Aasof’s Reflections

Letter to Dorothy Dix

I am a sailor in the New Zealand Navy. My parents live in Whangarei and my brother-in-law is living in Melbourne. My father and mother have been busted for drug running and they depend on my two sisters, who are prostitutes, for a living.

My only brother is serving a life sentence in jail on conviction of rape and murder, and my uncle is a High Court Judge who takes bribes. My other uncle is on trial for lighting fires in a National Park which burnt down 93 houses.

I am in love with a Thai prostitute who solicits around the Auckland wharves. She says she loves me, but she knows nothing about my family background. We intend to marry as soon as her illnesses clear up. Me being white does not bother her at all. When I get out of the Navy we will open a brothel in Hamilton and my two sisters will work there to keep the business in the family.

My problem is that I want to marry this girl and have an entirely open and honest relationship with her. The burning question is whether I should tell her that I have a brother-in-law who lives in Melbourne?

I was searching the web for a joke concerning drovers and a taxidermist that I remember being told by Margaret Powell following a trip to Australia and recounted either on a TV Chat show or in one of her books. In doing so I came across a reference to a Dorothy Dix, who in modern parlance would be known as an ‘agony aunt’. Dorothy Dix often wrote and answered her own questions; so much so that in Australian politics a planted question become known as a Dorothy Dixer.

So, to the point: I found the joke that I was looking for in The Balgownie Hotel Joke Book. This has a plethora of Aussie jokes, funny and mostly ones that I would not repeat here, but I thought it worth posting the joke that led me to Dorothy Dix and other distractions,

 Margaret Powell’s Joke

This pommie walks into an outback pub, very well dressed gentleman he was too. He gets talking to some drovers around the bar and they ask him what he does for a crust. He said ‘I’m a taxidermist. Yesterday I stuffed a kangaroo, today I stuffed a wombat and tomorrow I am looking forward to stuffing an emu’. Later on, after the taxidermist had left, the barman came up and asked who the pommie was. The drovers replied ‘Well, he said he was a taxi driver, but we think that he is a drover like us’.

Amongst the Angst! Posted by Peter on June 24, 2014