by Melvyn Bragg
It was not until 1788 that English really planted itself on the continent with the arrival of seven hundred twenty-three convicts who were to found a penal colony: without question the most significant, fertile and successful penal colony the world has ever known. The convict ship made for Botany Bay but a parching summer had turned Cook’s primal lush landscape inhospitable. It sailed north and landed at Port Jackson, now Sydney Harbour.
The contact with the local language can be illustrated most directly in two ways. First the naming of the kangaroo. At Port Jackson it appears that the strange creature which beguiled the Brits was called “patagorong.” Or was it? For, seemingly, there were about two hundred fifty native languages, many of which were not mutually understandable. It is possible that there were two hundred fifty words for kangaroo. It is also possible that there never was the word “kangaroo” at all: that kangaroo was the reply given when one of Cook’s crew pointed to this peculiar creature and enquired what it was: “I don’t understand what you’re asking,” said his Aboriginal informant and that sentence roughly translates as “kangaroo.” Wherever it came from, it stuck. These settlers were there under duress and they needed to get their bearings fast. They plundered whatever in the native language helped their furious purpose.
The first cluster of English borrowings came from the Dharuk language spoken around Port Jackson. Words such as “boomerang,” “dingo,” “koala,” “wallaby,” “wallaroo” and “wombat.” One exceptionally happy borrowing was “cooee,” a call word used by the Aborigines to summon one another from a distance. For decades to come “cooee,” the call of the harsh Australian bush, would be the chaste mating call of the English-speaking world, the affectionate signal used in childhood games, the call across the garden fence, the word from the wild that summoned the faithful in domesticated suburbia. There was also an owl known as a “boobook”; a tree, the “waratah,” which has become the emblem of New South Wales; “warrigal,” another name for “dingo”; and “woomera,” a throwing stick. From other languages came “budgerigar”; “barramundi,” a great perch; and “kylie,” another word for boomerang. The experience parallels that of America quite closely. The English held tight to their language — were very resistant to native tongues — but under pressure from the new and the strange they would steal. Not unlike the fifth-century Frisians and the native Celts.
Again, as in America, words from English were grimly applied to local species: “magpie” and “apples” are examples here. And the English took their place names with them. North of Sydney, to take just one example, is Newcastle and near Newcastle there are a number of place names from the district around Newcastle-on-Tyne in Northumbria.
It was not until about a century after the first British had settled that the word “Aboriginal” came into use. At first those found living in the new continent were called Native Australians. “Australian” derives from the Latin adjective for “southern.” “Aboriginal” is a Latin term meaning “from the beginning”: the Romans used it to name the peoples they displaced. As the word “Aboriginal” came into use for the natives, so the word “Australian” was appropriated by the settlers.
Language borrowing worked both ways. The Aboriginals had never seen horses: in some of their languages they called them “yarraman,” which most likely comes from teeth.
The Aboriginals also developed pidgins of English, some of which were sucked back into the new tongue. “Jumbuck,” for that curious newcomer the sheep, is widely used in Australia. It could be a corruption of “jump up” or, less likely, I think, it could come from “jombok,” which means a big white fluffy cloud. “Walkabout” has gone from the outback to every city street and city square in the English-speaking world.
Dr. Kate Burridge of La Trobe University in Melbourne has pointed out the diversity and subtleties in Australian creole. It is, she says, strikingly different from Standard English, and again perhaps surprisingly for those who equate creole with simple it can be much more complex than Standard Australian English or English English. She gives a telling example:
Take the pronoun system. Standard English has just one form “we,” so that if I said to you “We’re going now,” you don’t know whether you’re included in that “we” or who’s exactly included in that “we.” In Australian Creole they have four different “we”s. There’s a form for “you and me” — the two of us; there’s a form for “me and somebody else excluding you”; there’s a form for “you and me and a whole heap of others” and there’s a form for “me and a whole heap of others excluding you.” Much finer distinctions.
About a hundred fifty thousand prisoners were taken halfway around the world in the eighty years of transportation — interestingly about the same number as is estimated for the Frisian settlers and invaders in fifth-century England. There is evidence that in many cases the offences of these convicts were light — sometimes scarcely enough to warrant even an appearance in court today. Many would now be dealt with by a few days’ community work. There are claims that those transported were given adequate medical attention because they would need to be fit at the other end. There were formidable individuals there, as Robert Hughes tells us in The Fatal Shore.
But sympathy was very short two hundred years ago. Punishment was the vengeance of the Lord and pity had no place. In his book, Hughes serves up a ballad from 1790 which celebrates the departure of “thieves, robbers and villains” to Botany Bay. The verses include:
Some men say they have talents and trade to get bread,
Yet they sponge on mankind to be clothed and fed,
They’ll spend all they get, and turn night into day —
Now I’d have all such sots sent to Botany Bay.
There’s gay powder’d coxcombs and proud dressing fops,
Who with very small fortunes set up in great shops.
They’ll run into debt with designs ne’er to pay,
They should all be transported to Botany Bay.
You lecherous whore-masters who practice vile arts,
To ruin young virgins and break parents’ hearts,
Or from the fond husband the wife lead astray —
Let such debauch’d stallions be sent to the Bay.
Little wonder the Australians still love beating the Brits in sporting battles.
As elsewhere, some English dialect words travelled well. Those who came to Australia, just as those who went west, were largely from classes to whom a dialect was standard. Sometimes dialect words which have since withered on the English tongue struck deep abroad. “Dinkum,” for instance, is a word for “work” from Midlands dialects and “fair dinkum” meant a fair day’s work — hence “fair play.” “Cobber,” meaning friend or mate, seems to come from the English dialect word “cob,” meaning to take a liking to. The comradely use of “digger” travelled to Australia’s goldfields from England’s farmlands.
And the criminals brought their own slang: “flash,” it was known as, or “kiddy talk”; “kiddy” coming from “to kid” — to steal, to fool.
Criminal words slotted in with remarkable ease, and time has laundered them impeccably. “Chum” began life in an Oxford college, someone sharing an apartment, and was taken over as a fellow prisoner; “swag,” the bag of loot, developed into “swagman,” a tramp carrying all his worldly goods in a bundle. There’s “bash,” “cadge” and “croak” (meaning to die), “dollop,” “grub” (food), “job” (robbery), “judy” (woman), “mug” (face), “pigs” (police), “to queer” (to spoil), “seedy,” “snooze,” “stink” (trouble), “swell” (gent), “whack” (share) and “yoke.” There’s “beak” (magistrate), “lark” (prank), “split” (betray), “stow it” (keep quiet) — all these are as common in Australian as in Oliver Twist and some of them in Shakespeare’s Southwark.
There are less familiar words. If you were “unthimbled” your watch had been stolen, police runners were called “traps,” a thief was a “prig,” to be “lagged for your wind” meant
being transported for life, and if that sentence knocked the wind out of you, you were a “bellowser.” The voyage itself was being “marinated” or “piked across the pond.” To be shackled to another prisoner was to be “married.” Convict speech such as this was recorded by James Hardy Vaux in 1812. He is said to have written it down in the breaks in his hard labour.
It would have been miraculous had the British not transported their class system to Australia, but the circumstances both streamlined and hardened it. There were the prisoners and their descendants, those born in Australia, known as “currency,” and the British who were “pure sterling.” The former developed a local dialect, the latter held hard to the standard of London English. If you wanted to climb the ladder of society then it was no different from England at that time, though the gap might have seemed wider — you had to adopt Establishment English. And to say “caning,” meaning a hundred lashes, “smiggins” for a prison soup thickened with barley, “scrubby brushes” for bad bread, or “sandstone” for a man who flaked from a flogging would be a certain giveaway.
There was also the word “bloody.” It has a long and interesting history in the literature of war, of words, of violence, of blasphemy and of outright cursing. It was a favourite word among the convicts, unsurprisingly, and it became widely used in Australia. One traveller noted that he heard an Australian use “the disgusting word” twenty-seven times in a quarter of an hour, and this enterprising observer went on to calculate that it would add up to about eighteen million two hundred thousand uses in fifty years. He added that he thought the said Australian was quite capable of reaching the target. The first verse of John O’Grady’s poem “The Integrated Adjective” illustrates this.
I was down on Riverina, knockin’ round the towns a bit,
An’ occasionally restin’, with a schooner in me mitt;
An’ on one o’ these occasions, when the bar was pretty full
An’ the local blokes were arguin’ assorted kinds o’ bull,
I heard a conversation, most peculiar in its way,
Because only in Australia would you hear a joker say:
“Where yer bloody been, yer drongo? ’Aven’t seen yer fer a week;
An’ yer mate was lookin’ fer yer when ’e comes in from the Creek;
’E was lookin’ up at Ryan’s, an’ around at bloody Joe’s,
An’ even at the Royal where ’e bloody never goes.”
An’ the other bloke said “Seen ’im. Owed ’im ’alf a bloody quid,
Forgot to give ut back to ’im; but now I bloody did.
Coulda used the thing me-bloody-self; been orf the bloody booze,
Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos.”
As with many dialects, creoles, and non-standard versions of English, what is condemned by the establishment is often held on to with pride and affection in part because it is one in the eye for Proper Speakers. It is a language of Outsiders who are confident enough to set themselves up against the Insiders. It has the comfort of a clan, the edge of being subversive and the freedom of something apparently made up by and for the clannish group that uses it.
The word “convict” was far more inflammatory than “bloody.” “Emancipist,” “government men,” “legitimate,” “exile,” “empire builder” — that is what they wanted to be called.
As the nineteenth century marched on, Australia began a love affair with its new accent and with its ability to invent vivid slang. In 1880, the Bulletin or the Bushman’s Bible began weekly publication in Sydney and it delighted in “fair dinkum,” “larrikin,” “bonzer,” “bloody,” “offsider,” “fair cow,” “battler” and “bludger.” Phrase-making was a speciality: “better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick” or “as miserable as a bandicoot on a burnt ridge.” This was a people finding its identity in the most essential and enjoyable way — through words which started with them and belonged first to them. The Bushman’s Bible also went in for poetry, and one poem became Australia’s national anthem, a treasure chest of Australianisms: “Waltzing Matilda.”
It was written out on a sheep station. (It is said that “station” was used because the city-bred convicts had little idea of the countryside so they adopted the military words “station” for “farm,” and “muster” or “mob” for “a flock of sheep.”) Banjo Patterson was the author of this song, in 1895, a song which, I can testify, was sung as lustily in the primary schoolrooms of northern England in the 1940s as ever it was down under — which had by then drawn so many northern British to its shores.
In case you did not enjoy such primary school benefits, it begins:
Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda,
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Down came a jumbuck to dri-ink at that billabong,
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee.
And he sang as he stuffed that jumbuck in his tucker bag,
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Simple as it sings, it is not instantly comprehensible to those unacquainted with late-nineteenth-century outback Australian slang. This, I guess, is partly the point, the clannishness again, the proof of propriety over a new language. The swagman is a drifter. The billabong is a pool and he is shaded by the Coolibah tree, a kind of eucalyptus. The billy can is clear enough. Jumbuck is a sheep; tucker bag is again quite clear but, like the billy can, given an Australian spin. Waltzing Matilda means to hit the road. Matilda was slang for a bedroll, so the swagman is singing about moving on, quickly, presumably. But not quickly enough. He is pursued by a squatter — the farmer who had once squatted on the land to claim it — and the mounted police.
Up rode the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred,
Down came the troopers, one, two, three.
“Who’s that jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker bag?
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”
Up jumped the swagman and sprang into that billabong.
“You’ll never take me alive,” said he.
And his ghost may be heard as you pa-ass by that billabong,
“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”
At school we were always instructed to sing that last line very softly.
It is a rich song for Australia. It is fascinating that the word “squatter,” descriptive of such a degraded condition in England, should have become the name for a wealthy landowner. Sheep stealing was the prime and ancient British capital crime against property, the last resort of the starving, often the talent of the skilled poacher. It rings down English history and to find as it were its last strike in Australia is apposite. And its resounding and defiant ending is equally apposite. It turns the black crime of sheep stealing into something near-heroic, an act of independence against authority, even worth dying for. And the slang gives it a wonderful camouflage as the uninitiated sing along (as we did) imagining a Matilda waltzing away around the billabong.
The pleasure that Australians take in their language is unabated. In 1965, a book was published which celebrated Australian and its pronunciation: Let Stalk Strine, by Afferbeck Lauder. It included “gonnie” (meaning “do you have?” as in “Gonnie apples?”), “harps” (half past two becomes “harps two”), “baked” and “necks,” “emma necks,” “scremblex” — breakfast foods.
“Cossie” is a swimming costume, “pokies” are slot machines, a “drongo” is a stupid person, a “no-hoper” and a “gutless wonder” are perfectly clear, a “chine” is a mate. Someone highly esteemed has “blood worth bottling.” Money, as everywhere, breeds a progeny — “splosh,” “spondulicks,” “
boodle”; drunk is never far behind — “spifflicated,” “rotten,” “full as a boot”; farting is “shooting a fairy.” A “pom” is an Englishman, generally despised but somehow, in my experience and that of many I know, still admitted as a relation; distant.
Yet these typically Australian words were only taken up with tongs by the establishment very recently. It is not until the 1970s that the real street and bush language of Australians, the language that is Australian, finds its way into the dictionary.
The Macquarie Dictionary finally put the language between respected hard covers.
Bluey: originally a rolled blue blanket, hence the possessions of a bushman; an ironic nickname for a redhead; “hump the bluey” — to live the life of a swagman.
Bonzer: adj. + excellent, or as interjection, expression of joy.
Boof head: a large, stupid fellow, named after a character in a cartoon strip in the Sydney Daily Mirror, from 1941, and derived from “buffalo head.”
Daggy: dirty, slovenly; later uncool.
Dob: to kick accurately, as in football “he’s dobbed another goal”; “dob in” — to betray; “dob on” — to inform against.
Druthers: corruption of “I’d rather” = choice, preference, as in “if I had my druthers, I’d be in bed.”
Dunny: an outside toilet; used in phrases such as “all alone like a country dunny” = isolated (from 1960s); “bangs like a dunny door in a gale”; “couldn’t train a choko vine to grow up a dunny wall” = useless (the choko vine being a particularly durable Australian plant); the word is a shortening of “dunniken,” from the British dialect “danna” (excrement) and “ken” (house).
