Contact the author at
wapenshaw@hotmail.com
The book “A VAN CALLED ERASMUS” is looking for a publisher
Synopsis
McLaren is a natural humorist particularly with the English language and this book is replete with plays on words. He has had many occupations and a great deal of life experience. This is a man who has dug holes in the road for a living, owned various businesses, managed departments in corporate companies and worked as a photographer and a musician. His formal education includes a BA in history, fine art and Aboriginal studies.
The book A Van Called Erasmus is an irreverent take on Australia and grey nomads written during a recent 17 month trip around Australia in a mobile home with his girlfriend. It is, by turns, side splittingly funny, poignant, controversial and cynical. At times he asks some profound questions concerning Australian society; the rapacious attitude towards the land, he wonders why there are no Aboriginal fellow campervanners and declares Australia to be the world’s most boring continent.
All this is backed up with sound reasoning but at the end of every such discourse there’s something patently loony to finish off with. His considerable amount of experience in other, off beat, parts of the world allows him to draw comparisons with how things are done elsewhere on the planet. There are flashbacks too, often in the form of funny anecdotes and he takes the piss out of Grey nomads unmercifully at times.
His style of writing is highly original. He frequently engages in a one sided dialog with the reader on the most insignificant of subjects and, through conjecture, comes up with hilarious conclusions. Early on in the narrative he describes the trip around Australia as being a procession of grey haired people travelling between rock formations. He then goes on to instruct the reader on how to create these rock formations on their kitchen tables for photographic purposes.
For Uluru he uses red Leicester cheese and Malteesers, Dahlia tubers and red lettuce for the Olgas, roast potatoes for the Devil’s Marbles and Terimasu for the Bungle Bungles. An indication of McLaren’s originality can be gauged from his contact with dead cows. The road from Adelaide to Darwin is littered with hollow, dehydrated dead cows and all the tourists have driven straight past them for decades. McLaren’s different.
To relieve the boredom of driving long distances he stopped and decorated them with garlands, spray painted names on them and took photos. All this in order to produce a future dead cow calendar! Now – how many minds would come up with such an idea?In all, this is a very good read for people with a quirky, pythonesque sense of humour who are themselves well read.
Even so, when it goes over the reader’s head it does so un-noticeably and one can continue through the narrative without being aware of it. As his tutor a university he presented me with some of the most original essays I’ve seen in twenty years of marking. I commend this work to those people who like a giggle and read a chapter a night before turning in.
John Wercouter
Contact Peter McLaren at: wapenshaw@hotmail.com
