Comes up blue in the face, spittin’ sand an’ seaweed’) decides that they ‘must be speaking the technical language of lifesavers’, which he himself should quickly learn. Nino, for instance, listening to a group of lifeguards at Bondi (‘Wot about Marouba last Sundy? All on ‘e says, an’ falls for it himself. They’re a Weird Mob could easily be viewed as linguistically comedy of sorts, and indeed in this vein it’s as observant and wry as ever, putting a mirror just how impenetrable an exaggerated local dialect can be. Naturally, this leads to all sorts of misunderstanding and mischief. Rather, they appear to converse in a kind of ‘Australianese’, a mish-mash of flattened vowels, strung-together words, slang and subtle quirks of literalism. While Nino speaks almost perfect textbook English, the catch, as he soon discovers, is that most Australians do not. To do so, he bunkers down at a hotel in Kings Cross and eventually lines up a job as a bricklayer so that he can get to know ‘Working Australians’. Nino Culotta, both narrator and apparent author of the novel, travels from northern Italy on an assignment from his boss – to ‘write about what kind of people these Australians are’ for publications back home. In a way, They’re a Weird Mob reads just as much as a love-letter to the Australian language as it does as a paranorma of immigration and culture-shock in 1950s Sydney.
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