Exploring Australian English 0733303013, 9780733303012

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TOO CROOK To.TAKE A SICKIE ?

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Exploring Australian English GA Wilkes

Published by ABC Enterprises for the

AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION Box 9994 GPO Sydney NSW 2001 150 William Street Sydney

Copyright © 1986 G.A. Wilkes First published 1986 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Wilkes, G.A. (Gerald Alfred), 1927Exploring Australian English.

ISBN 0 642 52730 X. 1. English language—Australia. 2. English language—Spoken English—Australia. I. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. II. Title. Edited by Nina Riemer

Designed by Howard Binns-McDonald Set in 11/12 Plantin by Midland Typesetters, Victoria Printed and bound in Australia. 0100064-5-1095

PREFACE This booklet grew fromaseries of talks given over ABC radio in 1985 under the title ‘Exploring Australian English’. The response to the programs led me to think of a more extended treatment of the subject, which might still preserve the informal approach of the broadcast script. The topics are taken in broadly chronological order, although the treatment of contemporary usage ranges more freely. Each section can be read as a self-contained unit. This book has been a pleasant one to write. I am grateful to Helen Findlay and Georgina Bitcon for their expert help, and to Wilma Sharp for her care with the typescript. GAW

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useless trash’ (p270). Boldrewood was writing in 1878. In the introduction to his book

The Pommies (1920), HJ Rumsey recalls thousands of immigrants arriving by the clipper ships in the 1870s, and so helps to date the next development. ‘The colonial boys and girls, like all schoolchildren, ready to find a nickname, were fond of rhyming ‘Immigrant’, ‘Jimmygrant’, ‘Pommegrant’, and called it after the new chum

children. The name stuck and became abbreviated to ‘pommy’ later on’. Xavier Herbert, in his autobiography Disturbing Element, also

_ recalls in his boyhood (c1913-14) seeing children in the streets dressed in heavy British clothing, and calling after them ‘Jimmygrants,

_ Pommygranates, Pommies!’ (p91). Mr L Johnston added his testimony in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald on 15 August 1983:

In 1911, 1912, and 1913, I attended Granville Public School. In those three years, 200 000 migrants entered Australia, virtually all from Britain. Granville was expanding with industrial development and it seemed almost daily that migrant children appeared at the school, many of them with the rosy cheeks of their English complexions, which suggested the pink glow of the pomegranate, then not uncommon. Children have always chanted at one another and the native-born and earlier arrivals imitated the accents of the newcomers and chanted at them. The chant was simple and spontaneous: ‘Immigranate, pomegranate, pomegranate, immigranate.’ From this the natural abbreviation was ‘Pommy’. Pommy

therefore

precedes

World

War

1. The

earliest

documentary instance of it, so far as I am aware, is in the title of a film directed by Raymond Longford and screened at the Snowden Theatre, Melbourne, on 13 September 1913: Pommy Arrives in _ Australia or Pommy the Funny Little New Chum. There are other

terms for Englishmen which do date from the First World War. They _ include chooms (in imitation of the English accent), Woodbines (from a popular brand of cigarettes), and pongo, at first applied to infantrymen and then extended generally (and explained by the later phrase, dry as a Pommy’s bath towel). World War II produced kipper, applied to service personnel, and reflecting the prominence of kippers in the English diet at that time, but also with the implication that they were two-faced and gutless. Pommy has now mellowed somewhat. It can be used without

any animosity at all. It seems excessive to have T-shirts with the legend ‘Pommie Bastards’ drawn to the attention of the Royal Commission 55

into Human Relationships (Sunday Telegraph, 9 February 1975, p96). Prince Charles, addressing an Australia Day Dinner in London in 1973, remarked that ‘All the faces here this evening seem to be bloody

Poms’. If it is all right for the royal family, it should be all right for the rest of us. I know that lion parks in Australia are supposed to have noticeboards outside reading ‘Cars $1; cars with senior citizens, 50 cents;

Poms on bicycles, free’. The further twist to the story is that the lions eat the bicycles and reject the Poms. The absorption of the Pom into Australian folklore indicates the measure of tolerance that has been reached. For half-Poms, the outlook varies from day to day. 24 History... What is the origin of Torrens title, and where is the Goyder line? The answers are to be found in the history of South Australia. Robert Richard Torrens (1814-84) simplified the transfer of land in South Australia in 1858 by having titles certified on a public register instead of relying on the execution of deeds. George Woodroofe Goyder

(1826-98) was the surveyor-general of South Australia who in 1865 indicated a line of rainfall in the colony which broadly separated land suitable for agriculture from land suitable for grazing. To attempt to grow wheat north of the Goyder line was for long considered to be courting disaster. Torrens title was subsequently introduced in other Australian States, so that titles not registered under this principle came to be known as Old System. There are many terms which have come into Australian English through historical figures. Most people would connect banksia with Sir Joseph Banks, and the Major Mitchell cockatoo and Sturt’s desert pea with the respective explorers. Perhaps fewer would relate boronia to the Italian botanist Francesco Borone (1769-94), or the operation known as mulesing, which reduces fly strike in sheep, to JHW Mules (d1946), who invented the technique. Game as Ned Kelly commemorates the career of Edward Kelly

(1855-80), whose last words before he was hanged were reputed to be such 1s life. A Jacky Howe is the sleeveless flannel shirt, cut nearly to the waist under the arms, worn by the champion shearer of that name (1855-1922). If we use oscar for ‘cash’, we are perpetuating the

memory of the Australian actor Oscar Asche (1871-1936), star of Chu Chin Chow. (A more recent example of rhyming slang is Reg Grundy(s) for ‘undies’, which are sometimes just reginalds.) Up there, Cazaly! is a cry of congratulation or encouragement which derives from the 54

VFL footballer Roy Cazaly (1893-1963), noted for his high marking. It was used as a battle-cry in World War II, and has since become

the title of a popular song. In like Flynn, which means seizing an opportunity, especially sexual, derives from the escapades of the Australian actor Errol Flynn (1909-59). It arose in the United States after charges of statutory rape on the Sirocco in 1942, of which Flynn was acquitted. Some personalities have been so flamboyant as to have contributed a number of terms to the vocabulary. Dame Nellie Melba (Helen Porter Mitchell, 1861-1931) is responsible not only for Melba toast, the thin-sliced toast which she preferred, and Peach Melba, invented

in her honour, but also for doing a Melba, which is to make repeated farewell performances. She also contributed Sing ‘em muck, her advice to Clara Butt before she undertook a tour of Australia. As the story is told by WH Ponder in Clara Butt: Her Life Story (1928): ‘So you’re going to Australia!’ she [Melba] said. ‘Well, I made twenty thousand pounds on my tour there, but of course that will never be done again. Still, it’s a wonderful country, and you'll have a good time. What are you going to sing? All I can say is—sing

em muck! It’s all they can understand!’ (p138) In 1926-7 the ballerina Anna Pavlova toured Australia and New Zealand, returning in 1929, and left such an impression that when in 1935 Herbert Sachse, at the Esplanade Hotel in Perth, produced a meringue with a crisp outside and a soft centre, he named it a pavlova. This has since become a famous Australian delicacy, with cream and passionfruit and strawberries. A dry pavlova mix was put on the market in 1980, and on April 22, 1981 Mr Al Grassby declared National Pavlova Day and launched (in the words of the press report) ‘the foolproof 50-minute pavlova—a dehydrated egg-white powder in a plastic eggshell of emu-egg proportions with step-by-step directions— and drawings for those who cannot read’. A possible source of embarrassment here is that New Zealand had a dessert recipe for pavlova in 1927. Australians, reluctant to concede this, object that the New Zealand recipe is for something resembling a biscuit, or else a mousse. While I lack the culinary expertise to judge, it seems likely that the paviova was invented in the two places independently, but certainly in New Zealand first. (It is not a gesture of reconciliation for the Australian pavlova to be garnished with Kiwi fruit, for that is only another name for the Chinese gooseberry.) The New Zealanders have not laid claim to the Jamington. As

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Lord Lamington (1860-1940) was governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901, and the Lamington Plateau in Queensland and Mount Lamington in Papua New Guinea bear his name, he has seemed a natural candidate. These squares of sponge cake coated with chocolate and dipped in coconut were more probably named in honour of Lady Lamington. In his autobiography, Lloyd Rees recalls seeing the lamington for the first time at the family home ‘Mobolon’ in Queensland at the turn of the century. The cakes were served at a tennis party by his sister Amy, with the explanation that the recipe

had been devised in honour of Lady Lamington by Miss Schauer of the Brisbane Technical College. There is obviously an element of chance in which names find their way into the language and which do not. And in Australia, the racehorses can be as famous as the people. Phar Lap may be a household word, but it is Drongo which has passed into idiom. Drongo was a horse retired in 1925 without ever having won a race. He had run second in the VRC Derby and St Leger, third in the AJC St Leger and fifth in the 1924 Sydney Cup, and could not win in thirtyseven starts. The horse, before it acquired this reputation, would presumably have been named after the bird called the drongo, a swift and alert member of the family Dicruridae, resembling the starling. Although there is now a Drongo Handicap for apprentice jockeys and horses without a win for more than a year, this has not so far removed drongo in ordinary parlance from the company of dill, nong and no-hoper.

25... and Folklore In the 1890s a Jimmy Wood or a Jimmy Woodser was a term for a man choosing to drink alone at a bar, or for a drink consumed in these circumstances. It carried an overtone of disapproval. But who was Jimmy Wood? LGD Acland in his Early Canterbury Runs (1933) reported a James Wood as a shearer on the Darling in the 1880s who was never known to shout, but in Lew Lind’s Sea fargon (1982) doing the Fimmy Woodser is listed as ‘a pearler’s term for a man who drinks

alone’. A correspondent to the Bulletin (July 27 1982) identified Jimmy Wood as a member of the family which founded the Gloucester City Old Bank in 1716, who was frugal in his own habits but generous to the poor. The correspondent to the Australian (18 February 1986) who identified Jimmy Wood as a Rugby player for the Bileola Thirds in the 1930s, who would not accept a drink from his mates after the game in case it should jeopardise his amateur status, was pulling the 56

editor’s leg, but the diversity of testimony indicates how blurred the line between history and folklore can be. Buckley’s chance raises the same problems. ‘You’ve got Buckley’s chance’, we might say, or ‘You’ve got two chances, your own and Buckley’s’, or simply “You’ve got Buckley’s.’ This means that you have a forlorn chance, or no chance at all. There was a William

Buckley, the convict who absconded from Port Phillip in 1803 and lived for thirty-two years with the natives. He gave himself up in 1835, and died on a government pension in 1856. Buckley’s chance of surviving would have been a poor one, but as he did survive and prosper, the phrase is hardly applicable. Another possible derivation is from the Melbourne firm of Buckley and Nunn. The early instances of the phrase do not show any connection with either the escaped convict or the department store, so that Buckley remains as elusive as Blind Freddie.

If Blind Freddie could see that, it must be within the reach of the lowest intelligence. Again a number of candidates have been put forward as the original Blind Freddie, who has more associations with Sydney than with anywhere else. I suspect that any blind seller of matches, bootlaces or newspapers in Sydney in the 1920s or 1930s was apt to be nicknamed Blind Freddie. Freddie himself is like the Rafferty of Rafferty’s rules. We know that Rafferty’s rules are the opposite of Marquis of Queensberry rules, and hence a state of complete disorder. Rafferty sounds Irish, but he may be no more than a variation of the dialect word reffatory, which means refractory in standard English. To ber like the Watsons is to wager large amounts, but where are the Watsons to be found? We would accept that Granny is the presiding spirit of the Sydney Morning Herald as the General is of General Motors-Holden’s, but we would not expect ever to meet either of them. On the other hand any number of people could have met Granny Smith, or Maria Ann Smith who developed the Granny Smith apple, and died in 1870. According to a report in the Age in 1981, it is now ‘highly unfashionable amongst teenagers to eat anything but granny smith apples’ (23 June, p11). The same teenagers have ‘updated’ Send ‘er down Hughie. This used to be an exclamation appropriate in a thunderstorm. English slang dictionaries record ‘Send her down David’ with the same meaning, along with such colloquialisms as Tm all right Jack’, ‘Let George do it’ and ‘I’ve got you, Steve’, which probably have no specific George, Jack or Steve in mind. Hughie is an outback term

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for whoever is in charge of the rain, and is sometimes used as an equivalent to God, so that bushmen who might feel self-conscious in referring to God could refer to Hughie instead. More recently, however, Hughie has also become the god of the surf, with the expression varied to Send’ em up, Hughie! At the conclusion of a malibu board-riding contest in 1984, the organiser thanking everybody at the award ceremony also added his thanks for the waves and the good weather to ‘Hughie upstairs’. The personalities who may or may not exist are like the places which may or may not be found on the map. Snake Gully, the locale of the Dad and Dave radio serial, is a fictional place, if more specific than Woop Woop, that byword for backwardness and remoteness, where the crows fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes. A later version of Woop Woop is Oodnagalahbi, combining ‘Oodnadatta’ and ‘galah’, given currency by the Mavis Bramston show of the 1960s. A Spewaa Station has been reported from near Swan Hill on the Murray, but the Speewa has long been the legendary habitat of Crooked Mick, whose exploits are typical of the ‘tall stories’ which flourish there. Any improbable bush yarn may be called a speewa. The black stump is the most controversial of these locations. To go beyond the black stump is to leave behind the last outpost of civilisation, although the phrase is most often used in the form ‘Jones is the biggest liar/best station cook/silliest mug this side of the black stump’. There was a property called the Black Stump near Coolah in New South Wales in 1826, although Merriwagga claims to have had an actual black stump, which gave its name to the Black Stump Watering Place in 1914 and to the Black Stump Hotel after that. Other black stumps have been reported near Bathurst, near Wilcannia, and at Bowen in Queensland. The expression itself occurs in all the Australian States, and indeed the currency of the expression may have been responsible for all those places being so named. More recently the State Offices Block in Sydney, from its appearance, has joined them.

26 Hay and Hell and Booligal There is nothing fictional about Hay or Booligal, which will be found on any map of New South Wales. As they are commemorated in AB Paterson’s poem, first published in the Bulletin on April 25, 1896,

however, they illustrate yet another pattern in the growth of Australian English. Whether or not Paterson was the first to use the phrase Hay and Hell and Booligal, he established it in Australian idiom—as one

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of Booligal’s faithful sons offers a welcome to visitors, despite what they may have heard about the town: ‘No doubt it suits °em very well To say it’s worse than Hay or Hell, But don’t you heed their talk at all; Of course, there’s heat—no one denies— And sand and dust and stacks of flies, And rabbits, too, at Booligal .. .’

— and also mosquitoes and snakes, one billiard table which is broken, and a drought in progress at the moment. These arguments have the opposite effect on those being appealed to: With bated breath We prayed that both in life and death Our fate in other lines might fall: ‘Oh, send us to our just reward In Hay or Hell, but, gracious lord, Deliver us from Booligal!’ This seems to be as Australian as a meat pie. There is no Booligal anywhere else but in New South Wales, and who could be more authentically Australian than Banjo Paterson? From the seventeenth century, however, there had been a proverb about Hull, Hell and

Halifax. At Hull, all vagrants found begging in the streets were whipped and put in the stocks. At Halifax, under a local law, anyone found stealing cloth with a value above thirteen pence could be executed by a type of guillotine, known as the Halifax Gibbet. Hull and Halifax were added to Hell as places to be avoided by the vagabond fraternity, who had atraditional prayer From Hull, Hell and Halifax Good Lord deliver us!

Paterson would have had this in mind in writing his poem, just as when he wrote of Clancy of the Overflow seeing the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended he recalled Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ ode, where the Youth ‘by the vision splendid/Is on his way attended’, until the Man sees it ‘fade into the light of common day’. The translation of Hull, Hell and Halifax into Hay and Hell and Booligal is an example of the transfer of a kind of folk wisdom from one place to another, which continues as from here to Booligal is used as an equivalent to from here to Halifax. There may be another

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example of the same process when we greet a piece of good fortune in a low-key way by saying ‘I suppose it’s better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick’. There are corresponding English expressions, such as better than a slap in the face with a wet fish. But the parallel may be even closer, for in 1852 in one of George Eliot’s letters John Chapman is found referring to some forthcoming Letters from Ireland, which (he says) ‘I hope will be something better than a poke in the eye’. Perhaps we naturalised the phrase by adding the burnt stick. Another transfer, this time from the United States, may be seen in Murphy’s law. It is sometimes possible to buy souvenir teatowels which itemise Murphy’s law through a number of clauses. The basic proposition is that if anything can possibly go wrong, it will. It if does not, you must have overlooked something. Murphy’s law gained some currency in Australia in the time of the Whitlam government, when the Attorney General was named Murphy. It was however first formulated in the United States, though even there the original Murphy cannot be certainly identified. To be as drunk as Chioe is to be very drunk indeed. It is natural to associate the phrase with the famous painting of Chloe in Young and Jackson’s hotel in Melbourne. It is not a nude painting, one is

sometimes reassured, because she is wearing a bangle. Anyone studying the painting closely enough to notice the bangle should also notice that she does not look drunk. The expression drunk as Chloe occurs in an English dictionary, John Bee’s Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring &c in 1823, fifty years before the painting existed. Perhaps the painting helped to acclimatise the saying in Australia, but the saying itself is properly listed in the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. One expression which I cannot explain under any principle is the Old Dart. It is an Australian way of referring to England, but how did it arise? A dart in nineteenth-century Australian slang was a scheme or stratagem or favoured objective. When stealing unbranded calves, Dick Marston explained in Robbery Under Arms, ‘the great dart is to keep the young stock away from their mothers until they forget one another’. A convict returning to England could conceivably be going back to his ‘old dart’, but this is mere speculation. A derivation from Dartmoor gaol has been suggested, but Dartmoor was opened in 1809 for French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars, and did not function as a general prison until 1850. As transportation to the eastern states had by then almost ceased, hardly any convicts could have come to Australia from Dartmoor, or would have associated

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England with it. The origin of the Old Dart remains a mystery. The expression Australian as a meat pie, incidentally, must be

patterned on American as apple-pie.

27 Regional differences In some Australian states the racehorses go clockwise around the course, while in others they run anti-clockwise. Are there similar differences in idiom from State to State, such that the term doogs

for ‘marbles’ (pronounced to rhyme with the first syllable of ‘sugar’) might be perfectly familiar in Western Australia, but hardly known elsewhere? Who but a Tasmanian knows what is meant by the Hydro? Is the game hoy played anywhere else but in Queensland? State differences of a kind began to emerge in the nineteenth century, in the scornful nicknames which one state gave another. New South Wales may have done best out of this, as the habit of calling any colonial youths cornstalks, because they sprang up tall and slender, came to be restricted to the mother state. Victoria was called the cabbage patch, from its size and its crops; Queensland became Bananaland; South Australians were Croweaters and West Australians the Sandgropers. To those in the west the inhabitants of the other states were Tothersiders; to those in Tasmania they were mainlanders. The Tasmanians themselves became Tassies or Apple Islanders. These rivalries were further expressed in Victorian references to the Sydney Harbour Bridge as the coathanger and in references

(in New South Wales) to the Yarra as the only river in the world that flows upside down. Canberra came to be called the bush capital and Queensland the Deep North. Queensland looks down onaless fortunate area called the south, while in southern New South Wales travelling Victorians may be known as Mexicans (from ‘south of the border’).

In vehicle registration plates this rivalry takes the form of self-

advertisement. New South Wales is the Premier State, Victoria the Garden State, Queensland the Sunshine State, South Australia the Festival State, Tasmania the Holiday Isle, and Western Australia, formerly the State of Excitement, is at the time of writing Home of the America’s Cup.

Can the different states be said to have differences of vocabulary? The evidence is limited, but on some points fairly definite. Adelaide has the Stobie pole, the telegraph pole made of concrete and steel and named after its designer, JC Stobie (1895-1953). It also invented the floater (at least in the form of a pie floating in pea soup) though this delicacy has spread elsewhere. The noxious weed known in New 61

South Wales as Paterson’s Curse (from the family which introduced it at Cumberoona, near Albury in the 1880s) is in South Australia called Salvation Jane, as providing fodder in bad seasons.

In Western Australia the same plant is known as Lady Campbell, from the lady who cultivated it near Broomehill when the railway was being constructed in 1889. In about the same period Western Australia invented the Coolgardie safe, and the gold-mining process called dry-blowing. The cockeyed bobs were the squalls, like minor hurricanes, which afflicted the north-west coast; the south had the benefit of the Fremantle doctor and the Albany doctor, refreshing breezes from the sea. Sausages, colloquially known as snags elsewhere

in Australia, are in Western Australia sold as snaggers. While claims have been made that what is sold as devon in one State is fritz or polony in another, the only thing I am confident of is that Windsor sausage is special to Queensland. Whereas most Australians would take cheerio as a farewell, in Queensland and the Northern Territory it may be a cocktail frankfurt. Only Queensland has the casket (the Golden Casket lottery), and the Ekka, which is both the Brisbane Exhibition Ground and the Exhibition held there. It also has the Creek, the racecourse at Albion Park, formerly a sand track, so that a horse performing well there was known as a creeker. It has been suggested that ladies in Queensland wear golfers rather than cardigans. In the Australian Capital Territory, a cordie is a Duntroon cadet,

from the corduroy trousers adopted for casual wear. The American War Memorial is sometimes called Bugs Bunny, from a supposed resemblance to the rabbit in the cartoon series, and the Academy of Science building the igloo. The tourist groups who come to view these and other sights are grasshoppers. The Australian National University has institutionalised Bush Week as the name for end-ofterm student festivities. New South Wales is the home of the expression shoot through like a Bondi tram, for a speedy departure, although the trams running from Sydney to Bondi beach were discontinued in 1961. The brown bombers who were then working as parking police have since, with a change of uniform, become grey ghosts. To understand the meaning of getting off at Redfern, one would need to know that Redfern is the station immediately before Sydney Central, although it has been claimed that this expression for coitus interruptus is patterned on the English getting out at Gateshead. Sydney has more recently come up

with the derogatory term westie for a youth from the western suburbs, 62

and dubbo for someone stupid. It was a Sydney film critic who wrote

that Sylvester Stallone had ‘shaken off his dubbo image’. A dubbo

Is a type who wouldn’t know if it was Pitt St or Christmas, or Thurs day or Anthony Horderns. His equivalent in Melbourne wouldn’t know if it was Tuesday or Bourke St. Although only Sydney can offer a one-way ticket to the Gap, Melbourne transport has the loop, the City Circle in the underground, and trams called Z cars. It may be the indication of a more cheerful outlook that what in New South Wales is a TAB agency is in Victoria a /ucky shop. In Victoria infants in their cradles feebly emit the sound Carn (meaning ‘Come on’, as in Carn the Blues), are taken about in pushers rather than strollers, go to kinder rather than kindy, eat potato cakes instead of scallops, and May grow up to drink beer in pots. A pot in Victoria is usually a 285 ml glass. This size in New South Wales and Western Australia is a middy, and in South Australia a schooner. A schooner in New South Wales is 425 ml, anda 200 ml . glass is a pony or (from the shape of the glass) a Jady’s waist. South Australians call this size a butcher. Only the Northern Territory has a Darwin stubby, a two-litre bottle, while a glass of beer there may be called a handle (from the tankard it is served in). Ring-pulls from beer cans produce Northern Territory confetti. Only Darwin, incidentally, has the Tomaris, the sweep on the Melbourne Cup named after Tom Harris, who inaugurated it. The uncertainty attending the study of regionalisms may be illustrated from port, short for portmanteau, and used for a suitcase or the like. This has been claimed as a Queensland usage. I have turned up fourteen instances of port in printed sources, between 1908 and 1986. The setting on four occasions was Queensland, in four cases New South Wales, twice Western Australia and twice South Australia, once Tasmania and once New Zealand. How has the belief

that port is a Queenslandism come about? Partly from a generation gap. I have always known it in New South Wales, but it would be less familiar to anyone under forty. Port also seems more common now in New South Wales in the country than the city. The evidence points to a contraction of usage, so far less pronounced in Queensland than elsewhere, rather than to port as an indigenous Queensland term. As children now rarely carry suitcases to school, port may contract even further.

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28 A rooster one day, a feather duster the next This was Mr Arthur Calwell’s expression for the uncertainty of the life of a politician, which he said he adopted from America. It is now well embedded in Australian political argot, together with a number of other pronouncements made by politicians before their transition from the one state to the other. To be dragged screaming from the tartshop is an expression for government members reluctantly facing an election. Although it has been attributed to WM Hughes, it was actually applied to Hughes by Alfred Deakin in 1904: ‘He presents . . . as undignified a spectacle as does the ill-bred urchin whom one sees dragged from a tart-shop kicking and screaming as he goes’. Ten years later, campaigning at Colac in an election just before the outbreak of World War I, Andrew Fisher pledged support to the mother country, declaring ‘Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling’. The Jast man and the last shilling has always been associated with Fisher, but Fisher was echoing the earlier

statement by Sir George Turner in the Victorian Parliament at the time of the Boer War. He declared that if England was ever really menaced, then ‘our last man and our last sovereign would be at the disposal of the old country’. The idiom of Australian politics has a number of such echoes. I suspect that JT Lang was known as the Big Fellow not only because of his physical presence, but also because this was the nickname of Michael Collins, the Irish republican leader. When Mr EG Whitlam opened his election campaign in 1972 by addressing ‘Men and women of Australia’, he was echoing Mr Curtin’s broadcast on 8 December 1941: ‘Men and women of Australia, we are at war with Japan’. When Sir Robert Menzies said of Queen Elizabeth I did but see her passing by, And yet I love her till I die

he was showing his acquaintance with Elizabethan poetry. The saying of this kind which obtained most notoriety was Mr Malcolm Fraser’s Life wasn’t meant to be easy. He used it in a newspaper interview in 1970, when Minister for Defence, and again in his Alfred Deakin lecture, Toward 2000: Challenge to Australia,

in 1971. He used it often when prime minister, and acknowledged the source as Shaw’s Back to Methuselah. There the full statement is “Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful’. The same idea is found earlier in the proverb ‘Life 64

is not all beer and skittles’ and in Longfellow’s ‘Life is grim, life is earnest’. The light on the hill, the symbol of the socialist objective of the Labor party, is always associated with JB Chifley. He referred in his policy speech in 1949 to the need to ensure that ‘our less fortunate fellow citizens are protected from the shafts of fate which leave them helpless and without hope’, and described this as ‘the objective for which we are striving . . . the beacon, the light on the hill, to which our eyes are always turned’. I could not be sure that Mr Chifley invented the expression, but his use of it certainly characterised the aspiration of those Labor leaders who had experienced the Depression. One would expect that some famous political phrases would be interpreted out of their context. Sir Robert Menzies’ account of himself as British to the boot heels was given while he was defending an arrangement to purchase aircraft from the United States rather than from Britain. He told the House of Representatives on 29 October 1963:

The deal made with the United States of America is probably the most favourable deal ever made by Australia with another country for something that is vital to Australia’s defence. It is a very great mistake for anyone to think that this involves being pro-British or anti-British. As I have said before, I am British to the boot heels.

I will not be told that I am hostile to what is done in Great Britain. But, like my honourable friend opposite, I have always esteemed my prime duty to be to my own country and to the safety of my own country. On that principle we have acted. It was left to a later prime minister, Harold Holt, to assure an American president that Australia was all the way with LBF. Another

American connection of a sort is the Dorothy Dixer, the parliamentary

question asked so that the minister addressed can make a prepared statement to his party’s advantage. Dear Dorothy Dix was for many

years a syndicated feature in which readers wrote in to a magazine for advice on their problems. The expression horror budget is still in use, from its application

to the Menzies-Fadden budget of 1951. Rubbery has had a special sense in economic discussions since Mr Phillip Lynch used it in an address to the Canberra Press Club, to describe the budget estimates

in 1977. The Razor Gang was the Committee for Review of Commonwealth Functions chaired by Sir Phillip Lynch in 1981, but it can now be any body charged with reducing expenditure. The 65

expressions crash through or crash and maintain the rage have been applied in a number of contexts since Mr Whitlam first used them. A certain forthrightness is only to be expected in the language of politicians. Sir Robert Askin predicted that ‘I am going to go down (in history) as the bloke who said: Ride over the bastards’—when protesters were lying on the road to block President Johnson’s motorcade in Sydney in 1966. Mr Don Chipp, as leader of the Australian Democrats, defined his duty towards the two major parties as being to keep the bastards honest. WM Hughes said of Mr Menzies that he couldn’t lead a flock of homing pigeons, and Vince Gair said of Mr Snedden that he couldn’t go two rounds with a revolving door. There is hardly space to look into more recent phenomena such as the accord and the trilogy, the blowtorch applied to the belly, or Hawkespeak, because the list keeps growing all the time.

29 Under the brim of his Akubra Whenever we eat a sandwich, put on a cardigan or a mackintosh, or drive along a macadamised road, we are indebted to the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-82), the seventh Earl of Cardigan (1797-1868), Charles Macintosh (1760-1843) and John McAdam (1756-1836). If however we put on a Chesty Bond and get out the Victa to mow around the Hills hoist, then set off to the beach with the esky, we owe no debt to the northern hemisphere—and may feel free to have a Vegemite sao. The Victa motor-mower and the Hills rotary clothes-hoist are named after their inventors, Mervyn Victor Richardson and Lance Hill. Chesty Bond is a brand name for a man’s singlet, and also the name of the cartoon figure who began to exhibit its athletic features. A number of such brand names have become household words in Australia. Even in the 1930s a schoolboy who set out with his Globite, forgot his Speedos and came home on his Malvern Star would be understood to have carried a suitcase, forgotten his bathing costume and come home on his bicycle. Usually when the word loses its capital letter it has become a generic term. This happened long ago to the cyclone fence, and more recently to doona for a continental quilt (for both are proprietary names, like daks in England). Esky is the trade name for a portable cooler, probably from the Eskimo ice chest which preceded it. It is now used of any such portable cooler, although only one brand can legally be advertised as an esky. Stubbies are a particular brand of men’s shorts, but the term is loosely applied to any shorts in a similar 66

style. Driza-Bone is a brand of waterproof clothing which won

attention after Kirk Douglas wore it in the film The Man from Snowy River. When in 1985 the Melbourne Herald reported a family experiencing a wet day at the showgrounds, with ‘the drizabone draped over the pram’, the omission of the capital letter indicated that drizabone was now a generic term. The same thing may happen to the Ti/t-A-Door, invented by Keith Halliwell (d1983), and the Super Sopper, invented by Gordon Withnall in 1974. The thongs which may accompany the stubbies and the esky are flat sandals with a strap between the big toe and the other toes, fixed behind the heel. This is not a brand name, but the Australian term

for what in England may be flip-flops or in Germany Badeschuhe (beach shoes). There is more of an international connection in the Australian use of the brand name Zam-Buk. This is an ointment marketed in England and Australia, but in Australia it has come to be applied to the St John’s ambulance man attending sporting fixtures. (After a disappointing football match, one commentator reported ‘the best player was the Zambuck’.) Overseas influences were certainly responsible for the Australian aspro. When the supply of aspirin from the German firm Bayer was cut off by war in 1914, a local formula had to be found. An Australian chemist, George Nicholas, succeeded in 1915 in manufacturing a product to the required standard, and marketed it first as aspirin and then as aspro (Nicholas product). Later came the APC, the headache powder containing acetylsalicylic acid, phenacetin and caffeine. Bex—‘the better APC’—was marketed in 1937 by Beckers Pty. Ltd. A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down became a prescription for a suburban heachache, and was adopted as the title of a Phillip Theatre revue in the 1960s. The need for headache powders over this period may also be reflected in the slogan It’s moments like these you need Minties. The cartoons accompanying this caption presented people in various states of crisis, and in need of the peppermint sweet manufactured at this time by James Stedman Henderson. Australia also invented the Violet Crumble Bar and the Chiko Roll. Neither would be quite such a tribal symbol as Vegemite. The sober definition of a yeast extract used as a spread and a flavouring suggests nothing of the romance of Vegemite, of which four thousand tonnes a year were being sold in 1979, making Australians overseas feel homesick. Vegemite can be spread on a sao biscuit, so named, according to tradition, because a member of the Arnott family was a Salvation Army Officer. The 67

Arnott trademark is responsible for like the cocky on the biscuit tin, a phrase applied to anyone left out of what is going on. It is in Patrick White’s novel The Eye of the Storm that the old solicitor Arnold Wyburd is described as looking out from ‘under the brim of his Akubra’ (p450). As Patrick White was writing of a generation when men all wore hats, he would have had no need to check the brand. The Akubra, first named in the belief that it was

an Aboriginal word for ‘headgear’, has since been especially associated in one style with plainclothes police, and in another with country

people (‘the wider the brim, the smaller the property’). While hats in general have not returned to favour, the Akubra itself has become trendy. As a columnist versed in these matters wrote in 1986, ‘when even Ronnie and Nancy Reagan have Akubras, can you afford to be left out? Put it together with moleskins and a Drizabone raincoat for the total look’. 30 Too crook to take a sickie? This comes from a Tandberg cartoon in the Melbourne Age in 1984, when Anzac Day fell on the Wednesday following Easter. There was a holiday on Monday and a holiday on Wednesday, with one working day in between, with a high level of absenteeism expected. The cartoon showed one man sitting at an office desk looking the worse for wear, while another said to him “Too crook to take a sickie? A

sickie is a day’s sick leave which people sometimes take even when they are not sick. If you are not fit enough to take a day off to go to some sporting fixture, and so come to work instead, you may be ‘too crook to take a sickie’. Sickie is one of a number of terms from industrial relations, commerce and politics which are peculiar to Australian English. It is related to compo, which is the payment of workers’ compensation for injuries incurred during employment. The most fundamental of them is basic wage. This is usually ascribed to Mr Justice Higgins

and the Harvester case (ex parte HV McKay, 1907). The phrase basic wage will not be found in the Harvester judgement, although the concept is certainly present there. Charged with the responsibility of determining a ‘fair and reasonable’ remuneration for an unskilled worker, Mr Justice Higgins adopted the standard of ‘the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community’. Taking account of the expenses of food, shelter, clothing and so on needed for ‘a condition of frugal comfort estimated by current human standards’, with ‘provision for evil days’, he arrived 68

at a minimum wage of 7s. a day for a six-day week. The term basic wage was used in 1911, when Mr Justice Higgins referred to the basic or living wage in the case of the Australian Workers Union v the Pastoralists’ Federal Council. The minimum wage laid down in 1907 was the wage of the unskilled worker. The judge held that ‘those who have acquired a skilled handicraft have to be paid more than the unskilled labourer’s minimum’, and he went on to specify these extra payments. These are the margins for skill that have become part of industrial legislation, along with penalty rates (eg paid for overtime), loadings, over-award payments, and flow-ons (the flow-on of the benefits of an award made to one group of workers to workers in a related group). These are all determinations of the Arbitration Court; agreements made without its authority by employers and employees directly are called sweetheart agreements. Has Australia become the paradise for the working man prophesied by Kingsley and Trollope in the nineteenth century? When William Lane gave his ‘Australian Labour Novel’ the title The Workingman’s Paradise in 1892 he did so ironically. The language nevertheless reflects a continuing concern with social welfare. Endowment acquired a special meaning in Australia as applied to social security payments for children. The basic wage, as a wage below which one could not be expected to work, has led to the poverty line, as a level of support

below which one should not have to live, whether in employment or not. The attempts to provide a universal health service under government control led to Medibank and Medicare—and also Medifraud. The slogan smoking is a health hazard is one that has come from the legislature. The legislature itself is elected by a compulsory vote and a sometimes complex preferential system. This is sometimes held responsible for the number of informal votes, and also for some distortion of the result by the donkey vote (numbering the squares straight down the ballot paper). An e/ectorate in Australia is not so much the total number of electors as the area represented, and a swinging voter is not necessarily one with an emancipated lifestyle, but one who changes party allegiances from election to another. A spill is the declaring of a number of offices in the party vacant as the result of one vacancy occurring, and a unity ticket is a how-tovote card in a union election associating Labor and Communist : ; candidates. Although there are enough terms to describe the things that can

69

go wrong, neither kangaroo court nor kangaroo closure is an Australian invention. A kangaroo court is any travesty of proper proceedings, and a kangaroo closure is the selection of some amendments for

discussion and the exclusion of others. The comprehensive Australian term for these kinds of manipulation is rort. A rort can be a party

or celebration, but it is also a-dodge or racket, and has been used in the politics of local government ‘to cover such practices as stacking branch membership, rigging elections, cooking branch records, and, as a last resort, losing all branch records to frustrate a head office inquiry’. These practices are described as rorting, and anyone engaging in them is a rorter. The term is not confined to politics. Rorts of greater sophistication would include schemes of tax avoidance, and the technique of assetsstripping which gave a new meaning to bottom of the harbour. To take a sickie when you're not really crook may be a bit of a rort, but these are rorts on a grand scale.

31 Missing out on the trifecta There is a standard joke in country areas when the local racecourse is pointed out to city visitors. ‘We have horse racing over there during the week, and on Saturdays we have two horses racing’. As the first race meeting of which any record has been kept was held in Hyde Park in 1810, the sport has a long history in Australia, and has left its mark on the Australian vocabulary. Some of the terminology we inherited from England. To have a saver, in the sense of a hedging bet, goes back to Elizabethan times. A skinner, for a race in which the punters are ‘fleeced’, was known

in England before it was so called in Australia—here it is usually ‘a skinner for the books’. A boi/over, another term for an unexpected result, seems to be more Australian than English, as is roughie for an outsider, or bolter for the horse given no chance which nevertheless ‘bolts in’. Horses in Australia may collectively be called the neddies, which in England would be donkeys. There are many ways of describing different performers. A mudlark will perform well in wet conditions, whereas a cat is a timid horse or one which lets the punters down. A horse that runs /ike a hairy goat is a poor prospect, probably all over the place like Burke and Wills, and inviting the comment that it didn’t run a drum. A scrubber is a horse that should be out on the country tracks. The mail is a term with a country background. It means unofficial 70

information, tips or rumours, especially on racing form. It must derive from mulga wire or spinifex wire, as a variant of the bush telegraph that goes back to the bushranging days. The jockey in the nineteenth century was called the boy, no doubt because that was what he was. An apprentice or a qualified jockey may still be called the boy, or else the hoop, from his hooped colours. The bookmakers may be bookies or books, or sometimes knobtwisters. They turn the knobs on the betting board as the prices firm or blow

(ie the odds shorten or lengthen). The touts are urgers, who go about

urging punters to act on this tip or that, hoping that as someone must win, he will s/ing them a percentage of his winnings. Urger is also a general term of contempt for someone who wishes on others risks he will not take himself, and the slingback is found in other activities

besides racing.

Some expressions are associated with particular personalities. London to a brick on was the trade mark of the racing commentator Ken Howard (1914-76), especially when he was predicting the winner

in a tight finish. Fruit for the sideboard was the cry of the bookmaker Andy Kerr (1867-1955), encouraging punters to bet at long odds on outsiders. It has since come to apply to any easy money or access of good fortune. To be further behind than Walla Walla commemorates the pacer who won from seemingly impossible handicaps. It means to be disadvantaged or delayed. Some terms have contracted in meaning in their application to racing. While a jigger can be any sort of contrivance—in gaol, an illicit radio—in racing it is an electrical device, which is of course illegal. To go for the doctor, applied to a jockey, is to make a sudden, all-out effort. In Australia there are many cups to be raced for, but the Cup is the Melbourne Cup, which has given a special significance to the first Tuesday in November. These contractions of meaning are less common than the transfer of racing idiom into the general vocabulary. To be on the outer is to be in a less favoured or less privileged position, as on the outside track or the outer ground in racing. To bring someone back to the field is to cut down his pretensions, as a leading horse is ‘brought back’ as the others overtake him. When the numbers are up can be used of some issue being resolved (as an equivalent to the official declaration of the race result), and sometimes correct weight can be used as though to confirm some statement made. A person can be described asa starter not because he is an entrant in a race, but because he is willing to take part in some activity. To say to someone ‘I know your form’, 71

means that we have sized him up, usually unfavourably. We may

even say ‘I know your rotten form’. In Sydney a bride who has her wedding at St Mark’s, Darling Point and the reception at the Royal Sydney Golf Club could be said

to have won the daily double, but if she does not also have her in Fiji, she has missed out on the trifecta. The trifecta honeymoon is the betting system requiring the punter to nominate first, second and third in the correct order—unlike the quinella (from the American Spanish quiniela, a game of chance) in which first and second can be nominated in any order. Trifecta is however now being applied to any set of three exceptional events. The Bulletin reported on March 20, 1984 that ‘the south-west of New South Wales struck the trifecta

last week—the Riverina Merino Field Day, the opening of the duck season and a visit by Prime Minister Bob Hawke’. Anything trying to rival this would simply be not im the race. 32 The boiling of billycans grinds to a halt The heading is adapted from a report in the London Times for November 6, 1985 on the running of the Melbourne Cup: All animation as we know it was suspended in Australia yesterday. The justice of law courts, the rhetoric of Parliament and the boiling of billycans all ground to an eerie halt for a full three minutes as a country held its breath and betting slips to attend to the event of the year ... (p23) I cite this not so much for the reference to the Melbourne Cup as for the use of the billycan as the symbol of rural Australia. The bz//y (which probably comes from the Scottish and Irish billy-pot) is an apt enough symbol: it was part of the equipment of the swagman in ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and two collections of Lawson’s stories were called While the Billy Boils. But is this an appropriate image for rural Australia in the 1980s? There have been some major changes since Lawson’s time. The jackeroo has for some time been joined by the jil/aroo in learning station management, and neither is now so likely to have come from a squatting family, or from Home. The stockmen may now muster the cattle by motorbike or even helicopter, earning the name of ball-bearing cowboys. The cattle may be taken to market by a road train, formed of linked trailers towed by a massive prime mover,

and travelling fast along beef roads built for the purpose. The grazier now breeds boat sheep for the live export trade, especially to catch 72

the peak winter shipment to the Middle East for Ramadan. Geoffrey Blainey invented the phrase the tyranny of distance to describe the isolation of Australia from the rest of the world and the dispersion of settlement within it. Changes in the vocabulary indicate that the problem has been met and partly overcome. The Rev John Flynn (1880-1951) dreamed of a mantle of safety over the outback, from combining wireless and aviation. It was achieved by the Flying Doctor scheme, an airborne medical service with a radio network

based on the pedal wireless, the transceiver invented by Alf Traeger. It was Flynn who gave the inland a special meaning, partly from the journal The Inlander and from the foundation of the Australian Inland Mission. While the inland remains the term for the low rainfall areas of central Australia, the terms inside and outside continue in use with the reverse of their usual meanings. The inside is not the interior of Australia, but the coast. As the settlement expanded from the littoral, the pioneers went ‘further out’, and set up outside stations,

making the area from which they had come the inside. In 1984 a family in New South Wales which considered they had been ‘out west’ long enough decided to take their children ‘down inside’, which meant

‘somewhere east of Bourke’. The pattern of land-holding has been varied by the soldier settlement schemes, which opened up areas not previously available,

and by the advent of the Pitt St farmer and the Collins St grazier, the businessman putting capital into rural property for the tax advantages. The growth of irrigation produced more blockies, owners of blocks of land for the cultivation of grapes and similar crops. A field day in the country is devoted to the demonstration of farm machinery, or it may be a combined open day and sale on a stud property. One of the associated attractions may be camp-drafting, a test of skills in cutting out and drafting sheep or cattle. A clearing sale is the auction of plant, stock and effects, especially when a property is changing hands. Although more than half of the population of Australia now lives in the cities, the influence of the bush is still imprinted on the vocabulary of everyday. As we have inherited the government stroke from convict days and point the bone from Aboriginal culture, so we maintain the tradition of the outback when we use ropeable for ‘enraged’, refer to the playing-field as the paddock, or buy tinned meat which is marketed as camp pie. The Australian salute is recognised as the movement of the hand in brushing away the flies, and the never 73

never is unlikely to take on the English meaning of ‘hire purchase’,

because it still refers to the areas beyond the settled regions.

The Australian attitude to the bush has some elements of a mystique. Schoolchildren know about the sunburnt country and the wide brown land from Dorothea Mackellar’s poem before they have left the suburbs. We may describe someone as tough as fencing wire or as fit as a mallee bull without have seen either. When the ABC devised a format called The Country Hour in 1945, for a State-based rural program beginning at midday, with weather information, market reports, news and a serial, it was broadcast in all the State capitals,

and it has continued its appeal to city and country listeners alike. 33 A dog’s life This is not about the dishlickers, as racing dogs are sometimes called, nor about the dogs especially bred in Australia, such as the kelpie and the blue heeler cattle-dog. It is more about the word than the animal, and the associations which it has in Australian English, although the animal will also turn up. The first dogs probably arrived with the First Fleet. In convict slang, a dog is an informer, and this sense survives in criminal circles today. To turn dog has also long been an expression for betraying one’s associates or reneging on a commitment. Even a footballer who

lets down his side by not making a full effort may be said to be dogging it. To dingo has the same meaning. The dingo is of course the native dog, which has a reputation for cowardice and treachery. Naturalists have argued that this reputation is undeserved, and that politicians calling one another dingoes are being unjust to the animal. Someone engaged in trapping dingoes was a dogger and he received payment for their scalps—which technically included the ears and tail, to prevent several claims being made on the one carcase. Dogging could involve the use of the poison cart, which dropped baits as it went along, although this was also used for controlling rabbits. A dog-leg fence was an early example of bush improvisation. It consisted of branches or saplings laid obliquely, with forked uprights at intervals, and some overlapping to fill the gaps. A dog tied up, on the other hand, was an unpaid bill, usually at a public house, which made the debtor reluctant to go back there. Tinned dog was canned meat, and this too could be shortened to dog. The Dog Act was a way of referring to the provision of the Liquor Act which forbade a publican to serve drink to an habitual inebriate. 74

AB Paterson wrote in 1898 that in the Northern Territory, ‘to be brought under the Dog Act is a glorious distinction, a sort of VC

of Northern Territory life’. It is distinct from the Dog Collar Act,

which was the name given on the waterfront to the Transport Workers’ Act (1928) and the Transport Workers’ (Seamen) Regulations, which required wharf labourers and others to have a licence before they could be employed. The dog licence, on the other hand, was the certificate exempting an Aborigine from the provisions of the Aborigines Protection Act 1909-43, especially allowing the holder to drink in a hotel. The Aborigines felt that this was like taking out a dog licence, and the legislation was discontinued in 1967. The dogman who rides on the hook of a crane, and directs operations by signals, has no connection with any of the foregoing. The term is Australian, but it comes from one of the English senses of dog as a mechanical device, like the spikes used for securing railway sleepers. A dogbox, however, is a compartment on a long-distance train, in a carriage with no corridor. In (say) parliamentary debate, dog and goanna rules are no rules at all, as in a fight between a dog and a goanna. Other dogs may be sheep hard to shear, and other doggers may be slaughterers of horses for pet meat. Dog’s disease is influenza. Some canines call for individual mention. There is the brown dog referred to in adverse judgments on food: it would kill a brown dog at fifteen paces. In 1982 Senator Ron Elstob complained that the food in Parliament House was ‘fit to kill a brown dog’. Sir Howard Beale, in his reminiscences This Inch of Time (1977), gave the text of a message which the Opposition whip passed to Eric Harrison when he had been speaking too long: ‘Pull out digger, the dogs are pissing on your swag’ (p39). When Mr Hayden was replaced by Mr Hawke as Labor leader just before the election in 1983, he commented that ‘a drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory the way the country is’. He had been anticipated in a way by Bill O’Reilly, who had argued earlier that the importance of captaincy in the Australian cricket team had been overrated, for a collie dog was capable of leading them out on to the field. Yet another Australian politician, who discovered from the media that he was to retire at the next election before he had heard it from his leader, invoked the bush principle that you always shoot ‘your own dog. Other party members, tempted to fraternise with their political opponents, have been told that ‘if you lie down with the dogs, you'll get up with fleas’ (which happens to be a Latin proverb). If none of this seems very favourable to dogs, at least the cause of the dingo 75

has been taken up by the Dingo Liberation Movement, also known as the Australian Native Dog Training Society. By producing posters, T-shirts and Christmas cards with a dingo motif, they have added to the language the word dingobilia. 34 Name that child What do the names Bruce, Norman, Sheila, Alfred, Roy and Frederick

have in common? They all have a particular significance in Australian idiom. In the time of Henry Lawson, it was assumed that any two Australians in the outback would be called Bil/ and Jim, and this was extended to any two Australians in World War I. Sometimes the typical Australian was referred to as Billjim, for short. It is interesting that in 1985 James became the second most popular boy’s name in Australia, judging from the birth notices in a leading Sydney newspaper. (The most popular boy’s name was still Andrew, and the favourite girl’s name Katherine.) How many of those christened ames will grow up to be called Fim? The typical male, however, is supposed to be called Bruce. This at least is the English view, which seems to derive from a sketch in ‘Monty Python Live at Drury Lane’ in 1975. (In the same year a film called Spanish Fly included an Australian girl called Bruce.) Australians have not accepted this with total complacency. When Mr Rupert Murdoch took over the London Times in 1981, one Australian journalist wondered if the staff of that paper might be expecting ‘a bunch of Bruces and Narelles to come to Britain to take over from your Nigels and Cynthias’ (Australian, January 24, p14). In 1981, when names were being proposed for one of the royal babies, another journalist suggested ‘Bruce’. He added The son of Charles and Di could perhaps be given the opportunity to mix more with the masses by attending a good solid State school such as Brunswick East Tech . .. Bruce Windsor. Now there’s a name that combines regal style with the grit and honor of the working person. (Australian, June 26, p13) He did not propose that a girl might be called Sheila. Sheila is of course an Irish girl’s name. It was being used in Australia as early as 1828 to apply to any Irish girl, just as Paddy was used for any Irish man. The Sydney Monitor in that year reported a disturbance after which ‘many a piteous Shela stood wiping the gory locks of her Paddy’. JC Hotten, in his English slang dictionary of 1859, recorded shaler as meaning a girl. In Australia sheila has come to be applied to girls and women alike, to young sheilas and 76

old sheilas, although it is not a term which women would apply to themselves. There is no reflection on a woman’s morals in referring to her as a sheila, but there is an element of condescension nevertheless.

PW Joyce, in his English as We Speak it in Ireland (1910), noted that sheila could be used as ‘a reproachful name for a boy or man inclin ed to do work or interest himself in affairs properly belonging to women ’ (p320). This derogatory association lingers. It would be no compliment to say of a cricketer that ‘he ran for the catch like a sheila’. Alf and Roy were put into currency by Murray Sayle in an article in the English magazine Encounter in May 1960, though it has been claimed that they were first invented by the late Neil C Hope. A/f and Roy are contrasting types, one the unpolished, uncomplicated

Australian of average tastes, the other the smooth trendy, inclined

(in 1960s style) to button-down shirts and yachting jackets, and probably driving a sports car. To them might be added Fred, apparently an invention of Max Harris, and seen as the type of the average consumer. In 1975 the motoring correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, reporting on the Centura, wrote that ‘the Centura is aimed at what is loosely known as the average Fred market—the ordinary family motorist who wants basic transport for a price and who is not an imported car buff (April 20, p20). The ‘imported car buff would be a Roy. Although these terms generated Fredsville and Alfland— and for a time Daphne was Alfs female counterpart—none of them now has much vogue. This would not be true of Norm. He is the cartoon figure conceived by Phillip Adams, and launched in the Life Be In It campaign in Victoria in 1975. The concept has since been deployed nationally and internationally in the cause of fitness, to such effect that in the United States ‘the President and his wife, Nancy, often

toss an Australian frisbee around the Oval Office’ (Australian November 18, 1983, p9). Norm himself is the supremely un-athletic figure, watching sport but never taking part, warming the set and cooling the tinnies, the representative slob. He was later supplied with a sister, Libby (the name which headed Doreen and Narelle in the poll), who is trim and energetic, and keen to end his slothful ways. There have been some reports of badges with the legend Life Be Out Of It. While there are problems choosing names for children anywhere, in Australia there are some extra hazards. Are Bruce and Norman ever likely to reach the top of the list, displacing Andrew and James?

Would it be foolhardy to christen any child Oscar? 77

35 Ockers and others Back in the 1920s, there was a character in the Ginger Meggs comic strip called Ocker Stevens. What his first name really was may not be recorded, but it could well have been Oscar or Horace. When

I was a schoolboy, anyone called Stevens, whatever his first name, was likely to be referred to as ‘Ocker Stevens’ (just as anyone named Fowler was likely to be called ‘Chook’), and anyone named Oscar was likely to be called ‘Ocker’ or ‘Occa’, and anyone named Eric was likely to be called ‘Ecca’. Although these names are no longer fashionable, anyone named McDonald or McKenzie can still be called ‘Macca’, and the business entrepreneur Mr Robert Holmes 4 Court has been referred to in the financial pages as ‘Hacca’. I am not so much concerned with the general tendency as with the particular case of Oscar. Boys named Oscar continued to be called ‘Ocker’ in the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s. In Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux (1939) Miss Montague’s brother is called ‘Okker’, and there is an ‘Occa Stevens’ in Sumner Locke Elliot’s Rusty Bugles (1948). D’Arcy Niland’s The Big Smoke has a character called ‘Ocker White’. It was television, however, which produced the ocker we now know. The talented comedian Ron Frazer appeared ina series of TV sketches from which I retain a mental picture of him leaning on a bar, speaking with a broad Australian accent, probably wearing shorts and thongs, and periodically sinking a glass of beer. As that character was called ‘Ocker’, ocker became the name of a type. Ron Frazer said that years later men would come up to him in their thongs and shorts, can of beer in hand, and say ‘Y'know, mate, I know a guy just like that Ocker character’. So far as I am aware, the earliest instance in print of ocker as a generic term is in George Johnston’s A Cartload of Clay (1971). David Meredith sits down on a bus seat next to a man ‘with powerful _ jaws and a robust colour and with a resentful striped face and naked neck and ears below a soft white hat adorned with a club monogram on a blue band’ (p66). Meredith conjectures that he would be

a good player, a vigorous clubman, a hearty participant in the companionship of the club bar. He was a type Julian [Meredith’s son] had sometimes talked to him about, what the boy called an ‘Ocker’. (p71)

Although in fact the big man’s talk consists of complaints about protest demos, long-haired youths and girls in miniskirts, he proves eventually to be more human and considerate than Meredith had first thought. 78

This description suggests the two aspects of the ocker. Played by Ron Frazer as a comic figure, he is the uncomplicated Austr alian, accepted by his fellows, without pretensions himself. At the end of the centenary test at Lord’s in 1980, there was a newspaper report of ‘a cheerful Ocker parading in front of the Pavilion and shouting to the England team: “We'll be back in another hundred years mate— so look out” ’(Australian September 4, p14). This is the kind of ocker behaviour which passes into folklore. It is of a piece with the story

of the late arrival at the country airport who finds the flight fully booked, and is told ‘Sorry ocker, the Fokker’s chocker’.

From another aspect, the ocker is a person of limited horizons, uninterested in things of the mind, intolerant and self-satisfied. He

differs from Norm in being more boorish and aggressive. The ocker is of course a male phenomenon. Now and then a female counterpart

to an ocker is called Shirl, and there are allusions to ockerettes or ockerinas from time to time, but it is a role that the Australian male

plays best. It would not be a compliment to refer to anyone as an ocker.

Yet the original ‘Ocker’, and the contemporary ‘Ecca’ and ‘Macca’, and the later “Hacca’, are all to be understood or diminutives, and

diminutives are supposed to be affectionate. The number of diminutives ending in ze and o has often been remarked upon as a feature of Australian English. They are not always abbreviations, as ‘Ocker’ has the same number of syllables as ‘Oscar’, and to refer to a Mr Black as ‘Blackie’ is actually to add a syllable to his name. But there is felt to be a sense of fellowship in calling Johnson Johnno or Simpson Simmo or Henderson Hendo—though it could also be disrespectful. The earliest of these formations, smoko, bottle-o and

rabbit-o, probably came from the cry (smoko was earlier called smokingtime). Arvo, kero, rego and myxo simply belong to a less formal register than afternoon, kerosene, registration and myxomatosis, and convey no particular attitude. On the other hand abo would be condescending, Salvo affectionate, and the more recent freddo (freddo frog, wog) racist. Such occupational terms as garbo, milko, journo and muso may suggest one man’s acceptance of another man’s Jurk. (It is only in Australia that anyone’s regular job may be called his Jurk.) On dero, wino, plonko and metho I hesitate to pronounce, but they seem less than affectionate. The ie formations may seem more like terms of endearment, if only because they may put us in mind of baby talk. There is afriendly feeling in referring to a can of beer asa coldie, a transistor as a tranntie, and St Vincent de Paul (as an outlet for used clothing) as Vinnies. The occupational terms brickie and chippie are English, but we seem 79

to have added postie, trammie, wharfie, schoolie or chalkie, hostie, dole,

swaggie, and (of more uncertain tone) alkie and bookie. If it is affectionate to refer to football as the footy, is it also affectionate to refer to poker machines as pokes and to politicians as pollies? Perhaps the question can be answered by those who refer to the prime minister of the time of writing as Hawke.

36 Adjacent to the uprights Not all colloquial language is necessarily informal. There are some quite ‘literary’ expressions that have become fixed in common speech, especially in the language of sports commentary. It is normal to hear that ‘Australia won the toss and elected to bat’ or that a tennis player ‘won the toss and elected to serve’. In what other sphere of human existence do we ‘elect’ to do anything? IfI said that ‘As it was raining, I elected to take a taxi’, it would sound quite affected. But in cricket commentaries we are constantly hearing of catches which are not accepted, of the number of runs scored prior to the luncheon adjournment, or of the umpire getting out of the way of the ball by taking evasive action. It is almost a linguistic code, in which a batsman may take full toll of a loose delivery, probably dispatching it for four, although he may be bowled comprehensively in the next over, so putting an end to a fighting knock. None of these expressions is distinctively Australian. Nor is to sport silk for starting in a horse race, or 1 contention for being a likely selection or a likely winner. The most likely winner in a race would achieve favouritism, which does not mean that the educated money would necessarily be on it. It may be that the saloon passage opening up for the winning horse has more of an Australian quality, from the days when travel between Australia and England was by ship, and a saloon passage was the most comfortable way of doing it. Only an Australian jockey who finds such an unimpeded run would think he had got George Moore’s whistle. He would hardly need to resort to the persuader. This is an elegant term for a whip in racing parlance: in the United States it is a revolver or a cosh. The elegance could continue up to the winning post, where the jockeys—whether in first or last placing— are said to salute the judge. It would not be a genteelism to refer to one-day cricket matches as pyjama cricket or to the white ball used as the flying aspro. But what of the shirtfront in Australian Rules? Jack Dyer offers a description of it in his book Captain Blood (1965). ‘He collected me

80

with the perfect shirt-front, the knee coming up, the shoulder drivin g into my chest and the punch to the jaw on the follow-through. It was a real Victorian job’ (p87). To call this a shirtfront may be a shade genteel. A player perpetrating it may find himself being asked to take an early shower. This strictly applies to a footballer being sent off

the field, but it has more recently been extended to a tennis-player being eliminated in an early round. This was the significance of the

heading in the Australian on January 17, 1986: ‘McEnroe goes for an early shower’. He was however showering at the normal time, the end of his match. The ‘literary’ term with the widest currency in Australia is probably strife. We have heard of the Barry Humphries character who ‘had a bit of strife parking the vehicle’. But half a century before

that, Miles Franklin wrote of one of the characters in Back to Bool Bool who ‘did not want to come back here and make strife among

her relatives’ (p320). Strife is a more ornate word for ‘trouble’ (and ‘trouble and strife’ is Cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife’). The common . Australian usage is in strife. One may be in strife for all sorts of reasons, and in an extreme case, im more strife than a one-armed bill-sticker in a gale or in more strife than Speed Gordon. Hostile is another such ‘educated’ word used colloquially. ‘There’s no need to get hostile’, we may say to someone who becomes heated in an argument— possibly from imbibing too much of the amber fluid. While taking an early shower may be the lot of a footballer in any code, it would only be in Rugby League or Union that a player could score adjacent to the uprights. This improves the chances of a successful conversion. The number of successful and unsuccessful kicks, tackles made, scrums won, errors committed, penalties awarded and so on will be given in the statistics, an elegant phrase now used in a number of sports. The language of sport can even move from

the elegant to the poetic, as in the account of a match (in the Australian June 19, 1978, p25) in which the St George team were ‘aided in their fightback by a huge 12-2 penalty count in the second stanza’. The second stanza? On enquiry, this proved to be an Americanism. According to Wentworth and Flexner, a stanza is ‘any unit of time or action, esp. in sports: a round of a prize fight, an inning of a baseball game, a quarter of a football game’. We have not so far imitated the Americans in calling such a ‘unit’ a canto. 37 Flash as a rat with a gold tooth Every now and then the question arises whether Australian English

81

is being overwhelmed by Americanisms. There has always been a marked influence in the entertainment world, and in the sometimes related world of the drug culture. The language of political evasion

often follows American examples: a ‘negative growth’ in employment sounds more palatable than a ‘decline’, and is far preferable to the crude reality of ‘a rise in unemployment’. To havea policy ‘in place’ ‘sounds positive, although it does not mean that anything is actually being done. It is rather like having something ‘under active consideration’— which is a phrase, like ‘forward planning’, which leaves one wondering what ‘inactive’ consideration (or ‘backward’ planning) might be. The technical language of economics (eg the #-curve, which must go down before it can go up), and the terminology of computing are probably international. The vitality of Australian English itself remains undiminished. It is hard to keep up with the changes. Two Australian dictionaries appeared ina revised edition in 1985—and I was responsible for one of them—but neither had caught up with scratchies as the name for instant lottery tickets in New South Wales. Only in recent years have children become ankle-biters, while deadset has become equivalent to ‘fair dinkum’, and budk come to mean “a lot of or ‘on a large scale’. One mother reported that she ‘came into bulk parenthood quite late when we moved to Brisbane. You know, the talking to other parents at the barbecues about nappies and kindergartens and all of that’. At the same time, some expressions have become old-fashioned. When Barry Humphries invented the cartoon figure Barry McKenzie for the English journal Private Eye, he concocted a language for him, which he described as a pastiche in which ‘words like cobber and bonzer still intrude as a sop to Pommy readers, though such words are seldom, if ever, used in present-day Australia’. Bonzer is certainly fading— except to the degree that the popularity of Barry McKenzie revived it. Melbourne no longer has the man outside Hoyts, either as a spruiker, or (from the authority of his commissionaire’s uniform) as the source of unconfirmed reports. It is still possible in Melbourne to have more front than Myers, but harder in Sydney to have more hide than Jessie, since Jessie the elephant at the Zoo died in 1939. New regionalisms arise to replace the old. In 1976 the gumt race down the Murrumbidgee was inaugurated at Wagga Wagga. Whatever the superstructure of the craft taking part, it had to float on inflated inner tubes. The term gumi seems to have come from the Papua New Guinea pidgin for ‘rubber’, derived in turn from the German gummi. Teams now come to Wagga from New Zealand, Hong Kong and 82

the United States to compete, and in time the adjective gumi (appli ed to the race) and the noun gumi (applied to the vessel) may produc e the verb to gumi, which would be to take part. While some regionalisms may be becoming international, within the vocabulary a single word can change its meaning in a surprising

way. Dag is an English word for a lock of wool clotted with dirt round

the hinder parts of a sheep. It became part of the language of the Australian wool industry, so that Frank Hardy in one of his novels could refer to ‘Sir Percival Dagg, the sheep millionaire’. By the time of World War I, a dag was also a ‘card’, a wit, probably with a dandified

appearance. As the adjective daggy, derived from the original sense of the word, naturally came to be applied to anyone dishevelled or untidy, he too became a dag—but of a very different kind from the life-of-the-party type. Later still a person who was not daggy in appearance, but neatly dressed with a collar and tie, came to be called a dag because this attire was so ‘uncool’. This last version of the dag is a ‘square’, quite unlike both the scruffy dresser and the humorist — who preceded him. These extensions of the meaning of dag have a certain logic, although the results are contradictory. The meaning of spunky has also moved from ‘game’ or ‘plucky’ to ‘attractive to the opposite sex’— and a spunk is anyone who qualifies. Hoon has been extended from someone living off immoral earnings to a lout of any kind. The word embassy underwent an extension of meaning when the Aborigines set up an encampment on the lawns before Parliament House on Australia Day in 1972, to protest against government policies,

especially on land rights. There have since been other embassies set up as demonstrations, such as the ‘gay embassy’ outside the home of the NSW Premier in 1983. Beyond the black stump was redefined in 1986, when it was applied to areas where the only TV channel available is the ABC. Whether the language grows by formal or informal means, there is always a place for individual ingenuity. We have long had ratty or rats for someone of unsound mind, ratbag for a more engaging eccentric and the rathouse for the more severe cases. It was still an original mind which hit upon the comparison in flash asa rat with a gold tooth. Such Americanisms as ‘uptight’ and ‘comeuppance’ may have been absorbed into the language, and politicians who talk of interest rates ‘impacting’ on the economy carry the process on, but a single expression like flash as a rat with a gold tooth shows that the local idiom is still in good hands. She'll be right.

83

NOTES 1 Is ‘Australian English’ a contradiction in terms? a press report: in the Sydney Morning Herald, 4 Apr 1984, pl. in two World Wars: my evidence from World War II is anecdotal; the World War I story

is given in AB Piddington, Worshipful Masters (1929), p46.

2 Budgerigar suffered microwave ordeal Leichhardt: see Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia (1847), p297. Tangara: the Royal Australian Navy earlier had a training ship Tingira, meaning ‘open sea’. Blake: see his Australian Aboriginal Languages (Angus and Robertson, 1981), pp84-5.

3 Piccaninnies at Port Jackson Tench: quotations from his Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789) and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793) are from Sydney’s First Four Years, ed LF Fitzhardinge (Angus and Robertson, 1961). Harpur: see his Poetical Works, ed Elizabeth Perkins (Angus and Robertson, 1984), p510.

4 Bound for Botany Bay Vaux: his ‘Vocabulary of the Flash Language’ forms an appendix to The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux, ed Noel McLachlan (Heinemann, 1964). Areopagitica: in John Milton, Selected Prose, ed CA Patrides (Penguin, 1974), p225.

hard dinkum: in Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms (World’s Classics, 1949), p47.

5 Up the creek John Maxwell: in Letters from Irish Australia 1825-1929, ed Patrick O'Farrell (New South Wales University Press, 1984), p189. Audrey Tennyson: in Audrey Tennyson’s Vice-Regal Days, ed Alexandra Hasluck (National Library of Australia, 1978), p48. Cook: see The Voyage of the Endeavour, ed JC Beaglehole (Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp309, 300, 307, 368, 393. King: in Historical Records of New South Wales, iv 624.

6 Up a gumtree Dampier: the quotation is from A New Voyage Round the World (1697), p463. Banks: the quotation is from The Endeavour Journal of foseph Banks, ed JC Beaglehole (Angus and Robertson, 1963), ii 115. Cook: in The Voyage of the Endeavour, ed JC Beaglehole (Cambridge University Press, 1955),

pp312 n, 368, 393. Flinders: see his Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), i 63.

7 Sydney or the bush Trollope: see his Australia, ed PD Edwards and RB Joyce (University of Queensland Press,

1967), p413.

Hume and Hovell: see the Australian, 17 Feb 1825, pl. 8 Movement

at the station

Audrey Tennyson: in Audrey Tennyson’s Vice-Regal Days, ed Alexandra Hasluck (National Library of Australia, 1978), p124. Blaxland: in Fourteen Journeys Over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, ed George Mackaness (1950), pp19-20.

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§ House, barracks and hut fly, Life: quotations from Such is Life (1903) are from the Angus and Robertson edition

1944).

Boldrewood: see In Bad Company (1901), p285.

10 Up came the squatter In the Collected Verse of AB Paterson (Angus and Robertson) it is ‘Down came the squatter’, but I follow the text of Singer of the Bush (Lansdowne, 1983). Betts: in Account of the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (1830), p39. Gipps: the dispatch is given in Historical Records of Australia, xxi 130. Lady Tennyson: in Audrey Tennyson’s Vice-Regal Days, ed Alexandra Hasluck (National Library of Australia, 1978), p118. Kingsley: see The Hillyars and the Burtons (1865), iii 265.

11 Gold, gold, gold press report: in the National Times, 9 Aug 1985, p5. The term darg, for the amount of work to be done in a specified time, is also sometimes used, but it derives from coal-mining

rather than gold-mining. 12 Selectors and cockatoos AG Stephens and SE O’Brien: the materials they collected are MS Q427.9/0 in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. jibes: see the Sydney Morning Herald, 3 Aug 1982, p7; 15 Feb 1986, p7.

13 Click go the shears The anonymous ballad is cited from Old Bush Songs, ed Douglas Stewart and Nancy Keesing (Angus and Robertson, 1957), p254. A ringer could also be a stockman, ‘ringing the cattle’. smoko. . . 1855: R Caldwell, The Gold Era of Victoria (1855), p129, describes the practice, although the expression used is ‘smoking time’. 14 The ‘nomad tribe’ Trollope: see Australia, ed PD Edwards and RB Joyce (University of Queensland Press, 1967),

p137.

Ward: in his The Australian Legend (Oxford University Press, 1958). Mary Gilmore: see Old Days, Old Ways (Angus and Robertson, 1963), pp167-8. Hancock: in Professing History (Sydney University Press, 1976), p61.

15 There once was a swagman squatter’s leather valise: in GC Mundy, Our Antipodes (1852), iii 285. Lawson: in ‘Some Popular Australian Mistakes’, Collected Prose, ed Colin Roderick (Angus and Robertson, 1972), ii 24.

16 Mates and mateship as early as 1845: in C Griffith, The Present State ... of Port Phillip (1845), p79. Harris: in Settlers and Convicts, ed CMH Clark (Melbourne University Press, 1954), p176. Hawke: as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 13 Apr 1983, p26. Flynn’s biographer: Ion L Idriess, Flynn of the Inland (1932), p262. Carboni: in The Eureka Stockade, ed Geoffrey Serle (Melbourne University Press, 1969), p5.

17 Colonials all Johnson . . . Adam Smith: this information is given in the entry on ‘currency’ in the OED. Cunningham: Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales (1827), ii 54-66. Sorenson: Life in the Australian Blackblocks (1911), p183.

85

18 War and language munga: for a more extended discussion, see Southerly, xl (1982), 440-1. Woman’s World: for 8 Oct 1975, p 71.

19 Diggers and Anzacs the command to ‘dig in’ at Gallipoli: Sir Ian Hamilton wrote to Birdwood from the Queen Elizabeth ‘there is nothing for it but to dig yourselves right in and stick it out’. He added a PS: ‘You have got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig, until you are safe.’ (CEW Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18, i 460-1) diggers in 1 Anzac Corps: Bean, Official History, iv 732-3. Anzac as code name: Bean, Official History, i 124-5. Bean’s diary was published as Galhipolt Correspondent (Allen and Unwin, 1983). a journalist in 1982:.in the Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 1982, p17. The Season at Sarsaparilla: in Four Plays (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965), p105. Scyld Berry: as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 May 1985, p42.

20 The big smoke as early as 1790: in Historical Records of New South Wales, ii 724. as late as 1827: in Peter Cunningham,

The Language of Bohemia:

Two Years in New South Wales, ii 70.

see Marcus Clarke, A Colonial City, ed LT Hergenhan

(University of Queensland Press, 1972), pp154-62. a court appearance: as reported in the Sunday Telegraph (Sydney), 7 May 1950, p47. Boyd: in Australia’s Home (Melbourne University Press, 1952), p91.

21 Doing it by numbers a small loaf: according to the definition in James Hardy Vaux’s ‘Vocabulary of the Flash

Language’ (1812). a six-pack to Barkly: as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 16 Jan 1986, p8.

22 National characteristics? Paterson: see Song of the Pen (Lansdowne, 1983), pp707, 404.

Tarquin: see Livy, I liv.

22 Poms and half-Poms Prince Charles: as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 3 Feb 1973, p2. lion parks: this version of the story is given in the Bulletin, 15 Jul 1974, p38.

24 History... National Pavlova Day: the report is from the Australian, 23 Apr 1981, p3. Lloyd Rees: see Peaks and Valleys, ed Elizabeth Butel (Collins, 1985), pp37-8. 25...

and Folklore

Buckley’s chance: the earliest instances of the expression known to me are Buckley’s show and Buckley’s hope. Hughie upstairs: see the Sydney Morning Herald, 31 Jan 1984, p3l.

26 Hay and Hell and Booligal George Eliot: see Letters, ed GS Haight (Oxford University Press, 1954), ii 70-1. the original Murphy: for attempts to identify him, see William and Mary Morris, Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (Harper and Row, 1977) and O&A Collection Volume Two, comp Peter McCormack (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1984). Dick Marston: in Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms (World’s Classics, 1949), p46.

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27 Regional differences The Hydro: Pee in Tasmania, avccis the Hydro-Elect Baty ric Commission y (i Sydney, the Hydro Majestic mission (in jesti hoy: known elsewhere as bingo or housie. film critic: in the Sydney Morning Herald 15 Oct 1984, Guide pls. Carn: according to Bruce Dawe’s poem ‘Life-cycle’.

28 A rooster one day, a feather duster the next Deakin: see JA La Nauze, Alfred Deakin (Melbourne University Press, 1965), p378. Turner: see Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 10 Oct 1899. Chifley: as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 15 Nov 1949, p4. Askin: see the Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Jul 1981, p12. Hughes: as reported by Alan Reid, Bulletin, 29 Jan 1980, p365. Gair: the Australian, 3 Apr 1974, p5.

29 Under the brim of his Akubra Melbourne Herald: for 26 Sept 1985, pl. a columnist: in the Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Feb 1986, Metro p2. 30 Too crook to take a sickie? Kingsley and Trollope: see The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), i 104; Australia,

ed PD Edwards and RB Joyce (University of Queensland Press, 1967), p524. rort: the quotation is from the Sydney Morning Herald, 10 Jun 1981, pé6.

31 Missing out on the trifecta the boy: the nineteenth-century use is found in AC Grant, Bush-Life in Queensland (1881) ii 67, and in AB Paterson’s ‘Old Pardon, Son of Reprieve’. the Cup: some would argue for a Sydney counterpart in the Slipper, the Golden Slipper Stakes inaugurated in 1957. The Cup and the Shipper vie for the distinction of having the highest

prize money in Australian racing.

32 The boiling of billycans grinds to a halt tyranny of distance: in Blainey’s book with that title (1966). family in New South Wales: reported in the Sydney Morning Herald 20 Oct 1984, Colour Magazine p24.

33 A dog’s life AB Paterson: in the Bulletin, 31 Dec 1898, p31.

drover’s dog: see the Australian, 4 Feb 1983, pl. shoot your own dog . . . get up with fleas: see Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Dec 1983, pl; 25 Sep 1985, p12. dingobilia: see Sun-Herald, 6 Dec 1981, p208; 17 Jan 1982, p144.

34 Name that child Monitor: for 22 Mar 1828, p1053. Max Harris: see his The Angry Eye (1973), p21. 35 Ockers and others

in the financial pages: eg of the Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Jan 1986, p23. Ron Frazer: as quoted in the Sun (Sydney), 20 Aug 1975, p37.

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36 Adjacent to the uprights elected to bat: the alternative is to insert the opposition. Wentworth and Flexner: in their Dictionary of American Slang (Crowell, 1975), p517.

37 Flash as a rat with a gold tooth This expression was first used in ae to the best of my knowledge, by Bill Peach in the Sun-Herald, 27 Aug 1978, p59. bulk parenthood: see Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Jun 1984, pl0. Barry Humphries: writing in the Times Literary Supplement, 16 Sep 1965, p812. Hardy: The Outcasts of Foolgarah (Allara Publishing, 1971), p2. black stump redefined: see the Age (Melbourne), 29 Mar 1986, Extra 1.

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INDEX abo 79 Aborigines Protection Act, 1909-43 75

barramundi 9 barrowing 31

accord, the 66 Acland, LGD 56

the 61 ankle-biter 82

bastard 8 from the bush see bush battle for a crust, to 52 battler 51-2 , little Aussie 52 Battlers, The 37 Beale, Sir Howard 75 Bean, CEW 16,43,88 beaut 8 Bee, John 60 beef road 72 bell sheep 32 Berry, Scyld 45,88 betshiregah see budgerigar

Anzac 43,44-5,49

Betts, Lieut T 25,86

Adams, Phillip 77 adjacent to the uprights 81 Akubra 66,68 Albany doctor 62

Alf 77 Alfland 77 Alfred 76 alki 80 amber fluid 50,81

America’s Cup, Home of

Cove 44

Apple Islander 61 Areopagitica 14 arvo 79 Asche, Oscar 54 Askin, Sir Robert 66 aspro 67,80

Auld Reekie 45 Aussie 42 Aussie 44 Australian salute, the 73

Australian ugliness, the 47 awake 14 axe-handle 49

babbler 32 babbling brook see babbler back block 29 back to the bush see bush bag-a-ray 11 bagman 37 bail up, to 20

ball-bearing cowboy 72 Bananaland 61 bandicoot 10,11 , like an on a burnt orphan: ridge 51 bank 14 Banks, Sir Joseph 11,18,54,86 banksia 54 barbie, two chops short of a 51 barney 15 barrack 15 barracks 23,24,36

basic wage 68,69

——, boss of:the 32 boat sheep 72 bodgie 46 bogey 12 bogghi 31 boilover 70 Boldrewood, Rolf 24,34,52-3,85,86,90 bolter 70 bombora 9 Bondi tram, to shoot through like a 62 bone, to point the 73 bonzer 82 book, bookie 71,80 Booligal, from here to 59

block 29,40 , the 46

see also Hay and Hell and Booligal boomerang 9,12 boramby 12 Borone, Francesco 54 boronia 54 bosch 19 boss cocky 30 boss of the board 32 Botany Bay, NSW 13 ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ 13 bottle-o 79 bottom of the harbour 70 boundary riders 23 Bourke 50 bowyangs 14 boy, the 71 Boyd, Robin 47,89 brass razoo 49 break it down 50 Breton, WH 25 brick 49 on , London to a 4

——, doing the 46 blockie 73

brickie 79 British to the boot heels

Bex 67 Big Fellow, The 64 big smoke, the 45 Big Smoke, The 78 bignote, to 51 Bill 76 billabong 9 , on the 37

Billjim 76 billy, billycan 37,72 bindi-eye 10 bingey 10,12 , a pain in the 10 Birdwood, General WR 44 black stump 58,83 Blackall 50 blades 31 Blake, Dr Barry 85 Blaxland, Gregory 22,86

Blind Freddie 57

bloody 7 blow 31 , to 28,71

blowtorch applied to the belly, the 66 Blue 7 blue 7 , to cop, make, pick, stack on a7

heeler 74 -tongues 31 Bluey 7 bluey 7,37 , hump your 7,37

, Tasmanian 7

board 31

brolga 9 broomie 31 ‘bronzed Anzac’ 45

brook brown brown Bruce

16 bomber 62 dog 75 76,77

brumby 12 Buckley, William 57 Buckley’s chance 7,57 Buckley’s hope, show 89 budgerigar 9-10 budgie see budgerigar budjereegar see budgerigar Bugs Bunny 62

89

bulk 82 Bulli pass 50 bullocky 35,39,46 bumper 49 bungarra 12 Burke and Wills, all over

the place like 70 burn 15

bush 19,40 , back to the 21 ——., bastard from the 20 , take the 20 bush capital 61 carpenter 21

lawyer 21 liar 21 medicine 21 shower 21 telegraph 21,71 tucker 20 Bush Week 62

bush week 20 bush it, to 20 bushed, to be 20 bushman 19 bushman’s breakfast 21 cement 21 clock 21 bushranger 20-1 bushwhacker 20 butcher 63 Butt, Clara 55

cabbage patch 61 caddjibut see cajeput cajeput 10 calabashes 41 Caldwell, R 87 Calwell, Arthur 64

camp, the 46 camp pie 73 -drafting 73 -oven 22

Campbell, Lady 62 cane cocky 30 canto 81 Carboni, Raffaelo 39,88 Carn 63 casket, the 62 castor 14 cat 70 catching-pen 32

cheerio 62 Chesty Bond 66 Chifley, JB 65 Chiko Roll 67 Chipp, Don 66 chippie 79 Chloe, as drunk as 60

chocker 79 choco 43 + choko vine, couldn’t train a over a country dunny 51 Chook 78 chook raffle 51 choom 53 chuck a seven see seven cigarette swag 37 Clarke, Marcus 46,88

Clancy of the Overflow 59 classer 31 clearing sale 73 ‘Click go the shears’ 31 clinah 28 clip 33 coathanger 61 cobber 14,44,82 cobbler 32 cockatoo 30-1, 36,47 cockeyed bob 62

cockie, cocky see cockatoo cockie’s clip 30 Cockie’s Corner 31 cocky on the biscuit tin, like the 68 cocky’s gate 30 joy 30 weather 30 coldie 79

collie dog 75 Collins, David 12 Collins, Michael 64 Collins, Tom 23-4, 27

Collins St grazier 73 colour 27 compo 68 cooee, within 10 Cook, Captain James 11,16,18,85

Coolgardie safe 62

coolibah 9 ee Creek, Qld/SA

cattle-duffing 27

cop a blue see blue

cavally 10 Cazaly, Roy 54-5

coppice 16

see also up there, Cazaly! century 49 , go for the 32 chalkie 80

cordie 62 corduroy 41 corella 10 cornstalk 61 correct weight 71 corroboree 9

Charles, Prince of Wales

3,54

90

copse 16

Country Hour, The 74 cow cocky 30 cowboy 35 crack hardy, to 51 cracker 49 crash through or crash 66 crawler 33,35 Creek, the 62 creek 15,17 , up the 17,19 creeker 62 crook 8,68,70

Crooked Mick 58 Croweater 61 cuffs and collars 23 Cunningham, Peter

20,40,88 Cup, the 71,90 Curr, EM 35 currawong 9 currency 40 Currency Lad, The 40 Curtin, John 64 cyclone 66 cut out 33

Dad and Dave 29-30,58

dag 83 daggy 83 daily double 72 daks dale 16 damper 15 Dampier, William 17-18,86

Daphne 77 darg 86-7 Darling whaler 37 dart 60 Dartmoor, England 60 Darwin stubby 63 Dawe, Bruce 90 deadset 82 Deakin, Alfred 64

debbil debbil 12 declare them wet, to 32

Deep North, the 61 dell 16 Dennis, CJ 46 dero 79 deucer, 48

devil’s number, the 49 devon 62 dig 44 in, to 43,88 digger 43-5,75 dill 51,56 dillybag 9

ding 14 dingo 9,74 ——, toi /4 Dingo Jack 42

dingobilia 76 dinkum 14,42 Aussie 42 dinkum oil, the 42

dinky-di 42 Dirty Digger, The 44 dishlicker 74 disperse 35 doctor 32,62

——., go for the 71 dog 74-5 , to 74 ———. to. turn 74 Dog Act, the 74 dog and goanna rules 75 Dog Collar Act, the 75 dog-leg fence 74 dog licence 75 dog tied up 74 dogbox 75 dogger 74,75 dogman 75 dog’s disease 75 dogs are pissing on your swag see pull out dogs, if you lie down with

75

dolie 80 donah 46 donkey vote 69

doog 61 doona 66

Doreen 77 Dorothy Dixer 65

dragon-tree 17-18 dragon’s blood 17-18 Driza-Bone, drizabone

67,68 drongo 51,56 drop your bundle, to 51

drover’s dog 75

drum 37 ——, not to run a 70 drummer 32,35 drunk as Chloe see Chloe dry-blowing 62 dubbo 63 duckbill 15 duffer 27 dummy, to 29 dump 40 Duncan 37 Dyer, Sir Edward 38

ear-bashing 43 Ecca 78,79 Echuca 50 eighteen 48 , the 48

eighteener 48 eighty-seven 49

Ekka, the 62 electorate 69 Eliot, George 60,89 Elizabeth II 64 Elstob, Senator Ron 75 embassy 83 emu 10,11,43

-bobbing 43 parade 43 endowment 69 esky 66,67

eucalyptus 18 euro 9

Evatt, Dr HV 46 expert 31 extras 8

fair cow, a 51 fair go 50 farmer 26

fencing wire, tough as 74 Festival State, the 61 field, to bring back to the 71 field day 73

fifty 48

firm, to 71 Fisher, Andrew 64

flash as a rat with a gold tooth 81,83

‘flash’ language 13-14,36 flea, so bare you could across it 51 flick, to give the 51 Flinders, Matthew 18,86 floater 27,61 flow-on 69

flying aspro, the 80 Flying Doctor scheme 73 Flynn, Errol 55 , in like 55 Flynn, Rev John 39,73

footy 80 form 71-2 forty 48 forty-niner 48 fossick, fossicker 27 fourths, on 48 Franklin, Miles 81 Fraser, Malcolm 64 Frazer, Ron 78,79,91

Fred 77 freddo 79 Frederick 76 Fredsville 77 free selection before survey free selector see selector Fremantle doctor 62 fritz 62

frontage 29

fruit cocky 30 fruit for the sideboard 71 full bottle, not 51

furphy 42

Furphy, Joseph 23,29,42 Furphy water-cart 42 fuzzy-wuzzy 43 galah 9,10

Gallipoli 43,44-5 game as Ned Kelly 54 Gap, one way ticket to the 63 garbo 79 Garden State, the 61 oe getting out at

2

gen 42 General, the 57 George Moore’s whistle 80 getting off at Redfern see Redfern gibber 10 gidgee 9 Giles, Ernest 15 Gilmore, Mary 34,87 Gipps, Governor George

25,86

glade 16 glen 16

Globite 66 go for the century see century go through, to 43 goanna 10,11,12

farm 41 gold rush 26-8,38 golfer 62

gonce 28 good guts, the 42 good oil, the 42

gooley 10 Government house 24 government stroke, the 73 Goyder, George Woodroofe 54 Goyder line 54 Granny 57 Granny Smith 57 Grant, AC 90

Grassby, Al 55 grasshopper 62 grazier 17,26

grazier’s alert 17 great Australian dream,

the 47 Greville, Sir Fulke 38 grey ghost 62

griff 42 Griffith, C 87

91

grog 50 grove 16 gum 17-18 ——., species of 18 gumi 82-3 gumtree 17-19 ,uprarl9 gun shearer 32,35 guts, the 42 gutter 27 Hacca 78,79 hairy goat, like a 70 half-Pom 52,54 Halliwell, Keith 67 Hancock, Sir Keith 35,87 handle 63 Hardy, Frank 83,91 Harpur, Charles 12,85 Harris, Alexander 38,87

Harris, Max 77,91

Harrison, Eric 75 Harvester case 68 Hatfield, William 24 hatter 37 Hawke, RJ 39,87

Hawkespeak 66 Hawkie 80

Hay and Hell and Booligal 58 Hayden, WG (Bill’) 75 Haygarth, HW 45 heading them 42

head-station 23 Hell, see Hay and Hell and Booligal Henderson, James Stedman 67

Herbert, Xavier 53 Higgins, Mr Justice 68-9 Hill, Ernestine 22 Hill, Lance 66 Hills hoist 66 holey dollar 40 Holiday Isle, the 61 eh a Court, Robert Holt, Harold 65 Home 26,72 home unit 47 home-station 23 homestead 22,23

homing pigeons, couldn’t lead a flock of 66 hoon 83

hoop 71 hoot 28 Hope, Neil C 77 horror budget 65 hostie 80

92

hostile 81 Hotten, JC 38,45,76 house 23,24,26,36 Hovell, William Hilton

20,86 Howard, Ken 71 Howitt, William 30

hoy 61 Hoyts, the man outside 82 Hughes, WM 44,64,66 Hughie 57-8 Hull, Hell and Halifax 59 Hume, Hamilton 20,86 hump a swag, to 46 hump your bluey see bluey Humphries, Barry 82,91

humping bluey 37 humping the drum 37 humpy 9 Hunter, John 12 hut 23,24,36 see also men’s hut Hydro, the 61,90 Idriess, Ion L 88

igloo 62 Indians 15 informal vote 69 Innisfail 50 inland, the 73 inside 73 issue, the 42 , to get one’s 42

Johnson, Samuel 40 Johnston, George 78 jonic 28 journo 79 Joyce, PW 77 Julia Creek 50 jumbuck 12 jump 14 up 12 jungle juice 43

kadjabut see cajeput kangaroo 9,11,12

closure 70 court 70 kanguroo see kangaroo karri 9 keep the bastards honest 66 Kelly, Ned 20,39,54 kelpie 74 Kendall, Henry 16 kero 79 kerosene 8,79 Kerr, Andy 71 kick, couldn’t get a ina

stampede 51 kinder 63 kindy 63

King, Governor Philip Gidley 17,86 Kingsley, Charles 69 Kingsley, Henry 26,52,86

jacaranda 10

jack-up 43 jackaroo, jackeroo Jacky Howe 54 jamboree 10 jarrah 9 J-curve 82 Jessie, more hide than 82

jeweller’s shop 27 jigger 71 jillaroo 72 Jim 76 jimbuc 12 jimmy 52 Jimmy Wood, Jimmy Woodser 56 pera Woodser, doing the

jimmygrant, Jimmy Grant, Jemmy Grant

see also jimmy Jindivik 10 Joe 27 joe (ewe) 31 Johnson, L 53

kipper 53 kiwi fruit 55 knobtwister 71 knock, to 45 knock down a cheque, to knockabout man 35,36 koala 9,43,49 kookaburra 9,21

kurrajong 9 kylie 9,12 Lady Campbell 62 lady’s waist 63 lag 13 lair 47 lairize around, to 47 lamb down, to 46 lamington 55-6 La Nauze, JA 90 landing, the 44 Lane, Wiliam 69

Lang, JT 51,64 larrikin 14,46 last man and the last shilling, the 64

La Trobe, Charles Joseph

27 Lawson, Henry

19,20,23, 26,28,29,30,3

36, 38,46,52,72,76,87 lay-by8 LBJ, all the way with 65 learner 31,35 Leichhardt, Ludwig 9,85 Libby 77

‘Life Be In It’ campaign 77 Life in the Australian Backblocks 41 life wasn’t meant to be easy 64 light on the ee the 65 Lind, Lew 5 Little Bie The 44 lizard 34 loading 69 Locke Elliot, Sumner 78 lollywater 50 London to a brick on

long paddock 16 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 65 Longford, Raymond 53

loop, the 63 loppies 31

lucky shop 63 luderick 9 lurk 79 Lynch, Sir Phillip 65 Macca 78,79 Mackellar, Dorothea 74 McKenzie, Barry 82 Macquarie, Governor Lachlan 40 mad, he went——and they shot him 43 mad as a two-bob watch see two bob magnoon 43 mail 70-71 mainlander 61 maintain the rage 66

maisonette 47 Major Mitchell cockatoo make a blue see blue

make the eighteen see eighteen, the mallee 9 , take to the 10 mallee bull, fit as a 74 Malvern Star 66 man on the land 30 mantle of safety 73

margin 35,69 Marshall, James Vance 44 mate 38-9 mates, being/going——with 39 mateship 35,38-9 Matilda 37 Maxwell, John 15,85 meadow 16 mean, so he wouldn’t meat pie, as Australian as a 59,61 Medibank 69 Medicare 69 Medifraud 69 Melba, Dame Nellie 55 Melba, Peach 55 Melba, to do a 55 Melba toast 55 Melbourne Cup 72 see also Cup “Men and Women of

Australia’ 64 men’s hut 23 Menzies, RG 48,64,65 Meredith, Louisa 15 merry widow 31 metho 79 Mexican 61 middy 63 milko 79 Milton, John 14,85 minimum wage 69 Minties 67 Mitchell, Sir Thomas 16 monte 28 moom 10 Moomba 10 morwong 9 mother state 61 motza 28 mozz, mozzle 28

muck, sing ’em 55 mudlark 70 mug lair 47,51 Mules, JHW 54

mulesing 54 mulga 9

, out in the 10

mulga wire 71 mullock 27 , to poke 28

Mundy, GC 34,87 munga 42,43 mungareer 43 Murdoch, Rupert 44,76 murnong 11

Murphy’s law 60 Murrumbidgee whaler 37

muso 79 Muswellbrook 50 Myers, more front than 82 myrnong see murnong myxo 79 nannygai 9 Narelle 76,77 native 8

native dog see dingo nature strip 47 Ned Kelly, game as 54

neddies 70 never never 73-4 new chum 13 Nicholas, George 67 Niland, D’Arcy 78 niner 48 nitkeeper 47 Noah, Operation 83 no-hoper 51,56 ‘nomad tribe’ 33 nong 51,56

Norm 77,79 Norman 76,77 Northern Territory confetti 63

nugget 27

nuggety 27 numbers are up, when the

71

O’Brien, SE 30,87 Ocker, Occa 78,79 ocker 79 ockerette, ockerina 79 offsider 35,36 oil, the 42 Old Dart 60-61 old hand 13 Old System 54 On Our Selection 29 Once There Was a Bagman 37 ones 48 Oodnagalahbi 58 OReilly, Bill 75 Oscar 77,78,79 oscar 54 outer, on the 71 outside 73 out-station 22

over the hill, to go 43 over-award 69 overlander 33

paddock 15,16,73

Paddy 76 padre’s bike 43 pakapoo ticket 28 pan out, to 27

93

paradise for the working man 69 paraffin 8 pastoralist 26

pongo 53 pony 63 poon 51

pat-ag-a-ran 11 Paterson, AB

port 63 possie 42

58,59,75,86,89,90 Paterson’s Curse 62 pavlova 55 Pavlova, Anna 55

paydirt, to strike 28 Peach Melba 55 peacock, to 29 pedal wireless 73 penalty rates 69 pequeno 11 perenty 12 persuader 80 piccaninny 11 pick a blue see blue

pick the eyes out, to 29 picker-up 31 picnic, two sandwiches short of a 51 pidgin 12-13 piece-picker 31 pineapple, the rough end of the 50 pissing on your swag, dogs are see pull out Pitt St farmer 73 Pitt St or Christmas 63 placing 80 plain turkey 37 plant, to 13

plate, bring a 8 plimsoll 8 plonk 42,50 plonko 79

point the bone, to 73 poison cart 74 poke in the eye with a burnt stick, better than a 60 pokie 80 pollie 80 polony 62 pomegranate 52 Pom, Pommy 7,8,52-4 , ——, whingeing 52 Pommies, The 53

Pommy Arrives in Australia

53

Pommy bastard 52,53 Pommy the Funny Little New Chum 53 Pommyism 15

Pommy’s bath towel, dry as a 53 Ponder, WH 55

94

Reveille 43

revolving door, couldn’t go

poppy 51 possum, stirring the see stirring

postie 80 pot 63

two rounds with a 66 returned man 45 Richardson, Mervyn Victor 66 ride over the bastards 66 Riemer, AP 14

right, she'll be 84

potato cake 63 poverty line 69 pure merino 40

rill 16

prawn 43,51

ringer 15,31,87 Rivett, Rohan 45 rivulet 15 road train 72 roaring days, the 28

ring dollar 40 ring the shed, to 32

preferential vote 69 Premier State, the 61 presser 31

Prince Alberts 37 prospect 27 pull out digger, the dogs

Robbery Under Arms 14 roll-up 27 Ronan, Tom 37

are pissing

on your swag 75 pull your head in 43,51 push 46 see also ‘Captain of the Push’ 20 pusher 63 pyjama cricket 80

rooster one day, feather duster the next

ropeable 73 rort, rorter, rorting 70 Rose Hill 10 rosella 10

toughie 70 rouseabout 32,35,36,39

quinella 72 quokka 9

RSL 45 rubbery 65

tabbit-o 79 race, not in the 72 Rafferty’s rules 57 rainbow 42

raining, if it was palaces, pea soup, virgins Ramson, Dr WS ranch 21

12

ranger 20 rat with a gold tooth see flash ratbag 51,83 rathouse 83 rats, ratty 83 raw prawn, to come the

Razor Gang 65 redback 49 Redfern, getting off at 62 redfish Rees, Lloyd 56,89 Reg Grundy(s) 54 reginalds 54 rego 79 rep 32 Repat 45

Rudd, Steele 29 Roy 76,77

Rum Corps 50 Rum Hospital 50 Rum Rebellion 50

Rumsey, HJ 53 run 22,32,33 Sachse, Herbert 55

saloon passage 80 salute the judge, to 80 Salvation Jane 62 Salvo 79 Sandgroper 61 sandshoe 8 sao 66,67 sarvo 7 saver 70 scab 33 scallop 63 school 13,14 schoolie 80 schooner 63 scratchie 82

scrub turkey 37 scrubber 70 see you later 8 sein 48 select to, 29

selection 29 selector 26,28-30,36 semi 47 settler 26 seven 48 , to chuck a 48 shake, to 13 Shakespeare, William 14

shaler 76

shanghai 15 Shaw, GB 64 shearer 31-3

shearing 48 shed 31 sheep-oh! 32 Sheila 76,77

sheila 7,8,76-7

shepherd 27,33 sherbet 50 shicer 28 shickered, shikkered 7,28 shingle short, a 51 > shinplaster 41 shiralee 37 Shirl 79 shirtfront 80 shook on, to be 50 shoot through, to 7,43,62 shoot your own dog, you always 75 shot 28 shouting 28 show 27 shower, come down in the last 51 shower, to take an early 81

shrapnel 42 shypoo 28 sickie 68,70

Sidney, Sir Philip 38 silent cop 47 silvertail 51 sing em muck see muck skerrick 15 skinner 70 skite 15,28

slap in the face with a wet fish, better than a 60 sling, to 71 slingback 71 Slipper, the 90-1 slops 50

sloth 15 slushy 35,36 Smith, Adam 40 Smith, Maria Ann see Granny Smith Smoke, the 45

see also big smoke, the

Soe is a health hazard smoking time 87 smoko 32,79 smooge, to 7 snag 62 snagger 31,62 Snake Gully 58 snarler 43 sniper, he went for a crap and the got him 43 snob 32 soldier settlement 73 sollicker 28 sool 15 Sorenson, ES 41,88 sorry, you'll be 43 Southey, Robert 13 souvenir, to 42

specking 27 speedball 32 Speedo 66 oo Catherine Helen 3 speewa 58 Spewaa Station 58 spieler 28 spill 69 spine-bashing 43 spinifex wire 71 spinney 16 spud cocky 30 spunk, spunky 83 squatter 25-6,29,30,36,39 squattocracy 26 squire 26 stack on a blue see blue stand 31 standover man 47 stanza 81 starter 71 State of Excitement, the station 21-3, 39 -hand 23

horse 23 stock 23 statistics 81 Stephens, AG 30,87

strike oil, to 42

strike paydirt, to 28 stroller 63 stubby 63,66,67

Sturt’s desert pea 54 Such is Life 23,26,27,29,42

‘such is life’ 54

suds 50 sugar bag 12 sunburnt country 74 sundowner 37 sundries 8 Sunshine State, the 61

Super Sopper 67 Sutherland, Dame Joan 46 swag 36,37 swaggie, swagman

36-8,39,80

swamp, to 41

swamper 41 sweetheart agreement 69 swinging voter 69 swy 28 Sydney or the bush 21

tailer 34 tailings 27 take the bush see bush take to the mallee see mallee tall poppy 51 Tallarook 50 tally 32,33 Tangara 10 tarboy 31 Tasman, Abel 17,18

Tasmanian bluey see bluey Tassie 61 tartshop, dragged screaming from the 64 ten, ten, two and a quarter 23,48 Tench, Captain Watkin 11,85 Tennant, Kylie 37,52,78 Tennyson, Lady (Audrey) LOST ,21522, 26,85,86

stirring the possum 19 Stobie pole 61

thongs 67,78 Thursday or Anthony Horderns 63 ticket, where did you get

stockman 34 stone the crows! 15 stoush 15 strata title 47 strife 81 , in 81 ——— more than 81

tigers 31 Tilt-A-Dor 67 Tingira 85 tinned dog 74 toastrack tram 47 tobacco cocky 30

sterling 40 Stevens, Ocker, Occa 78

your

95

‘Tom Collins’ 42 see also Collins, Tom tomahawk, to 32 Tomaris 63 tongs 31 Torrens, Robert Richard 54 Torrens title 54 Tothersider 61 town house 47

Traeger, Alf 73

trammie 80 trannie 79 Transport Workers’ Act, 1928 75 Transport Workers’ (Seamen) Regulations 75 trap 13 traveller 37

two-three-four-one (2341)

wash up 28

9 two-up 42 tyranny of distance, the 73

wattle 18-19

unit 47 unity ticket 69

up a gumtree see gumtree up the.creek see creek up there, Cazaly! 54-5 uprights, adjacent to the 81 upside down, the only

river in the ‘world that flows 61 Urandangie 50 urger 1 eke the 35,36 Vaux, James Hardy

water-mole 15 wattle-and-daub 19 Wattle Day 19 Watsons, to bet like the 57 Weetbix 50 westie 62

whack 13 whaler 37 wharfie 80 wheat cocky 30 While the Billy Boils 72 White, Patrick 24,45,68 Whitlam, EG 64,66 wide brown land, the 74 wider the brim, the

smaller the property, the 68

trevally 10 trifecta 70,72

13,14,36,85,89 Vegemite 66,67

widgie 47

—.,

Victa 66 Vidal, Mrs Francis 9

Windsor sausage 62

to miss out on the

trilogy, the 66 Trollope, Anthony 19,33,36,69,87 troppo 43 tuart 9 tube 31 tucker 15

tuckerbag 37 Tuesday, first in November 71 Tuesday or Bourke St 63 Turner, Sir George 64 turps 50 tu-ru-ma 12 twang 28 twenty-eight 48 |

two bob 48 two bob, not worth 48 two-bob lair 47,48 two-bob watch, mad as a two ones 48

96

villa 47 Vinnies 79 Violet Crumble Bar 67

wino 79 Withnall, Gordon 67 Wolseley 31 wombat 9 wo-mur-rang 12

vote, donkey 69 , informal 69

, preferential 69 vote them dry, to 32 waddy 9,10,12 Wakefield, EJ 52 walkabout, going 13 Walla Walla, further behind than 71 wallaby 9 , on the 36

wallaby track, on the 36 walloper 47 waltzing Matilda 37 ‘Waltzing Matilda’ 25,72 waratah 9 Ward, Professor Russel ’

Wood, Jimmy 56 wood-and-water joey 35,36 Woodbine 53 wool away! 32 woomera 9,10

Woop Woop 7,58 wowser 7,15 yakker 10 yam 11

yamstick 11 you'll be sorry 43 Z cars 63 Zam-Buk, Zambuck 67

Exploring Australian English ‘It would be possible for two Australians, using fairly common terms, to have a conversation which another English speaker could not understand,’ says GA Wilkes in his introduction to ieoloalrpalenec lintel iver This entertaining book looks at how Australians use words differently from other people who speak English — why, for instance, we talk about bush lawyers, plonk, pointing the bone, skites, wowsers, ankle-biters, scratchies and grey ghosts; what we mean by tucker that would kill a brown dog at fifteen paces and why we describe something as not worth a bumper. GA Wilkes is author of A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms and an authority on the special Australian use of words. He is also Professor of English Literature at the University aSydney and editor of the literary magazine Southerly.

ISBN O-b42-52730-X por? e101Ag

Il | I me

an

O100064-10