Among the various celebrations of the event were the production of two large, illustrated books. The Journalistic Javelin (which incidently, ‘lifted’ copyright material from at least one book without permission or acknowledgement), and the more recent The Bulletin Clotted Rot for Clots and Rotters (a tasteless title really, but sensibly abbreviated on the imprint page for library cataloguing to Clotted Rot. Issued in a large paperback edition Clotted Rot is a collection of joke cartoons, stories and verse – ‘the best and brightest of the early Bulletin’.

Clotted Rot was the term the early Bulletin gave to the volume of light verse selected for publication. The term has been extended in this collection to cover the stories, cartoons and some amusing advertisements from the time of the paper’s inception to around 1900.

Whilst the drawings are not dated, the stories, the verse and the short pieces are. A few of them carry no author's name, nom de plume or initials, but of those that are signed the big names of the Bulletin's exciting, formative years are fully represented with fiction or verse by Henry Lawson, Edward Dyson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Albert Dorrington, Louise Mack, ‘Breaker’ Morant, Roderick Quinn, and of course Steele Rudd with his wonderfully human story from his series collected in On Our Selection. ‘The Parson and the Scone’.

Although short stories like this latter, and Quinn’s ’A Stripe for Trooper Casey’ among other items, have been republished in book form, and may therefore be familiar to some, readers of Clotted Rot will pleasurably discover much that is new, reprinted for the first time since the original appearance before the turn of this century.

Because Australia at the time had an economy based almost totally on rural production, not surprisingly both the fiction and the drawings have a strong ‘bush’ emphasis; all the old legendary favourites are present – swagmen, station hands, cocky-farmers, bush parsons, new-chums, John Chinaman and so on. And the marvellous pen draughtsmen of the day too – Phil May, Livingston Hopkins, George Lambert, David Souter, Alf Vincent, George Rossi Ashton, Fred Leist, Alf Fischer and others contribute with their skills and talents to a book that documents an important part of our cultural heritage and a way of life so different from our own – one of a slower, quieter pace, one less sophisticated when humor was an unashamed factor of creativity.

The book is an optical joy. Frank Broadhurst the designer, with great sympathy for the subject, has produced a hundred and ninety odd pages of taste and charm. The ochre and the pale blue tints introduced to impeccably reproduced illustrations together with a text set in Bembo type of a size that echoes perfectly the packed, somewhat grey columns of the early Bulletin support a wonderful collection for reading from cover to cover, or for idle dipping.

There will be those who, after having read Clotted Rot, wish it were the first of a series presenting further treasures from the early 20th century Bulletin.