THE ROAD TO GUNDAGAI
Y EARS ago, more than I care to recall, I used to listen to Dad. and Dave every week. They were archetypal characters of my youth, mountainously, but engagingly stupid, surmounting with a gigantic earthy calm, the forces of hostile mature arrayed against them. Wasn’t it always teeming in Snake Gully? As I recall, they lived in-unpainted lean-tos and shacks, with Dave and Mabel mooing cretinously at each other as they floundered amiably along the soggy road of their interminable courtship, subject of a hundred unprintable accounts of the Life Force in the outbacks. I tuned in to them the other night, after an absence of, I fear, 20 years. It was a shock. They seem entirely respectable now, well housed, and it was not raining. They spent their time on trivial errands which in one episode I could hardly untangle, but the old earthy comedy of humours, that curious enlivening mixture of mercury and sludgy melancholy, has gone. It is, I suppose, quite unreasonable to expect a comedy series to maintain its invention or its style over a whole generation: after all, Dave and Mabel would have to get hitched some- time, but the present series has no more relation to the old, than, say, a modern comedy has to the stage humours of Ben Jonson. Most of the episode consisted of various sections of The Road to Gundagai rendered by full orchestra. I shall not listen again, I fear, but use
this page to mourn the passing of three great, and for all their dampness, noble
characters.
B.E.G.
M.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570802.2.47.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 938, 2 August 1957, Page 30
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265THE ROAD TO GUNDAGAI New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 938, 2 August 1957, Page 30
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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