There was a rabbit trapper’s camp amongst those trees; he had made a fire to boil his billy with gum leaves and twigs, and it was the scent of that fire which interested the exile’s nose, and brought a wave of memories with it.
‘Good day, mate!’ he shouted suddenly to the rabbit trapper,
and to the astonishment of his fellow passengers.
‘Good day, mate!’ The answer came back like an echo—it seemed
to him—from the past.
Suddenly, this declared ex-Australian, this total
never-again and former Australian wants to head back to Australia. Smell can do that, and so can the laugh of a kookaburra—for most Australians. The sight of gum trees in foreign climes works a sort of spell, and the red of
the country around Uluru may do it for us as well, but language is the Big One.
Hearing our own Oz words and Oz intonations in a foreign place always stops us
dead.
Sit in a crowd as I have done, in a pub in Riga; a wine
bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps; a hamburger joint in Siem Reap; a reindeer restaurant
in Bergen; a Greek café in Banff; a chippie in Glasgow; a tapas bar in Cuzco; Murphy’s
curry and Guinness house in San Francisco; high tea at Singapore’s Raffles
Hotel; a coffee shop at Heathrow; a tea shop in Kandy; or a bangers-and-mash
restaurant in Reykjavik. When you hear Australian tones (and trust me, you will),
project your voice and call out “G’day!” with a hint of a rising terminal, but
do it with your lips hardly moving, and your vowels as flat as a roadkill
goanna after a road train convoy has passed through.
It always works: sit silently, unblinking and
poker-faced, watching as Australian heads turn, urgently seeking their unseen
compatriot who may, perhaps, have news from back home. It also makes them home-sick. That’s the home we care
about, and that single “G’day!” reminds us all of where home is. It’s the place
where they talk like us, but I have always wondered how we came to talk our
way, and by fossicking around, I know our national voice was alive, two
centuries ago.
Our society is divided…We have…first, the Sterling and
Currency, or English and Colonial born, the latter bearing also the name of
corn stalks (Indian corn), from the way in which they shoot up. This is the
first grand division.
—Peter Cunningham, Two Years In New South
Wales, third edition, vol 2, 1828, p. 108.
The names Currency
and Sterling, he said, were conferred
by ‘…a facetious paymaster of the 73rd regiment quartered here—the pound
currency being at that time inferior
to the pound sterling.’ By 1827, Cunningham had sailed to Australia four times
as a surgeon, supervising convicts, and he clearly felt he was an Australian by
then, writing of ‘our’ Currency lads and lasses.
Cunningham said currency and sterling each looked down
on the other. ‘The Currency lads’, he told us, was a popular standing toast, after
it was given by Major Goulburn at an Agricultural Society dinner, while ‘The
Currency lasses’ was a favourite colonial tune. These currency lads and lasses,
he said, were good workers, but they preferred taking up a trade, or going to
sea, rather than doing farm work, which he thought they saw as work fit only
for convicts. Currency lads and lasses made good servants on a wage of £10 to
£15 per annum.
He also noted that thieves’ slang terms (like plant and swag), along with Dharuk (Sydney Aboriginal) words like jirrand (afraid) might be heard in
currency slang. To others in Australian society, speech was a mark of class, but
words poured in from all over the world and these new Australians were already using
words like bandicoot, verandah and bungalow, all from India, and creek
and bush from North America. Various Aboriginal
languages gave us names of many plants and animals (like kangaroo, wombat, waratah and yabby) as well as bunyip,
woomera and waddy, cooee and yakka.
In time, the Australian language would unite us, but
that came later, once new words and phrases were coined and adopted. What
united all Australians for most of the 19th century was either their
experience of a long sea voyage to Australia, or the family tales of that
voyage. In 112 years, less time than it took for the “Hundred Years’ War”
(which lasted for 116 years!), Australia went from a peaceful and settled land,
sustainably managed under independent land-holders, to an unsustainable but
united continent-nation with its own ways, myths and legends.
Some Australian habits, practices, terms and assumptions
were imported from Europe, some came from America, a few were acquired from the
original inhabitants, and some were invented from scratch. Many of them we
cannot explain with any certainty, but others are more explicable. Take just
two verses of a song, familiar to and understood by all Australians, where the
words in bold would be confusing to most other speakers of English:
Once a jolly swagman camped
by a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolabah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,
Who’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with
me.
Down came a jumbuck to drink
at that billabong
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee,
And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker bag,
You’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me.
Those bolded terms had all entered the Australian language before 1901, and
they all reflect an Australian way of thinking, our own way of life.
So had many other expressions like dunny*, ironbark,
stringybark, sheoak, budgerigar, kookaburra, chooks, numbat, goanna, redback,
galah, waler, squatter, fossick, bludger, bingie, kangaroos in the top paddock,
bushranger, digger, mate, bowyangs, larrikin, wowser, jackeroo, gunyah, fair
dinkum, spruik, coolamon, cooee, damper, lamington, shout, sly grog and
willy-willy—to list just a few.
* I just ran a check, and dunny wasn't there, but it is now:
dunny: 1942
South Western Times
(Bunbury, WA), 30 July 1942, 7. This appears to be the earliest newspaper use
of the d-word
I actually had to take a different brand of cigarette than
the sort I've been smoking since Dad caught me lighting up the first attempt
behind the “dunny.”
dunny: 1956
The Argus, 14 July 1956,
12. This is a savage book review. The book was not for an Oz audience…
In “Not to Mention the Kangaroos” we find Australian characters,
who have escaped the penetrating vision of Steele Rudd, Tom Collins, Henry
Lawson, and Edward Dyson, to inflict themselves, per favor of Mrs. Corben, on
the unenlightened readers of today … In the suburbs, the backward people are
still in transports of delight over the installation of flush toilets in their
houses. One young wife speaking to Mrs. Corben refers airily to the “dunny cart man,” who, according to Mrs.
Corben's informant, was, until quite recently, a familiar sight in the streets
and streets of “clapboard” houses of suburbia.
dunny: 1969
Noosa News (Qld), 8
August 1969, 2. Letter to the editor.
Words, excuses and promises do not conceal non-existent
results. We have also to put up with a dusty, boggy car park with a promise of “We
have a plan for it”. Visitors, both rural and interstate, have been horrified
when they have utilized the change sheds, the outside shower and the smelly dunny cans so mis-named ‘Toilets’.
dunny: 1974
The Canberra Times,
10 July 1974, 2. The dunny is still a rara
avis in print.
Speaking of toilets, another such regional word is “dumpty” which
was the standard word for toilet, dunny,
etc in the colleges of the University of Melbourne when I lived in Ormond, but which
I've not encountered anywhere else.
***
In mid-2023, I heard a Cooee! near Salzburg in Austria, but lately many old and special words have been slipping away, Still, even as they disappear, the attitude that underlies them remains. Australian custom was made in a very short time, and it lives on, mutating as long as it lives, and as long as I live, I will be observing and annotating it. For example: The term New Australians has three distinct meanings!
A friend (Losang Zopa) wondered why I was not doing “I’m as dry as a dead dingo’s donger”. The answer is that Barry Humphries' lovely coinages are professional, and in slang, I prefer the amateur game. (The line that she quoted came from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie).
So I'm not sulking, just reading 19th century prose...and I am on a break, starting at Easter.
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