hi jinx

The Brisbane Courier (I recently discovered that the Brisbane Courier became the Brisbane Courier Mail in the early 1960s, but it's a hard habit to stop calling it the Courier Mail, as was clear from an interview I heard on Radio National yesterday in which an interviewee talking about the paper in the 1920s said 'The Brisbane Courier Mail as it was then called') ran a terribly unfunny (but rather beautifully drawn - look at that bentwood chair) comic strip in the early 1930s about the Caper College Boys, a small group of private schoolboys led by one called Freckles and always potentially in conflict with a headmaster called Canemall. Canemall's name would have to be one of the least appropriate you could imagine, as he never seems to cane anyone, just look on indulgently. I would say this strip is a good example of the Britishness of Australia in the pre-WW2 years, and it intersects nicely with David Malouf's musings in his recent Made in England, though Malouf is talking about a slightly later period. What I don't know is whether this strip was English and sold to the Courier, or Australian. It certainly doesn't have overt britishisms in it, so perhaps it might even be meant to be taking place in Australia, although it doesn't have any overt Australianisms either of course.

Most of the other comic strips I've come across during my research have been similar, nicely drawn but not particularly funny and very clearly oriented towards young children. The Argus ran a very nice series about a dog, whose name escapes me, most sequences of which ended in someone being splattered with mud or cake or horseshit.