers in Oxford Street.