The Gunzel Train To Happiness
(Happy New Year From BB)
Holidays are not just about lying on the beach dribbling peach juice down your chin. Nor are they necessarily about setting up the campervan on the Murray to watch the snags flow by. At Barwon Booksellers we see holidays as the periods of life where grind is exchanged for grist, where the rigours and responsibilities of the cryovacked workplace are exchanged for that purer version of existential oxygen: pursuing our harmless obsessions.
Thus, the director of medical services with a few weeks off becomes a 16 hour a day plasticene animator at the kitchen table. A demographer for a government advertising department throws last year’s bus timetable in the bin to spend January annotating the clouds of Central Victoria. The owner of a Ray Drummond Golf Shop franchise happily sets aside his entire annual break, not to travel to Pebble Beach or St Andrews, but to build a purpose-built annexe in the backyard for his Donkeys of Australia diorama.
So it is at holiday time, we hear the sighs and exhalations, from these little private idahos across the land. “At last some time to organise my bottletops!” “Adios! I’m off to win the lawn mower races in Queensland.” Or even, “I’m fed up with being coy about what I’m into. The hour has come. These summer holidays I’m going to embrace my inner gunzel.”
Inner gunzel? What on earth is a gunzel you might ask? Aha. Here at BB we suspect the gunzel is at the very heart of what holidays are for.
Gunzel (noun, slang Australia especially Victoria): A person who pursues useless and pointless railway enthusiast activities. Verb (intransitive) to gunzel, to go gunzelling.
UK equivalents: gricer, anorak.
USA equivalents: foamer, foamite.
From Lawrence Sterne through to Irvine Welsh english literature has long payed homage to the harmless mania, the uncle on the hobby-horse, the eccentricites of the collector-nut, the byways and superfluities of addiction and obsession. In Australia such a rich and nominally useless cultural lineage has, almost secretly, become embodied in our very own word. Gunzel.
Traditionally the hard men of the railways had no time whatsoever for ‘railway enthusiasts’, and even less for those weak minded individuals, or gunzels, who had developed a fetish for, of all things, trams. Trains and trams were what these men were paid to drive and maintain and all this amateur scrawling and jotting of engine numbers or swooning over track gauges and glossy fenders was deemed pathetic.
But of course there is one thing the hard men failed to understand. The joy of expending life’s sacred energy on purposeless and entirely unnecessary pleasure.
In festive residue at BB we would like to take the lexical liberty of proposing a widening of the meaning of gunzel. In short we would like to expand its magnificently local usage to encompass not only railway or tramway related matters but all harmless and decidedly useless activity.
The question we’d like to pose therefore, as a way of wishing you all great happiness in this new year of 2012, is this. Can we measure the pleasure of our holidays by our ability to be at a tangent to the ever present cultural bleat about making a ‘valid contribution to society’? Can we, at the end of the long break, safely claim that we have properly and assuredly wasted our time, in a gloriously unproductive way, by pursuing fetishes and hobbies of unalloyed joy, and that therefore we are qualified, not for a promotion, a pay rise, an Order Of Australia or any other government citation, but for official status as a shining example of the perfectly relaxed, properly amused, and blissfully well spent holiday: a gunzel.
We’ll leave you with it, and also with the following time wasting suggestions.
North Williamstown Railway Museum pamphlet – published by the Australian Railway Historical Society 1970. ‘No other product of man’s mind has ever exercised such a compelling hold on the public’s imagination as the steam locomotive…’ – Local ephemera with technical summaries of the local steam train scene and some great black and white photography of trains choofing happily on now extinct rural railways. - $6
The People Movers – A History of Victoria’s Private Bus Industry 1910-1992 by John Maddock. Kangaroo Press 1992 - $50 ‘For nearly one and a half centuries privately owned bus services of the horse-drawn and automotive varieties have matched population expansion and met changing transport requirements.’ Brilliant hardback book for the private bus-loving gunzel, once again full of fascinating black and white photographs.
Mind The Curve – A History Of the Cable Trams by John D. Keating (Transit Australia 1996) – As footy and fishing commentator Rex Hunt once said – “Some people wouldn’t know if they had the No.64 tram up them until the conductor rang the bell!” – This is Gunzel-lit in its classical manifestation. - $15
How to Make Your Own Cane Furniture by Max and Charlotte Ath. (Stobart 1982) With detailed instructions for designing and building your own cane furniture, and 10 cane furniture pieces to make with step by step photos and complete instructions. - $20
A Treasury Of Indian Coins ed. Martha L. Carter (Marg Publications 1994) ‘Throughout the history of India its coinage has often provided a key to the secrets of its past.’ Large format hardback with colour photographs. One for the numismatic gunzel. - $35
Australian Water Bugs - Their Biology and Identification by Nils M. Andersen & Tom A. Weir (Apollo Books CSIRO Publishing 2004) This book is an introduction to the fascinating world of water bugs with emphasis on the Australian fauna. - $50
Mastering Digital Photography by Michael Freeman (Ilex 2008) - $30
The Encyclopedia of Australian Dolls by Marjory Fainges (Kangaroo Press 1993) The most comprehensive book ever written on Australian dolls. - $60
Seasons In The Sun – The Story Of The Victorian Cricket Association by Robert Coleman (Hargreen 1993) Signed hardback in great condition. One for the many gunzels of the local cricket scene. - $25
Cricket books of course invariably all lead to Wisdens and inevitably to reflections on series and sets, numerical accumulation and statistics of all kinds. Such passions in the margins of ‘productive’ activity are of course in the very DNA of gunzel-ish behaviour. In 2012, the 21stbirthday year of Barwon Booksellers, we look forward to seeing that familiar gunzel-glint in your eye as you saunter into the shop looking yet again for ‘just the thing’ to fill the gunzel gap.