Thoroughly Decent People

A Folktale

by Glen Tomasetti

McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1976, ISBN 0869140019, black and white photographs, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, minor rubbing to edges and corners, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows a little edge and shelf wear with a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, small chips and tears to edges (see photographs)

“All over Melbourne in the Centenary year of 1934, thoroughly descent people are spending their evenings in thoroughly Melbourne ways.
Squeaky Leonard, uneasy product of Melbourne Grammar, drives his Lancia down Orrong Road to Sebastopol Street to visit his sister Bea, regrettably married to a musical man with foreign connections and an unpleasant painting by someone called Streeton on the wall.  Next door in Number 2 Bert and Lizzie, nearing old age, prepare for bed, billy out, blinds adjusted, early as always at Bert’s insistence as if he still had to be up early for milking.
As much a novel about a city as about the individuals who take pride in its special pleasures – tea at eh Wattle, a run to the Dandenongs, a night at the Tiv. – Thoroughly Descent people is impossible to read without shocks of recognition.
Everyone who has ever lived in an Australian city or country town will recognise the speech patterns of Bert and Lizzie and their grown-up children, of Squeaky Leonard and his Tasmanian-born mother.  They will recognise the details of daily life: the starched cloths, quinces, the cork secured with lunch-wrap in the picnic bottle of milk, the pile of prunings by the incinerator, the bleached broom handle by the copper.”