Kindly Satire: C.J. Dennis’s The Glugs of Gosh (1917)

by Philip Butterss

With the opening lines of his book-length verse narrative, The Glugs of Gosh, C.J. Dennis invites the reader into a magical world:

Follow the river and cross the ford,
Follow again to the wobbly bridge,
Turn to the left at the notice board,
Climbing the cow-track over the ridge;
Tip-toe soft by the little red house,
Hold your breath if they touch the latch,
Creep to the slip-rails, still as a mouse,
Then … run like mad for the bracken patch.ⁱ

The land of Gosh is a child-like place, and the book began its life as ‘Joi, the Glug’, a single, humorous poem written for the sick son of Garry Roberts, Dennis’s mentor.ⁱⁱ He soon added other pieces to create a world peopled by Glugs with some endearing habits, such as their love of climbing trees and their predilection for pumpkin pies. The poetry is sometimes reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verse in Through the Looking Glass (1871), and Dennis’s Guffer Bird and Snufflebust Palm are perhaps antipodean relatives of Carroll’s Jabberwock. The Glugs of Gosh was released in October 1917 while Australian soldiers in Flanders were enduring some of the worst fighting of World War I.ⁱⁱⁱ No doubt—as with his best-known work, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, published two years earlier—readers enjoyed some light relief from the news of terrible casualties.

But The Glugs of Gosh was not only humorous escapism. As Dennis wrote new poems, the children’s verse grew to become simultaneously a critique of contemporary society. These two aspects are reflected in the original reviews, many of which shared the Melbourne Herald’s verdict that the book was ‘kindly satire’,^iv though the stinging criticisms are, in fact, sometimes much less than kind.

As readers are taken on a search for Gosh and its Glugs, it becomes increasingly clear that the places to look are all around us. We are told that: ‘Who find not, ‘tis he shall be found!’ (18). In the tradition of nonsense verse, there are times when the meaning of Dennis’s poetry is tantalisingly elusive, but here we are to understand that if we don’t find Glugs, then some other Glug-seeker will find us: we are Glugs.

In its satire on Australian life in the first decades of the twentieth century, The Glugs of Gosh casts a wide net. Glugs are criticised for their complacency, self-righteousness, materialism, consumerism, and their unthinking adherence to traditions of all sorts, including the monarchy. The most scathing condemnation is of the bureaucracy administered by the Swanks—a caste of small-minded, nepotistic, red-tape-bound officials who run the public service, the courts and government boards. The nastiest individual in The Glugs of Gosh is the Mayor of Quog, a representation of a scheming and duplicitous politician with great ambition; he is closely matched by Sir Stodge, the ‘meretricious, avaricious, [and] vicious’ leader of the Swanks (59). The book enters the long debate in Australian political economy between free traders and protectionists, coming down firmly on the latter’s side and depicting free trade’s devastating effect on local industries when cheap imports from the crafty Ogs of the neighbouring land of Podge pour into Gosh. Among other targets in contemporary Australian life is the education system, which is shown producing ‘learned fools’ and encouraging students into greed and materialism:

‘And now,’ said the teacher, ‘the day’s task brings
Consideration of practical things.

If a man makes a profit of fifteen pounds
On one week’s takings from two milk rounds,
How many …’ (45)

The heroes of The Glugs of Gosh are Joi and his son, Sym, two Glugs who question the mindless conformism of their peers. Joi is a rebel who is hanged after he criticises the practice of climbing trees and advocates killing King Splosh. Sym shares many characteristics with Dennis, his creator: both are poets; both had ‘maiden aunts’ prominent in their upbringing; both have a love of tinkering with tools; both leave the city to live in the mountains with their wives. And the positive values that the book endorses are intimately connected with Joi and Sym. Chief among these are a Romantic escaping into the natural world and the domestic bliss of marriage. As he was writing the last poems for The Glugs of Gosh Dennis was preparing for his own wedding, and the book is dedicated to his wife. Just as Sym lives happily with his Emily Ann on ‘a great mother mountain’ in a world filled with trees, flowers and birdsong, Dennis and his new wife, Biddy, retreated to Toolangi, near Healesville, north-east of Melbourne, far from the hustle and bustle of city life.

One of the central issues in The Glugs of Gosh is a question that all cultures must deal with: the tension between individual and community. The book praises the independence of thought possessed by Joi and Sym, and criticises the stultifying conventions, traditions and regulations of Glug society. On the other hand it is very critical of individualist greed and ambition, and in favour of simple connections between people.

As with Dennis’s other works, an important part of the readers’ experience of the text is the illustrations. Hal Gye, who had produced the whimsical cupid-larrikins for The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, was responsible for the caricatures that adorned the pages of The Glugs of Gosh. In keeping with the volume’s combination of children’s verse and biting satire, these are both charming and grotesque. Gye wrote that Dennis was artist’s model for a number of the illustrations: ‘He put on his old spider-webbed tails, climbed trees, swung on limbs, clung to the mossy trunks in truly Glug fashion and made Glug faces at me. He was the Mayor of Quog a couple of times, too’.^v And to underline the fact that the book was a version of its readers’ own society, the map of Gosh was drawn in the shape of a distorted but recognisable Australia.^vi

The Glugs of Gosh was released in an era when poetry was an important part of people’s daily lives, prior to the advent of commercial radio broadcasting in Australia in 1923. Literary historians have described Australian readers of this time as ‘the poetry generation’. According to Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, ‘This was not just a generation of poetry readers: they recited it, they quoted it, and they wrote it’.^vii Today the first edition of 20,000 copies seems an enormous print run for a book of verse.^viii When the fighting of the First World War was at its worst, Dennis’s poem offered its audience a humorous look at themselves and their country, one that singled out many aspects of Australian culture for serious criticism, but one that was also affectionate towards aspects of the Australian people and that showed a deep love of the Australian landscape.

Philip Butterss
English, University of Adelaide

1. C.J. Dennis, The Glugs of Gosh, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1917, p. 13. Subsequent page numbers in the text are to this edition.
2. John Garibaldi Roberts, Diary, 3 June 1915, State Library of Victoria, La Trobe MS 5782 box 265/1.
3. C.E.W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918. Vol. IV, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1917. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933.
4. Herald, 10 October 1917.
5. ‘Hal Gye’s Association with C.J. Dennis, McLaren Papers, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, p. 25.
6. Dennis Glugs, p. 49.
7. Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890-1930, Melbourne: OUP, 1992, p. 59.
8. Ian McLaren, CJ Dennis: A Comprehensive Bibliography Based on the Collection of the Compiler, Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1979, p. 124.