Aussie-isms

Like Americans, Aussies have their own expressions and local vernacular to which we've slowly grown accustomed. Some expressions are pretty common and others we hear less often, but at least now we have some Aussie friends to ask when we hear something we don't understand. Early on, it was pretty comical. We have an Australian-American dictionary aboard...really! It helps and it's fun to read, but when you couple the accent with the different expressions, you can really get mixed up. Here's an example of a conversation David had with a local fellow in a Bundaberg fishing tackle shop shortly after we arrived in Australia. David was asking specifically about fishing rules and regulations.

Tom: If you're fishing mundi, you gotta throw 'em back.

David: If you're fishing Monday, you gotta throw back what you caught?

Tom: Yup

David: That's a strange rule. Why do you have to do that?

Tom: Ever since the flood, there haven't been as many of them.

David: Mondays???

Tom: Yup

Translation of what Tom said: If you're fishing for mundi (that's slang for barrimundi, a type of local fish), you have to catch and release. It took awhile to figure this one out.

I had a similar experience when someone asked me if I'd ever seen a goanna.

Marcie: An iguana? Oh, sure, we've seen lots of them. In Ecuador and the Galapagos..., blah, blah, blah.” I droned on and on about about our iguana encounters.

Jim: No, goanna.

Marcie: That's what I said, iguanas. We've seen lots of them.

Jim: No, goanna. I said goanna.

Finally...a light went on.

Marcie: Are goannas and iguanas different?

Jim: I guess so, I've never seen an iguana.

You can see how this can get very complicated, very quickly.

We had local friends on the boat for dinner the other night and Wendy was talking about a frustrating time she'd just had with something. “I nearly spit the dummy”, she said. Hold on a minute...”spit the dummy”? She laughed as she explained that “dummy” is the Aussie word for a baby's pacifier and the expression “spit the dummy” means to become enraged expressing your frustration. New one on us.

We'd certainly heard “fair dinkum” in the past, but weren't exactly sure what it meant until John explained it meant fair, honest or believable. And then, of course, we all know “you'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me”. I was sure this was about dancing with your best girl, Mattie. Mongo wrongo! It's about being a vagabond, an itinerant out on the road (a swagman) and what happens if you steal someone's sheep.

Aussies have a penchant for shortening words. Breakfast is brekkie and afternoon is arvo. Tasmania is Tassie and Brisbane is Brissie. Registration is shortened to rego (redge-o) and a mozzie is a mosquito. Sometimes we need a translation, but usually we can figure it out from the context.

Then there's “strine”. It's what happens when Australian is spoken fast and slurred so that one word blends into the next OR it's what you get when you say “australian” with a broad, but clipped Australian accent. The accent almost overtakes the language. They say if you've listened to Steve Irwin, “the Crocodile Hunter”, speak, you've had a taste of strine. Here's some info copped from Wikipedia.

“It (Strine) was the subject of humorous columns published in the Sydney Morning Herald from the mid- 1960s. Alastair Morrison, under the Strine pseudonym of Afferbeck Lauder (a syncope for "Alphabetical Order"), wrote a song "With Air Chew" ("Without You") in 1965 followed by a series of books. An example from one of the books: 'Eye-level arch play devoisters ...' ("I'll have a large plate of oysters").” Go ahead. Say the words out loud. You'll be “strine-ing”.

Someone called David a cobber the other morning. He wasn't sure whether to be offended or not. We asked our friend Marcia if the fellow was being rude or friendly. We figured it couldn't be too bad because that's what Marcia calls her dog. But you never know. Seems cobber is another word for “mate”...as in G'day, mate.

Australian movies and books

While in Australia, we've been trying to watch movies and read books which enhance our understanding of the country, its history and its people. Without a doubt, the book we've found most fascinating and descriptive of Australia's founding history is The Fatal Shores by Robert Hughes. It is a painstakingly grim and accurate account of the the UK's settlement of Australia as a penal colony. We read the book before traveling to Tasmania's west coast and visiting Macquarie Harbour and the infamous Sarah Island. The squalor and execrable living conditions of the convicts were almost palpable as we walked around the island and vividly remembered its deplorable history. When we visited Strahan, the only town in the Macquarie Harbour area, we also saw the play The Ship That Never Was, a comedy (hard to believe considering the subject matter) based on fact about a group of convicts that escaped on a non-commissioned ship they were responsible for building. In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson is a light-hearted look at Australia from a travel writer's point of view. Bryon's previous book, Lost Continent, based on his travels through small town America whet our appetite for his humorous exploits in Oz...from cities to the bush to the Outback.

There are lots more Australian movies beyond Crocodile Dundee. We've recently watched the film, Van Diemen's Land, the true story of Alexander Pearce, aka the cannibal convict, who escaped with seven other convicts from the infamous Sarah Island. The group found themselves lost and unable to cope with the savage harshness of the Tasmanian bush. The film is brutal, but reckons to be a fairly accurate account of what may have happened as the men struggled to survive starvation and the wilderness.

We've watched The Rabbit Proof Fence aka Long Walk Home several times. It is the poignant, true story of three young aboriginal girls who were plucked from their family home by the government in 1931 and placed in a native settlement camp. The girls escaped and began a 1500 mile trek across the Outback back to their home village with a tracker close on their heels.

On the lighter side, The Castle is an Australian classic in which a working-class family's home is to be taken by eminent domain in the name of progress and the expansion of the Melbourne Airport. Filmed in 11 days on a budget of less than $20K, this film was evidently not widely distributed outside of Australia and New Zealand, but was quite the hit down under. You'd be hard pressed to find an Aussie or a Kiwi that hasn't seen it.

We just watched Kenny the other night on loan from a friend. It, too, is a comedy … off the wall. A fellow who installs and services port-a-loos at public events narrates his escapades in the business. Irreverent Aussie humor is evident and we really needed to concentrate on the dialogue to understand what he was saying. Beyond the accent, the vocabulary itself sometime required an Aussie dictionary. Yes, we have one!

As an FYI, there have been quite a few actors/actresses from Australia that we never realized were Aussies like swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, for instance, who was born in Hobart, Tasmania! There's a long list that you'll recognize like Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Dame Judith Anderson and Geoffrey Rush. It's the novelists and writers that surprised me even more like Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (inspiration for Schindler's List), Paul Brickhill, The Great Escape, Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman and little did I know, Pamela Lyndon Travers' Mary Poppins.