Songs of a Sentimental Bloke

Meet Bill, a larrikin from Melbourne's mean streets who spends his nights brawling with the Little Lonsdale Street Push and his days talking big. Then he meets Doreen, and everything changes. Written in the working-class Australian vernacular of 1915, this verse novel follows Bill's rough courtship, his stumble toward respectability, and his dawning realization that maybe there's something better than knocking around with the boys. The poetry rollicks along in thick Melbourne slang, mixing laugh-out-loud humor with moments of startling tenderness. It's a story about a man discovering that being soft for someone isn't weakness, it's the whole point. When it first appeared in 1915, Australians bought sixty thousand copies in nine editions within a year. A century later, it still captures something essential about this place: the larrikin pride, the embarrassment about feeling too much, the way love can make a bloke grow up without losing himself.