The larrikin character of Bill, the Sentimental Bloke, also known as the Kid, formally debuted in a four-poem sequence in C. J. Dennis’s first collection, Backblock Ballads and Other Verses, in 1913, although the individual poems had appeared episodically in the Sydney Bulletin since 1909. The poet then developed Bill as the focus of a longer series of verses which was published as The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke in 1915. The book made Dennis a national figure and has rarely been out of print to this day, with over 900,000 copies sold by the 1980s alone (Butterss, Unsentimental 216). It is by far the most popular book of Australian poetry ever published. So embedded was its popularity that in the not-so-distant past, a now departed generation of Australian men was apt affectionately to utter, upon their wife entering the room, ‘’Er name’s Doreen…’ (Dennis 13) – even if…
Picturising Patois in The Sentimental Bloke
Abstract
Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell’s 1919 adaptation of C.J. Dennis’s vastly popular 1915 verse novel, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, has long been regarded as the great classic of surviving Australian silent films, yet relatively little has been written about how text and image relate to each other within it. This article begins with a consideration of Dennis’s poems in the context of the contemporary fashion for dialect verse, which paradoxically represented comic, semi-literate speakers for the entertainment of an increasingly literate mass audience, often through popular recitals in which the magic lantern show offered an early model of incorporating poetry with projected images. It is argued that Longford and Lyell’s deployment of Dennis’s text in the form of first-person expository intertitles implies that Arthur Tauchert’s performance as Bill, the Bloke, may itself be read as a kind of filmic ‘recital’. This has implications for the different ways in which his patois has been ‘picturised’ throughout, and two scenes are analysed in detail: ‘The Play’, where Bill famously first encounters Shakespeare, and ‘The Stroot ’at Coot’, where he vanquishes a middle-class rival. Against the artifice of Dennis’s ‘larrikinese’, the film unfolds through a naturalistic style of acting and direction that, while it incorporates earlier modes of popular performance, also reimagines them into a style of comic, dramatic irony.
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Published 18 December 2023 in Volume 38 No. 3. Subjects: Bush poetry, Larrikins, Cinema, Australian 'bush writing'.
Cite as: Kirkpatrick, Peter. ‘Picturising Patois in The Sentimental Bloke.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 2023, doi: 10.20314/als.14aa79ca9f.