This kind of novel doesn't often get published in Australia these days. It's far too experimental, savagely satirical and humane. Its targets are the mining corporations, the pastoralists and the city-slickers: in short, it provides a panorama of life in Australia from the 1930s. As well it pokes fun at the watershed moment in Australian literary history, the Ern Malley hoax, and the writing of Australia's Nobel laureate, Patrick White.
The novel has a circuitous structure, and at one stage I found a forty-page joke about camels. In this hardcover edition it can be bit hard going, with all its density, continual puns and unpunctuated prose style, as the layout is not great even though the typeface is large. There was a pocket-sized Penguin edition published later, which is a little better in presentation but too hard on aging eyes.
The Wort Papers is yelling out for a new edition, which would be most timely, as is his collection of short stories, which was poorly produced on a shoestring in the mid-80s. Trap has just been re-released by Sydney University Press.
Perhaps, like many have to Flann O'Brien in Ireland, people will wake up to the amazing satirists among Australia's rich, mid-late 20th century literary heritage. Surely writers such as Mathers, Dal Stivens, David Ireland and the slightly younger David Foster cannot be overlooked or undervalued forever. Mathers, in particular, is Australia's comparison to the best of the comic writers from Ireland and other European countries.
