It's interesting to read reviews from the time, which were unanimously positive, both here and overseas. On the score of out-and-out down-to-earth humour, it's impossible to top. But as a book which captures the spirit of a people in a particular era, I think it would be hard to beat. The book They're A Weird Mob would today be considered politically very incorrect - labelled as both racist and sexist - which is possibly why it won't be found on any list of Australia's finest home-grown literature, alongside such heavy going works as Patrick White's Voss (also from 1957). Australia Day (today) seems as good a time as any, the more so because I am going to watch the movie yet again, at the National Film and Sound Archive here in Canberra, this very afternoon.
With its rollicking and affectionate humour, it showcases our manners, our wit and our distinctive vernacular - where 'they open their mouths no more than is absolutely necessary'.For some time now I had been planning to post on an Australian comic novel from 1957 called They're A Weird Mob, ostensibly written by an Italian immigrant, a magazine writer called Nino Culotta. 'And once you have entered it, you will never leave it.' The book remains just as relevant today: Weird Mobis about good people trying to make a go of things. 'Nino Culotta encouraged Australians to laugh at themselves, while providing a walloping hint for the 'New Australians' who were gracing our shores: 'Get yourself accepted.and you will enter a world that you never dreamed existed,' he wrote. Anybody who has the subtitles on for Kath & Kim will get the joke.' Telegraph '.a rollicking comedy about an Italian journalist in Fifties Australia trying to get his head around the natives' vernacular. Jacinta is regarded as a commentator for her generation. Her second book, Some Girls Do: My Life as a Teenageris an anthology of female authors writing the true story of their adolescence. Her first book, Good Man Hunting, a memoir about looking for love, earned her the accolade 'Australia's answer to Carrie Bradshaw'. Jacinta Tynanis an author, columnist for Sunday Life, and news presenter on Sky News.
In 1959 he published his famous comic poem 'The Integrated Adjective', better known as 'Tumba Bloody Rumba' in the Bulletin. It remains one of the most successful titles in Australian publishing history. He wrote for most of his adult life, but did not publish a book until he dreamed up They're a Weird Mobto win a bet. John O'Grady(Nino Culotta) was born in Waverley on 9 October 1907. They're a Weird Mobis an hilarious snapshot of the immigrant experience in Menzies-era Australia, by a writer with a brilliant ear for the Australian way with words. He thought he spoke English but he's never heard anything like the language these Australians are speaking. Just off the boat from Italy, Nino Culotta arrives in Sydney.
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