Three Elephant Power, and Other Stories — Text and Context

The Chauffeur’s Vernacular and the Bush Ethos

Alfred’s speech is a character in itself. He uses phrases like “dead funny” and “clean mad on motorin’,” and his motto is Nil admirari—nothing astonishes him. This laconic attitude is a hallmark of Paterson’s bushmen, who face the extraordinary with a shrug. The narrator notes that Alfred “would have accepted … without hesitation, an offer to drive in the greatest race in the world.” The humor arises from the gap between Alfred’s grandiose self-confidence and his actual station as a chauffeur.

Paterson’s prose mimics the rhythms of oral storytelling. Sentences are short, often paratactic: “He talked motor, thought motor.” The effect is one of immediacy, as if the reader is sitting in the back seat. The story-within-a-story structure—Alfred telling about Henery—allows Paterson to layer voices: the educated narrator, the vernacular chauffeur, and the naive Henery. This technique recurs throughout the collection, creating a sense of communal yarn-spinning.

Thursday Island: A Study in Communal Thirst

In “Thirsty Island,” Paterson shifts from mechanical comedy to ethnographic satire. The excerpt describes a night when pearling lugger captains visit a ship, and “a contagious thirst spread round the ship.” The prose becomes almost clinical: “The saloon became an inferno of drink and sweat and tobacco smoke.” Paterson catalogues the effects with deadpan precision—captains “solemnly tight,” stewards “openly drinking the passengers’ whisky,” firemen “with business over the side.”

The humor is cumulative and grotesque. Young MacTavish, a British officer, asks a pearler if he knows “Talbot de Cholmondeley in the Blues”; the pearler replies that he “never could remember names.” The joke hinges on the absurdity of class distinctions in a place where everyone is equally drunk. Paterson’s observation that “it is very rarely that an Islander gets helplessly drunk, but strangers generally have to be put to bed” reveals a social code: the locals can hold their liquor; outsiders cannot.

Race, Trade, and Knife Fights in the Torres Strait

Paterson does not shy away from the racial dynamics of pearling ports. He notes that the Japanese “are not looked upon with favor by the white islanders” because they send money home rather than spending it locally. In contrast, “Manilamen and Kanakas and Torres Strait islanders … bring all the money they do not spend on the pearling schooner to the island, and ‘blow it in’, like men.” The phrase “like men” is telling: it equates masculinity with conspicuous consumption.

The violence is matter-of-fact: “They knife each other sometimes.” Paterson reports this without moralizing, as if it were a natural part of the landscape. The Japanese club’s dinner to celebrate a member’s death—the deceased had “tried to drown another member by cutting his airpipe”—is presented as a darkly comic anecdote. These details give the collection a documentary quality, grounding the humor in specific social realities.

Structural Variety: From Yarn to Serial

The collection includes not only short stories but also a serial, “Done for the Double,” attributed to the pseudonymous “Knott Gold.” This five-chapter tale about a pony and the turf introduces a different register: more plot-driven, with chapter headings like “Wanted, a Pony” and “The Tricks of the Turf.” The shift in form suggests Paterson was experimenting with popular genres of the day—the sporting yarn, the mystery.

The table of contents reveals a range of subjects: “The Cast-Iron Canvasser,” “The Merino Sheep,” “The Bullock,” “The Dog,” “Concerning a Steeplechase Rider.” Many titles are generic, as if Paterson is offering a taxonomy of bush types. The stories originally appeared in Australian journals, and their brevity and punchiness reflect newspaper constraints. Readers should approach the collection as a sampler of Paterson’s journalistic craft, where each piece is a self-contained sketch.

Paterson’s stories reward attention to voice and detail rather than plot. The best entries—like “Three Elephant Power” and “Thirsty Island”—work because the narrator’s tone is so precisely rendered. Readers may find it useful to read the stories aloud, especially the dialogue, to catch the rhythms of Australian vernacular. The collection is uneven; some pieces are slight. But the strongest show a writer who understood that the most telling details are often the most absurd.

I’ve shelved Paterson’s yarns for decades, and there’s a stubborn honesty to them—men telling tall tales to outrun their own loneliness. That same quiet ache lives in First love, and other stories — Themes and Context. Both books understood how we laugh to keep from weeping, how the bush and the heart share the same hard ground.