HOW the Silly's Jessica Irvine conceives of
her newspaper's readers, not to mention Australia Day and the quaint, old-fashioned obligation to provide a day's work for a day's pay:
Feeling tired after a long day discharging your patriotic duty to binge drink and indulge in a bout of introspection bordering on a national identity crisis? (What does it mean to be Australian?!) Perhaps you even considered calling in sick today? After all, the placement of a public holiday on a Thursday - so perilously close to the weekend - is like a fresh, meaty bone laid in front of a dog: there for the taking.
Could this impression of an inebriated nation have been gleaned from observing her colleagues' conduct? Quite possibly, which would explain rather a lot. Let us imagine the scene.
Over there in the corner, Betty Farrelly is raising with shaky hand the next tot of absinthe (very French and fashionable) to her thin, parched lips, the other tapping both her keyboard and that bottomless well of incoherence which has produced so many essays
to defy the understanding of all but fellow toss pots.
Nearby is environmental enthusiast, the young Ben Cubby, deep in the cups of his depression. He is staring at a light switch and sobbing, both furious and befuddled at the thought of all those volts pulsing wastefully behind the panelling. Adam Morton, up from Melbourne to co-ordinate Fairfax's felicitous transcription of Greens press releases, is swigging from a magnum of fermented lawn clippings and taking steps to put Comrade Colleague Cubby's mind at ease. Standing atop a chair atop a desk, he is mumbling threats against Big Carbon and poised to jam two fingers into a light socket. "This will teach them," he is heard to say.
Morton will need to be careful when he dismounts, because Mike "Butch" Carlton is on all fours with the coming Saturday's column gripped doglike between his teeth. It is an assault on radio listeners, whose mass abandonment of his show would not have mattered if broadcasting's evil bosses placed the same low premium on revenue and audience that characterise the Silly's senior stewards.
Another day at the Silly
Paul McGeough and David Marr are bonding over a bottle or three, each informing the other of his own magnificence and neither listening all that hard. It is just as well. McGeough would be livid to learn the latest drop is kosher, as he has promised his new missus, the prominent Palestinian activist, that
no Zionist wolves' piss will sully expense account or palate.
The scarcity of female quality journalists is at first a riddle, but then the shriek and cackle of alto voices drowns out the broader din and the mystery is solved. Yet another reprise of the Scottish play's first scene is being workshopped in the office of editrix Amanda Wilson, but the chief is not happy.
Readers Editor Judy Prisk has been comatose for months and is snoring in the corner. What is worse, A Dill Horin has drunkenly confused
the latest ACOSS press release with the script and it is not working.
"When shall we three meet again?"
begins A Dill. "When welfare clients know no pain!" Wilson slaps her, but not hard enough.
Into this bacchanal, unnoticed by all, comes a small, grey man. He is a Fairfax investor attempting to ascertain
what has happened to his nest egg. Editrix Wilson rouses Prisk and puts her on the case.
"It is all about commas, nothing but commas," she slurs and lapses again into unconsciousness.
The little man has no time to cut his losses, call a broker and place the sell order. He is bowled into oblivion by the flying body of Adam Morton, whose blackened fingers carve on the office air an arc of smoking particulants.
Poor Ben Cubby spies the floating carbon and cries even harder
