Anyone who saw last year’s Sydney production of Jack Hibberd’s great bucolic play A Stretch of the Imagination — and anyone who saw the box office figures — had to face a single sad fact. There is no longer an audience in Australia for rural humour. There is no longer an audience which can comprehend extended reference to the natural world, or a joke with a provenance extending beyond the city, the suburbs or the last twenty years. Rural humour in Australia is as good as dead. Lousy films and television with idiotic rural stereotypes have assisted in its demise, but this is by no means the main reason. Rural humour died with the decline of the natural elements in our lives. Its basis was the contest between humanity and the elements on the march to civilisation. It died at the conclusion of the march, along with God as we used to know Him.