Fang the fauna

This is a verse collection with a back-story.

This work had its origins in a creative writing workshop that I was engaged in, probably in 1986. We were discussing commercial tendencies, and with an eye on the looming 1988 Bicentennial, I invented a fictional work, which I dubbed:

Gastromania Australiana, or
The Bicentennial Rhyming Cookbook.

That deliberate stalking-horse, that epitome of crude commercialism fed the debate and gave us a good laugh before we moved on, but that night, a few rough verses crept out, and a week later, I shared them with the workshop. We had another laugh, and again moved on. At home, the scribbles went into the bottom drawer, but in the summer of 1986-87, I had a thought.

As a classically-trained biologist, I knew how to illustrate with stipple, and I would sit in boring bureaucratic meetings, as pompous oafs droned on, wasting time. To keep myself sane, I drew stippled doodles, usually trying to create a nicely shaded sphere, but somehow, as I drew, each of them acquired textures, eyes and appendages, like this one on the right.

More importantly, I saw that the clowns all watched intently as my doodles emerged, gaining character, and slack-jawed, they forgot to drone. An intelligent colleague, a real artist, saw this, and sat opposite me, drawing scenes. We found that by each of us settling between two twits, we could mute four of them, leaving the intelligent people to deal with issues uninterrupted.

I ended up with lots of drawings, and some of them matched my verses, so in mid-1987, a limited but illustrated edition (one copy) of Gastromania Australiana emerged. For reasons that I won’t go into, that single copy was instrumental to my being awarded a post, managing a large creative staff, but the single copy was filed on my shelves and forgotten.

Early in 2022, I noted on Facebook that finding a mosquito in your tea was less bad than finding a fly in your soup, a friend called Nisaba asked if I swallowed the mossie, I said that I had not, and mentioned that I had once written some verses on eating mosquitoes, and having, as I approach advanced middle age, sorted most of my backburner books, I turned to the verses again.

I revisited, revised, refurbished, rewrote them and augmented, adding verses and new illustrations, so now here it is, with a more catchy title. Thanks fellow writers in the workshop, thanks boring drones, thanks Nisaba, thanks Rotring and Artline who supply my pens, thanks to family and friends who have giggled.

Now here's a taste of seriously bad taste, within the meaning of the act.

First, a small calming foreword for the PC brigade: 

Friends who know my email address can request almost the entire thing, as a 17-page 2 meg PDF. I'm not at all sure that this one is commercial, but it would make a great stocking-stuffer, and that's how I plan to pitch it in a few weeks, once I have ironed out a couple of scansion issues.