Peter Woodforde has had a long and colourful engagement with Webdiary, frustrating and delighting editors with wittilly mangled language and successfully pushing the boundaries of personal abuse by means of sheer originality. A number of times we (Margo and I both) have petitioned Peter to come up with a Webdiary piece of his own, and he has delivered.

As I was reading through and formatting this piece I recognised swathes of it. The 'puzzle' in Peter's words is, "which much of the story of George O did I rip off in this spoofette and what of the rest was just plagiarism?" Thanks Peter, and I hope we hear much more of you. It's been too long. Hamish Alcorn.

by Peter Woodforde

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should write. I still hold this ambition, and one day I shall grow up.

Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I variously tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write stuff. Yair, stuff. You know stuff.

I was the eldest of six, and there was a gap of a little over a year to the next.

I rarely ever saw eye to eye with my father much before I was about 35 or 36 years.

For this and other reasons I was somewhat cross, lonely, and a "bit odd"; I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. Good. F**k them.

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons (and to this day, with such as the Joshing "m'Jay"), and I think from the very start my literary ambitions, if any, were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back at myself for my failure in everyday life.

Nevertheless the volume of serious - ie seriously intended - writing which I produced all through my boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first short story at the age of five, in longhand, in a filched older children's Queensland Education Department Composition Book.

I cannot remember anything about the awful and crudely illustrated thing except that it was about South Pacific pirates and a kind of multicultural utopia they had set up somewhere about the Cook Islands. Sailing boats with guns, tattoos, cutlasses, dusky enchantresses, coconut trees, waves, sunsets, salty seas, briny foam, cannibals and cannonballs, etc.

In many ways, I'm still a five-year old boy, hauling on that sheet thar. Like a scurvy knave. Avast, ye lubbers.

I had little or no real idea of much in the South Pacific region, of which I was pretty much ignorant although my home was equipped with two atlases - an elderly Harmondsworth (1914 vintage - I'm looking at it on the shelf as I write) and a newer, 1960s Readers' Digest job, both books highly ideological and reflecting the English and then the US imperialism of their times.

My pirates were all bearded and had various prostheses, and were uniformly brave with handy cutlasses - a good enough phrase, but I fancy the opus was a plagiarism of RL Stevenson's Treasure Island et al. plus a great deal of RM Ballantyne's Coral Island, which I read incessantly, and the much more difficult Robinson Crusoe, which I dug into when I needed penance for some Mortal or Venial sins (despite Defoe's Dissenters' artlessness). That way I read and reread Crusoe quite a bit, having plenty of sins from a very young age. I probably need a daily touch of Defoe to this day.

I was a devoted reader of John Buchan (The Thirty-nine Steps, et al), a real stiff upper lip, play up and play the game, no girls, sort of joker.

There were no girls of any kind in my confected and cutlass-strewn South Seas Utopia, which must have made it an awkward sort of place for all them pirates to Utope. Except for dusky enchantresses, who seem to have had some kind of role as "Mummys" of some kind for my hearty band of Boucaneers.

My mother had once owned and run a typing business, and had a good old Remington gradually rotting in a sideboard cupboard, and I began to love hammering it in a "compositional" sense after I had learned to read and write, at about five years. At eleven, with the Vietnam war in full swing, I scribbled patriotic sketches on the thing urging taking up the "uniform" in a kind of 1914-18 cock and John Bull manner.

Then my mother, a Catholic Queenslander of pure Irish stock, poisoned my mind forever with a gentle mix of pacifism, Sermon-on-the-Mount type gospel of Christ, Fenianism and democratic socialism.

We must blame our mothers for everything, I suppose. Freud said so, so it must be true.

There was also plenty of George Orwell's writing about the place, and I first read The Road to Wigan Pier followed by Down and Out in Paris and London beginning with tepid enthusiasm which grew as one or other of our various itinerant teachers bade Orwell's writing enormous respect.

No wonder Bjelke went on the record as saying the Queensland Teachers' Union was a "hotbed of communism."

From time to time, I wrote extremely bad and usually unfinished "schoolboy adventures" in Searle's Nigel Molesworth How to be Topp style.

I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure, but was published in an English boys' newspaper. They sent me five guineas - an enormous sum in 1964 Queensland - which I spent swiftly and unwisely.

A few years later, I put the case, in schoolboy debating style, that 18 year-olds should be given the vote.

A local newspaper ran it, to my immense gratification, but I didn't get the vote until I actually was 21, and had a crack at Malcolm at the ballot box.

That was the total of the would-be serious work which I set down on paper during all those years, apart from a mammoth pile of submissions to the ABC Argonauts, all entirely ignored probably on the grounds of "How to be Topp" typos and literals. And a growing mad utopianism. The ABC then, as now and in the interim, was a hotbed of conservatism.

However, since that time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself.

Apart from school or college work, I wrote semi-comic verse and funny stories, mostly reportage of what we stupid boys got up to, which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed and helped to edit various oddball magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest, nastiest journalism.

But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind.

I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Long John Silver, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw.

For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the cabin door open and entered the room, cutlass and flintlock pistol to hand. A brown beam of sunlight filtering through the canvas above slanted on to the map table, where a tinder-box lay beside an inkpot. With his both weapons at ready, he moved across to the porthole. Down in the sea a spotted ray was chasing a pilchard," etc etc.

This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside.

The "story" must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same revoltingly meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, ie the sounds and associations of words.

Old Greed must crook 'is dirty hand
And come ter take it from us.
So we must fly a rebel flag,
As others did before us,
And we must sing a rebel song
And join in rebel chorus.
We'll make the tyrants feel the sting
O' those that they would throttle;
They needn't say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle!"

Freedom on the Wallaby 1891

They still seem very wonderful, but in a totally different context to the times of poverty and oppression known by Lawson in the 90s.

And they send shivers down my backbone; with the added pleasure known in the huge quality that this was the man who effectively moved the writer of My Brilliant Career into a brilliant career in writing for humanity in the US and in Australia for decades.

As for the need to describe things, I thought I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of writing I wished, in so far as I could be said to want to write anything at that time.

I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels, probably with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.

But in fact at 20, I charged into scribbling for student newspapers and radio, and had minor battles with all manner of senior academics, Queensland politicians of any stripe and most memorable of all, a very rough, evil and well-connected lad who was, and remains a member of the Israeli army. He threatened me with a defamation writ for my coverage in Semper Floreat of his bullyboy antics at a Student Council meeting. I wasn't a student at the U of Q at the time, but at the then Institute of Technology, where a notable campus figure was the well-known Bryan Law, who probably still strongly disapproves of my behaviour.

I also got into bed with a bunch of Fortitude Valley Anarchists and CP (Communist Party) Rooms figures. These were the early days of The Cane Toad Times and 4ZZZ radio. The anarchists printed the AJA's strike paper assisted by PKIU blokes at a Murdoch Sunday rag simply by backing up a truck and "taking delivery" of many rolls of news print.

I went away to live on a tropical island, work at sea half the time, meet the girl of my dreams, AND start writing under various nom de plumes (I was in pretty dodgy with my employer, the Commonwealth Government) Sunday Review, later the Nation Review. In much the fashion to be expected.

A living could not be made from it, but enormous satisfaction could be.

Within a few years, I fell, or rather tumbled into, successively, a half-baked degree and mostly tabloid metropolitan or rural/regional journalism, then working, to my joy and amazement, for the first parliamentary front bench in Australian history with multiple indigenous membership. I then became an Australian diplomat, and took my spouse and kids to live in Germany as the Wall came tumbling down. All the time writing, writing, writing. But NOT in German. I'm not k'n Goethe, Kinder.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His/her subject matter will be determined by the age she/he lives in - at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own - but before he/she ever begins to write he/she will have acquired an emotional attitude from which she/he will never completely escape.

It is her/his job, no doubt, to discipline her/his temperament and avoid getting STUCK AT SOME IMMATURE STAGE, IN SOME PERVERSE MOOD; but if she/he escapes from his/her early influences altogether, she/he will have killed his/her impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc, etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they may almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all - and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose - using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature - taking your "nature" to be the state you have attained when you are first adult - I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornately, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties.

As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent more than ten years in unsuitable professions (truckdriver, deckhand, tabloid journalism), after undergoing poverty and an acute sense of failure.

This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the Australian class system, and a job in News Limited had given me some understanding of the nature of brutish capitalism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation.

Then came Howard and the other Bushidos, etc. By the end of 2001 I had more or less reached a firm decision. Orwell's little poem of the 1930s, expressed my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

Ah yes. Good ol' Eric. We all coulda been Parson Woodforde with his pisspot pigges.

Howard's War on Refugees, his Iraq war and other events in the new Millenium turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1998 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

And for a fair go, as Henry would have understood it.

It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.

Everyone writes of them in one guise or another.

It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.

And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into a new satirical art.

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art."

I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that most politicians would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises.

Most of what I churned out post-Howard and the Bushidos' Iraq villainy is of course a frankly political, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for a new form.

I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating a new literary instinct.

But among other things it is full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the "left" who were accused of plotting with Saddam, or Osama, etc. I attempted to satirise all that with as much laughter as I could muster in such a sad place.

Clearly such writing, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the entry.

Somebody I respect read me a lecture about it. "Why do you put in all that stuff?" he said.

"You've turned out k'n gonzo."

What he said was half-true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in Australia perhaps want to know, that innocents were being falsely accused and killed.

If I had not been angry about corrupt monsters like Bush and Howard shitting on us, then I should never have written anything.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and perhaps more exactly but savagely.

In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Webdiary was the first time I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.

I have not written novels, but I hope to write one one day. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited.

I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.

Writing anything, let alone a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. But is it true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality?

Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be allowed.

And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifelessly and was betrayed into sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

And a lack of aggression and preparedness to scream: "Get that into ya, ya Packer dingo Kardonnays!"

Being a ratbag is k'n hard work, thankless and often painful - but it must be done.

With considerable apologies, and thanks to George Orwell (Eric Blair) Why I Write, 1947 (which much of the story of George O did I rip off in this spoofette and what of the rest was just plagiarism?) and the great Henry Lawson, Freedom on the Wallaby, 1891.