It's the Greek nostos 'return home' and algos 'pain', the nostalgia or homesickness for the Australia that I had fallen in love with when I first arrived here in 1965, just before the movie "They're a Weird Mob" hit the screens, that brought me back to Australia in 1985.
I was right to be nostalgic for the Australia of the 1960s, but I was wrong to expect to find the mob still as weird twenty years later. Published in 1957, the book of the same name sold a record 130,000 copies in its first year. There were 'Weird Mob' parties across the country, with guests sporting blue singlets and workboots. Nino Culotta encouraged Australians to laugh at themselves, while providing a walloping hint for the 'New Australians': 'Get yourself accepted ... and you will enter a world that you never dreamed existed. And once you have entered it, you will never leave it.' I only ever left it to return again and again.
The book was written and the film was made when most Australians were welcoming of foreigners, but fully expected that they integrate into our way of life as soon as possible. That meant learning what a "shout" is, what it means to swim between the flags, and the value of a good beer. It is a documentary-like time capsule of a less complicated Australia before that ill-dressed little man, Al Grassby, ruined it for all of us when he fathered his bastard child, "multiculturalism".
Before Al Grassby stuffed it all up, 'New Australians' had already been readily accepted as long as they wanted to make a go of it and didn't make a nuisance of themselves. Not that they were expected to immediately drop their old ways, but that they did not parade their differences or bring their old-world disputes to this new land.
The book begins with the dedication, "Anyone who thinks he recognises himself in these pages, probably does." Sixty years later, I still do.
