The Glugs of Gosh is a book of satirical verse written by Australian author C. J. Dennis, published by Angus & Robertson in 1917. The book's 13 poems are vignettes of life in a fictional kingdom called Gosh, inhabited by an arboreal race known as Glugs. Dennis describes the Glugs as a "stupid race of docile folk". The illustrations, by Dennis's regular collaborator Hal Gye, depict the Glugs as short humanoids with large heads. Written in the style of children's nonsense poetry, the work attacks free trade, along with what Dennis saw as Australia's social conformity, intellectual cowardice and rampant bureaucracy. Although the book has greater literary merit than the larrikin-inspired doggerel verse for which Dennis is famed, it was a commercial failure. According to one biographer, "the veiled political and economic satirical verse was lost on the public." The book is dedicated to his wife.
The Glugs of Gosh
Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis, better known as C. J. Dennis, was an Australian poet and journalist known for his best-selling verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915). Alongside his contemporaries and occasional collaborators Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, Dennis helped popularise Australian slang in literature, earning him the title 'the laureate of the larrikin'.
C. J. Dennis
Dennis, ca. 1890s
Cover of The Glugs of Gosh