Being an Australian writer

The perceptive reader may have noticed a hiatus. the reason will be explained shortly. I now do a monthly column for a CBCA newsletter called iRead, but as it may not be accessible to all, I plan to follow up with a release here, a couple of months later. This is the first.

There’s a game I play overseas, and you can play it as well, once we can get away. Sit in a coffee shop in Riga, a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps, a Greek café in Banff, a chippie in Glasgow or a restaurant in Reykjavik, and say “G’day!” with a carrying voice, with vowels as flat as a goanna B-double roadkill. Then watch the Australian heads swivel, seeking an unseen compatriot who may have news from home. That single “G’day!” reminds them of where home is, but they never find me.

I knew from a tender age that I would be a writer, and an Australian writer at that, because Australia has always been my home. I may speak the rounded vowels of Received Pronunciation, but when I write and play games, a streak of larrikinism oozes out.

My early role models were Norman Lindsay with his Magic Pudding, Dorothy Wall, who wrote Blinky Bill to kill off the koala-shooting trade and Leslie Rees, whose ‘Digit Dick’ books and some of his Oz wildlife stories resonated. It was Henry Lawson who set me going with a short story His Country—After All, where an Australian in New Zealand smells the smoke of a fire made of gum leaves and gum twigs, and gets all nostalgic for home.

The catch: you can’t write smells, though Lawson gave it a good go. If you want to give a book an Australian flavour, you need the right words, from the right period. For the past decade, I have been nailing down Australian words, where they came from, and when, using the National Library’s Trove collection of digitised newspapers.

I started on this, thinking I might one day write some historical fiction, even though my day job has been writing straight-out history. I think it began with an idle thought about when the billy came into use. A search on (and note the wording!) fulltext:"quart pot" AND "tea" will show that the humble billy was a quart pot first of all. The billy was a Tasmanian coinage, I think.

With some distress, I traced the earliest use of “two bob” back to Charles Dickens, and what could be more Australian than “true blue”? Alas, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser mentioned in a filler in 1827 that the term was in use as early as 1737, in England. Struth, Bruce!

So what about that quintessentially Oz term, ‘larrikin’, which I define as calling “g’day” in foreign places? Well, ‘larrikin’ emerged without warning in Melbourne’s The Argus in 1870. We had paddocks and sheoaks before 1810, and sly grog by 1825, though it seems people didn’t shout drinks until the 1850s.

Squatters were around from 1825, but back then, they were shady characters, while until 1805, bushrangers weren’t even thieves, they were just bushmen. Being an Australian writer has its pitfalls!

My researches are online at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/early-language.htm