Yarns Without Threads - John Elder

John Elder

The Naked Hunchback

First published by the Sunday Age, 1996(?). Included in Penguin Books Australia paperback Hot Sand published 1997.

According to Hot Sand, John Elder:

once milked cows and wrote short stories for a soft-porn mag. As the last editor-in-chief of the Truth newspaper, he killed off a beloved national disgrace. He now writes 'Signs of Life', a weekly feature for the Sunday Age.

I presume The Naked Hunchback is one such "weekly feature" - although longer than Elder's columns visible on the Web (try those about his experiences of a beach, a Mind, Body, Spirit festival and ogling women), there is the same semi-detached point of view and - to me - unsettling use of the present tense. It has a style which combines story-writing with reportage journalism, and, for me, the mixture does not work well. The second-person writer (author? journalist? researcher?) visits a nudist beach on a very hot day: "You are carrying a Spirax A4 notebook and a pen". The result is a collection of impressions, observations, and what various people are prepared to tell the writer - comments, personal histories, opinions, philosophies.

The story provides an interesting-enough pen-picture of one beach on one day, and of a few of those using it, as you can judge from the extracts. But it seems to have no intention of telling a significant story, nor of considering various alternative attitudes to nudity and nudism. Perhaps Elder was constrained by the limits of his Sunday Age brief, perhaps he didn't find enough stimulus in his visit for more than two thousand words, or twenty column-inches, or whatever his brief might have been. In comparison to many of the other stories in Hot Sand, I found The Naked Hunchback weak. One of the other tales, Recovery, by Gaby Naher, includes a skinny-dipping episode which examines several aspects of sexual and non-sexual attitudes to the nudity of a young couple, which is neatly done, for example. By all means read the collection if you find it, but don't expect anything significant to be said about naturism. What Elder definitely does convey is a very vivid impression of a beach on a very hot day - the lassitude is palpable.

Final comment - I have no idea why the title includes "Hunchback". There's no mention of one in the text, and I'm at a loss to see what pun or allusion is intended.

Ratings:

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2004 February 23.

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