Days after the successful rescue of 12 Thai boys and their teacher from a flooded cave in Thailand, rescue crews are warning that a large number of Australian man-boys remain trapped in Nick Cave, with no obvious escape route out.

“This is a huge team of man-boys in their 40s, 50s and 60s, who wandered into Nick Cave before the heavy weather of middle age descended,” rescue co-ordinator Surreal Funnyname said today. “Now they are effectively trapped by the mordant musical stylings, portentous sense of doom, and exaggerated sense of existential angst that has blocked all the exists from Nick Cave.”

“Their wives and partners are very distressed,” Funnyname said.

“Because they are separated from their man-boys?”

“No, because they’re not. They have to live with public servants who take the kids to IGA in black jeans and a St Pauli T-shirt, management consultants who mumble things like, ‘I am the vengeful hand of God/descending with the power of his word’ when they’re asked to get the beach towels out of the Volvo, and playing the murder ballads at eight-year olds sleepovers. They get letters from the school.”

Experts are divided as to how to get the man-boys out of Nick Cave, but the consensus appears to be that they will teach the man-boys to live while still inside Nick Cave.

“That’s tricky. It takes years to learn how to live properly, and while they should have been doing it, the man-boys were listening to Nick Cave. We’re sending in certified living instructors to give the man-boys a crash course. You know, going to barbeques having made a potato salad, not hanging round the Tote in a wrong-size baseball cap trying to pick up their daughters’ friends, breaking up that sad little cover band they formed with the Chinese student who came to defrag the hard drive, and just, well, living, which seems to be mostly about going to Bunnings. It should work. There is a choke point at From Her to Eternity.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s awesome. It’s just awesome.”

It is. It’s awesome.

“Also, one other problem. None of the man-boys want to come out.”