Stunning similes and other stimulating turns of phrase

If the point is of importance my advice to you is to get hold of the old licensing records yourself, take a three months' holiday, and spend it with your nose glued to a cartload or two of dusty, old documents. It is because that sort of holiday doesn't appeal to me that I haven't done it myself. [35 Riverton]

rare old shindy, reminiscent of a meeting of the Sinn Fein party [35 Riverton]

They saw many flocks of birds, but they wouldn't come low enough to be shot. This is recorded as a grievance. For my part, I am inclined to agree with the birds. I know in my own case I prefer to be posted as missing when there is trouble brewing. [40 Mount Barker]

It's a curious thing that if men quarrel about money they go to law; but if they get at loggerheads over a woman they pull off their coats, and endeavor to spoil each other's manly beauty. I suppose we never will get rid of the streak of primitiveness which connects us with our Simian ancestors [44 Victor Harbour]

First the beach was invaded by a highly excited, jabbering mass of ebony humanity, who might have been discussing the decisions of last Saturday's football umpire, or the morality of Larwood's bodyline bowling, so freely did they let themselves go. They capered, and gesticulated, and jeered at each other until presently two powerful giants sprang into the open, and stared defiantly at each other. They were the duellists. They were dressed in the latest vogue— red ochre, white chalk, and oil. They opened the fight by shaking their waddies in each other's face. Then Biljim No. 1 obligingly bent down while Biljim No. 2 hit him the hardest wallop he could think of over the place where he kept his imagination. [44 Victor Harbour]

independent of the vagaries of natural zephyrs [referring to steam mills vs. windmills] [44 Victor Harbour]

more controversy than a meeting of the League of Nations [45 Goolwa]

The reports of Royal Commissions is hardly the type of fiction which appeals to me [45 Goolwa]

The native tongue was soft and musical, and full of poetry. Why, I wonder, were not the quaint legends of the blacks collected before the race was wiped out. They had some marvellous folk tales— tales of which the bulk of whites are entirely ignorant, and which, like the language itself, were melodious and unique. [45 Goolwa] [In a remarkably rare positive statement on aborigines]

But there are hills and hills — and Clarendon hills are of the latter kind. Do I make myself perfectly clear? [55 Clarendon]

Wine, I suppose, is the oldest brand of headache-producer known to man. If there is any sort older, then it has I been forgotten. I know that the Egyptians walked home unsteadily in moonlight after imbibing various toasts to the peerless Cleopatra; that hic-ish youths strutted the streets of Rome noisily vociferating, "Aye Claudius!"; that Antiochus the Syrian habitually saw things that weren't there; and that Peisistratus the Greek founded his theory of tyranny on the dreams he dreamt sleeping across the table after a hectic "night-out"— all the result of imbibing deeply of the vinic product. [56 Clarendon]

a bullock driver who didn't swear ... I had instinctively understood that something like a university education in the art of blood thirsty vituperation was a necessary concomitant in the art of navigating Rusty, Strawberry, and other bovine dreadnoughts through the arboreal seas of the Australian bush. [56 Clarendon]

Mr. Stone was one of those romantic gentry who left his country for his country's good, with various companions of whom one might write "ditto," in one of her Majesty's transports bound for Sydney [57 Meadows].

I admit that, from the point of view of euphony, there is no objection to Aldgate. It is musical. But, from the aspect of meaning, it. is as senseless as the word "surplus" in a national Budget [61 Aldgate].

As a rule I hold these stodgy, dry-as-dust records in abhorrence. They have as much news value as last week's paper. But the Angaston minute book was different [8 Nurioopta]