The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke

Meet Bill, a larrikin from Melbourne's notorious Little Lon district, whose rough exterior hides a heart as soft as a paw. When he meets Doreen, a girl with aspirations above her station, something shifts in this violence-prone member of a larrikin push. Through poems written in the broadest Australian slang you'll ever encounter, Bill chronicles his Courtship, his transformation, his doubts and his eventual surrender to love. It's the story of a man becoming more than he thought he could be, told in a voice that sounds like your toughest mate reciting Shakespeare at the pub. First published in 1916, this verse novel sold sixty thousand copies in its first year. Soldiers carried pocket editions through the trenches of WWI. It became the best-selling poetry book in Australian history, and its 1918 film adaptation remains one of the great works of Australian cinema. The Sentimental Bloke endures because it captures something true about becoming better than your circumstances, about the tenderness hidden beneath bluster, about love meeting us where we are and demanding we rise to meet it.