Bill & Doreen Get Hitched (Selections from "The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke")

The most popular Australian book of its era, this verse novel captures the rough music of Melbourne's working-class streets in the language actually spoken by larrikins and their lassies. Bill, a violence-prone member of the Little Lonsdale Street push, meets Doreen and discovers that love is the only fight he can't win on his own. The poetry walks the line between comedy and sincerity, rendering Bill's transformation from gang tough to contented husband and father with an authenticity that feels less like literature and more like overhearing a stranger's story at the pub. First published in 1915, the book sold sixty thousand copies in nine editions within a year. Australian soldiers carried special pocket editions into the trenches of the Great War, homesick for both the language and the sentiment. This is not polished high culture; it's better. It's the voice of ordinary Australians, rendered in verse that still rings true a century later.