Hoons, Chooks and Pashing

There is a great chapter in every guide book which relates to language. My Australian one says that ‘Strine’ (a word used to describe Australian-English) “can sound like a profound Cockney intonation piped through the nose.” They certainly seem to elongate their vowels and substitute t's for d's much like the Cockney accent, but there are some words which just don’t compute, things that I have had to question and, in extreme cases, look up. Here are some of them. I’m sure there will be more.

arvo: afternoon. “I’ll see you in the arvo.” 
chook: chicken. Fast food places like Red Rooster will serve you a whole chook, and delicious it is too. It’s like a fast food version of Nando’s, if you can imagine such a thing. 
daggy: uncool, out of style. “I know it’s a bit daggy, but I collect antique chamber pots/play chess on my own/listen to James Morrison” etc.
dinkum: meaning honest or true. If you heard “is he fair dinkum?” that would mean “is he for real/is he serious?”
hoon: hooligan, generally reserved for shouting at young people on loud motorbikes.
ocker: an unsophisticated country type who is really, really Australian, to the point where you would probably have to squint a little to understand them. I’m not yet sure whether this term is used affectionately or as a bit of an insult.
pash: kissing, full on, with tongues and everything.
pokie: a slot machine, like a one-armed bandit. Some bigger bars seem to have entire rooms dedicated to these, not to mention large numbers of gamblers and their small change.
schooner: the largest beer glass in Queensland, which is the maximum amount that you can be served in a bar and is smaller than an English pint. The glass size below a schooner is called a ‘pot’.
servo: service station. This habit of abbreviating words is popular, which seems to add to the somewhat casual informality of the place. I wasn’t sure whether ‘servo’ was just one of those slang terms which becomes part of the vernacular but is not generally embraced outside of local communities, but thankfully I stand corrected. I have spotted road signs with ‘BP Servo’ written in big letters, which I find completely endearing.
sluggos: small swimming shorts, like Speedo’s. In February, opposition leader Tony Abbott was photographed in sluggos as he competed in a swimming competition (pictured above), causing many to criticise the politican for using the opportunity as a publicity stunt. That may be true, but I don’t think he looks all that bad in what is certainly a difficult look to carry, especially when you consider the David Cameron equivalent.
smoko: break time at work, which used to relate to a cigarette break but now seems to embrace all worktime restbites.
stickybeak: to take a look, as in to ‘stick your beak’ into something. A bank clerk said this while I was opening an account and trying to get my brain around all the different rates of interest and saver deals open to me, so throwing in a word like stickybeak certainly didn’t help.
stubby: a small bottle of beer, a larger bottle is called a ‘tallie’ and a can of beer is a ‘tinnie’.
stubby holder: a fabric or foam case to keep your stubby or tinnie cold, which is an essential outdoor item. The better novelty ones usually have comic, beer-related quips written on the side, things like “if it’s not at your local, then move house,” and so on.
Tim Tam: a chocolate biscuit, like the McVities Penguin bar. There is a really adventurous way to eat these with any hot beverage - simply bite off the corners of opposite ends and slurp your drink through a specially designed air pocket which runs through the chocolatey centre. And yes, people actually do this. It’s mucky business, and takes dunking to a whole new level.

But if you want to get your head around some of the country’s most famous linguistic luxuries, then simply consult their adopted national anthem, Waltzing Matilda, written by the bush poet Banjo Paterson in 1887. It’s full of such rich verse that, even today, it takes a little bit of decoding, particularly for an Englishman. For example, here are the opening lyrics:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolabah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled
“You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me”

Now, firstly you will need to know what a swag is in order to understand what a swagman would be doing with one. A swag is a waterproof bed, and a swagman was the name given to a traveller living hand to mouth and working from farm to farm. He’s camped by a billabong (a lake), under a coolabah tree (a eucalyptus tree, the like of which are found across Australia), waiting for his billy (a portable kettle) to boil, singing to himself about carrying his matilda (a bag containing all of his belongings).

Similar to the British national anthem, people will struggle to recite all of the verses to this popular folk song, but if you read it all, you'll notice that things don’t turn out too grand for our jolly swagman. He steals and eats a sheep, only for the farmer to alert the authorities and have him arrested, but before the police catch up to him, he commits suicide by drowning himself in the billabong. Paterson concludes his lyrics with the spirit of the swagman haunting the site: And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong, "You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me". Spooky.

I hadn’t realised until reading up on the history of British colonialism in Australia that, throughout the 80 years that they were sending convicts here (160,000 in total), different allocated states and islands were used to separate the various classes of criminal. The first ships would arrive from Portsmouth into New South Wales on 26 January 1788 (now the celebrated Australia Day) after a journey of eight months, which adds a little perspective on the 24 hour flight that it takes today. They docked in Sydney and, over time, the city would form the designated home for solely those charged with petty theft and embezzlement. For really violent sorts who were fond of escaping, these were sent to an island (of course) off the coast of Victoria, which was then called Van Dieman’s Land, named after Anton van Diemen, governor of the Dutch East Indies who sponsored Abel Tasman’s journey to the island in 1642, later to be rechristened Tasmania in his honour. As for the ‘worst kind of felons’ - those who were deemed so bad that any free settlers wishing to live near them were banned from doing so inside a 50 mile radius - well, where do you think they were sent? Yep. That would be Queensland.

What they would have found, of course, were acres of tropical wilderness, enriched soil for vegetation and fine grazing for livestock, and underfoot, an abundance of natural, profitable resources from coal to gold. Compared to the squalor of an overcast, over-populated Britain, you can’t help but feel that these were some of the luckiest prisoners in the world.

A booming economy was waiting to be exploited here, although life was by no means easy, and you wonder whether Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society (pictured) who came up with the whole penal colony idea in the first place, had really thought it through carefully enough. The temperatures during the summer months in Australia would prove far too hot for the prisoners to work, and being city folk, they had little experience on how to cultivate crops or work on the land. As a result, and despite such obvious potential, those first fledgling steps in their new habitat would result in famine and hardship. Then there was the small matter of the natives, but that’s a whole other story, and one that I promise to come back to.

So there seems to have developed a north/south divide along the east coast between Queenslanders and those from New South Wales, who consider some northern folk to be, well - and putting this in the nicest possible way - bonkers. Whether this links to its colonial history, who knows, or maybe its just something about the heat. I couldn’t possibly pass judgement on this, being as I’m yet to spend any time in New South Wales, so I mention all of this merely as an aside to the real story that I wanted to discuss, which concerns the locals at my farm here in Bundaberg. All of them perfectly pleasant, but a select few perhaps meeting this prescribed assumption.

Like Mavis, who on my first day introduces herself as ‘Billy’ - she prefers it, she tells me, which is absolutely fine, although everyone else still calls her Mavis, which certainly puts one at risk of huge social embarrassment. There is a young girl, perhaps a similar age to myself, who has outwardly refused to engage in any form of prolonged conversion, and seems idly happy to spend her lunch breaks staring into a wall. The teenagers, however, are all smiling workhorses and much better at the job than me, like Joel, who didn’t get on too well at school and left in Year 10. There’s a slightly wild eyed look about him, especially when he laughs and tells me “why should I go to school when I’ve got a PS3 at home and a 50 inch plasma screen?” A tough decision for any 16 year old, certainly.

The ever-charming Bill Bryson has looked into other reasons why Queenslanders are allegedly “madder than cut snakes” in his brilliant book, Down Under. “For almost two decades the state was under the control of Joh Bjelke-Peterson, an eccentric, right-wing state premier who at one time seriously entertained the notion of blowing up parts of the Great Barrier Reef with small atomic bombs to create shipping channels.” There are anecdotes denoting the ‘crazy’ behaviour of Queenslanders in most Australian books, like the one Bryson explains, about an American tourist asking for salad to go with his meat and potatoes while staying at a Queensland hotel. The waitress turns to the other guests in disgust and says, “this bastard thinks it’s Christmas.” “In a word,” he concludes, “Queensland has a reputation for being a place apart.”

Now I would like to stress at this point that I am in no way suggesting that these select Queenslanders are indicative of a whole state, and with an area as large as Queensland it would be completely absurdist to suggest so. But they certainly don’t act as an exception to the rule, and that’s all I’m saying.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Santo, Sam & Ed’s Cup Fever’ (SBS)

All of the World Cup games on SBS are preceded by this comedy show, recorded live from Melbourne in front of a studio audience. I’ve caught it a couple of times this week and it is funny, in places, like an extended version of the 2 Good, 2 Bad section at the end of ‘Match of the Day 2’.

Here, a deadpan trio of established comedians (Santo Cilauro, Sam Pang, Ed Kavalee) host a round up of the day’s results with an extended look over the more absurdist moments from the previous day’s games. This includes excerpts of convoluted commentary, officials falling over, plenty of references to the vuvuzelas and a regular gag like Take On My Nuts, featuring the ‘hilarious’ image of a wall of players protecting their groins. The boys are clutching at straws a bit here, so lets hope there is a contingency plan for when the tournament reaches the later stages and the gags, as well as the games, start to dry up.

Better are the pre-recorded skits, like the Socceroo player Mark Bresciano’s Cup Diary, which has the midfielder commenting more on what he had for lunch rather than his training (trust me, it's funnier than it sounds), and then when it stops being silly to talk to special guests, like Dutch legend John van 't Schip who featured on last night’s show. The hosts suddenly prove themselves as not only gag blowers but also, reassuringly, big fans of the game, which certainly helps.

The SBS coverage might not be the slick, revolving, multicoloured stat fest that something like Sky would be rolling out, or the come hither homeliness of the cuddly Beeb, but at least they’re showing all of the games live, even repeating full matches at more sociable hours, as well as putting together a more serious round up of highlights. So this show acts as a nice alternative look at a sport which, we were led to believe, the Australians don’t even particularly like.

But let’s not forget that I am writing all of this as a frustrated England fan, and given our goalless draw with Algeria was so painfully dull that, at one point, the director chose to instead focus on a bird which had rested on one of the goal nets, then perhaps laughter is the best and only medicine.