More Than a Sentimental Bloke cover

More Than a Sentimental Bloke

John Derum as C. J. Dennis

NSW University Press, 1990

Cover photograph by Stuart Campbell

Dust-jacket Synopsis

John Derum's brilliant stage show on the life and work of C. J. Dennis is crystallised in this warm and funny book.

Old friends like The Bloke and Doreen, Ginger Mick, the Glugs of Gosh and dozens of others parade through its pages, wryly observed by “Den” himself.

This delightful book is a fitting tribute to one of Australia's most-loved writers.

Quotes

“I dips me lid to John Derum.” — Sydney Morning Herald
“More than a Sentimental Bloke is a delight…” — Sunday Observer
“If you missed it first time around, don’t miss it now.” — The Sun

Extract from the Introduction

The name of C. J. Dennis has been synonymous with his most famous creation, The Sentimental Bloke, ever since September 1915 when the poems were first published together as The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. All but two of the fourteen poems had been published in The Bulletin and four had been included in Dennis's first collection, Backblock Ballads and Other Verses, two years earlier. But it was with the arrival of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke that Bill, the Bloke, his sweetheart, Doreen, and his rough mate, Ginger Mick, became part of the lives of generations of Australians.

The intention in devising a theatrical presentation of a selection of the writings of C. J. Dennis was to bring to a wider audience, and subsequently to a wider readership, exactly what the title suggests - that Dennis had written much more than his most famous book of poems and its equally famous and successful sequel, The Moods of Ginger Mick.

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis, who preferred to be known as Den, was born in Auburn, South Australia, on 7 September 1876. Both parents were born in Ireland: James Dennis, a master mariner and later publican, was a widower when he married Kate Tobin, who died, aged thirty-nine, when Den was only fourteen. He and his two younger brothers were cared for by their mother's four maiden sisters and at boarding school in Adelaide.

After he left school young Den had a variety of jobs including journalism for several Adelaide, and later Melbourne and Sydney, publications. He was also a frequent contributor to The Bulletin and other magazines of the time. This pattern continued through his twenties, combined with various wanderings and a period of about eighteen months near Broken Hill until he came to the small town of Toolangi, about seventy kilometres east of Melbourne, in 1908.

.....

The script of More than a Sentimental Bloke, as originally performed and presented here, is made up from the poems and prose of C. J. Dennis, and even the narration is compiled from comments Den made in letters to people who were perceptive enough to keep them and later make them available to us all in library collections. There are also some reported comments and views that 1 have taken back to the first person, and a few where I blatantly made up what I thought he would have said! The sections in italics are either original stage directions or my additional background comments for the benefit of the reader.

Making the final selections which could convey, in a single performance, an idea of the contents of ten books and more than three thousand items of poetry and prose printed in The Herald was sometimes frustrating. Some old favourites had to be left behind. As well, the performance changed as we found that certain literary pieces were barely comprehensible to the theatre audience. "A Guide For Po-its" and "As She Is Spelt" need to be seen on the page to be fully appreciated. Similarly, the letters from Ben Bowyang are fun to hear but even more fun to read. A later and temporary inclusion in the performance, an extract from "Fighting The Fires". Den's description of an experience with bushfire, was included in the weeks immediately following the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983. The complete texts of all these are now included in Appendices 1 and 3.

Also included in this volume is the previously unpublished "Limpy Ben". It was written to be published as a Christmas pamphlet in 1918. Extracts from the correspondence between Dennis and publisher George Robertson discussing the decision not to publish are included with the text in Appendix 2.

Editing for live performance makes rather more ruthless demands than editing for publication and it has been tempting to restore some cuts made for the performance simply to enable the inclusion of the widest possible sample of Den's work. Nevertheless, the script is presented as it was performed, with the addition of two of Den's short stories which will come as a pleasant surprise even to people who are familiar with C. J. Dennis.

It was occasionally depressing to realise that so many of the subjects dealt with in The Herald were still with us fifty years later and that despite the rapier thrust of the satirist, little had changed.

Contents

From the New South Wales University Press paperback edition, 1990.

Home → Related Material → Collections → More Than a Sentimental Bloke