Randolph Bedford Quotes

Politics in Australia, as in the rest of the world, are becoming duller and soberer, as the world itself becomes temperate in the use of strong waters. I don’t know the political calibre of the three-bottle men; but it is established, in any constructional thought or action, that, if the man who drinks does silly things sometimes, the teetotaller rarely does anything. Not that the drinking of liquor can make a man clever, but that the instinctive teetotaller lacks genius, although I have known one case of a teetotaller genius. Abraham Lincoln, replying to a puritan critic who said that General Grant drank whisky, wished that he had more whisky-drinking generals if whisky made General Grant do the things he did.

Half way to Burwood there was a butcher’s shop, run by a Mrs Macnamara. She was a tall woman of great strength, working fiercely and living hard; a living testimonial to the forceful Colonial diet of beef and corn. She handled meataxe and saw as if they were toys. To see her chopping fore and hind quarters of beef fascinated me. I once heard her tell, without boastfulness, but in honest pride, that she was ‘doing six bodies a week’; which is a great tract and wilderness of meat.

His moments of most sentimental recollection were when he thought of the beauty of the sausages he had manufactured.

The Bible was second nature; and I had great interest in its gallery of bad men, beloved of the Lord. At least they said they were. Abraham, who represented his wife as his sister, so as to curry favour with Abimelech; Abel the lazy shepherd, who annoyed Cain so that that energetic farmer had to kill him; Noah, who ‘digged a vineyard’ and told tall stories of navigation; Jacob, who refused his brother a meal until Esau signed away his rights; and David, that pious scoundrel, who sent Uriah to death, so that he might steal Bathsheba respectably.

Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all.

Pretty as a picture and poor as a crow.

The Governor was a little pink old gentleman; so soft in the skin that he seemed to be stuffed with moss.

As salt as Lot's wife.

Bedford could be one of the rudest of men when he chose to exercise his wit at the expense of others. He happened to be a guest at a party given by a lady of some social pretensions. There arrived to it a husband and wife—the wife, big dominant, and masculine, the husband, small, meek, and submissive. Of them, the hostess said to Bedford, ‘Mr Bedford, I want to introduce you to my friends, Mr and Mrs So-and-so.’ Said Bedford, bowing to the couple, ‘Pleased to meet you. Which is which?’

For we have here a beautiful land that none could e’er knock down,
The brightest jewel that ever was known in dear old George's crown;
The brightest jewel that ever was known and never can be a failure.
Although the damn Labor party is doing its best to ruin Australia...