SOURCE: "More Tramps at Home: Seeing Australia First," in Meanjin, Vol. 46, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 400-09.

In the following excerpt, Thwaites argues that Illywhacker is a self-referential text in the tradition of Samuel Beckett's novels.

Many reviewers (here, and in England and the United States) have treated Illywhacker relatively unproblematically as either a realist text or a contemporary version of older genres, such as the tall tale. It obviously has much in common with various pre-modernist types of narrative: for a start, it is dominated by a first-person narrative from a narrator who seems to tell the story from a position of relative omniscience.

Herbert Badgery is a story-teller of immense gusto and confidence. Doubtless, Badgery would like to be thought of as a masterful narrator. The first two pages of the novel are full of self-sung praise for his storytelling abilities: 'lying is my main subject, my specialty...