What Kid’s Say!

Name: HARRIET

Age: 6

What is a holiday?

It’s where you go somewhere else.

What’s your favourite game to play?

Snakes and ladders.

What’s your favourite thing to do at school? Colouring in.

What’s your least favourite thing about school?

When I have a different teacher.

Where do fish swim to?

The ocean.

What are you best at?

Colouring in.

One young fellow was so taken aback by the sight of a female entering such a male-dominated area, that he struggled for the right words, and finally shouted the warning: “Swans on the lake!”

That story set the tone for the Oral History group when we looked at the words and phrases our parents used, which are now mostly forgotten.

Language doesn’t stand still and, as civilisations grow and expand, so does the language we speak.

Australia’s language is rich in a slang that reflects experiences from the country’s history by borrowing from Aboriginal languages, through convict sources, gold rushes and bushranging to the World Wars.

We also rather enjoy abbreviating and altering word endings like “barbie, “arvo”, “cossie” and “blowie” to name a few.

We like to call a tall man “shortie” and a redhead “blue”.

From the wars came words like cobber, digger, dinkum, dag, galah and drongo.

When I was a small child. I used to watch, with excited anticipation, a neighbour who said: “Strike me pink!” But, to my disappointment, he never did change colour at all!

Because many in our group grew up in rural areas, it seems only natural that the slang they remembered was closely linked to the bush. Our wildlife figured largely.

“Stone the crows”, “Starve the lizards” and “Flatten the magpies” were all expressions of amazement.

“A few roos short of a paddock” was a rather unkind way of describing a slow person.

Someone came up with, “flat out like a lizard drinking,” which, we decided, meant working very hard because we were emulating the rapid flicking of the lizard’s tongue.

“I’ve knocked around the backcountry a good deal,” said Tim, “and have seen some of it pretty dry.

There were lots of ways to describe it,” he went on, and gave us a sample, which I have left somewhat to the readers’ imagination.

“As dry as a dead dingo’s ….”

John had a more refined version: “So dry that even the bandicoots take a cut lunch”.

“There are expressions that I have never heard before,” said John C. who came to Australia from England in the 1960s. “Australia has developed its own vernacular.”

“Your blood is worth bottling” and “You’ve got Buckleys” were two which were new to him.

There is some disagreement about where “Buckley’s chance” came from.

Some think it refers to the convict who escaped and lived for years with the aborigines before being captured, and others that it is a reference to Buckley’s Department store in Melbourne.

“If you can’t find it at Buckley’s, you won’t find it anywhere!”

Russel, as usual, had a fund of stories.

“My father used to say about someone who valued himself highly: “If I could buy him at my price and sell him at his, I’d make a fortune!”

“Game as Ned Kelly” would not be said by anyone who was not Australian and “Fair Dinkum” is thought to have originated on the goldfields when the Chinese workers used “ding kum” to confirm an honest deal.

Glenna told us about her father who often said when asked where he was going: “I’m o to see a man about a dog” and her sisters would get very excited about the dog he was going to bring home.

Stuart’s mother was a little concerned about how he was doing at school and when she asked his teacher about his progress, he said: “Don’t worry, he’ll be there when the whips start cracking!”

Much of our slang was euphemistic, as Glenna pointed out.

It was frowned upon to use any language with a biblical connection and so we said “Go to blazes” when today we would quite cheerfully tell them to “Go to Hell!”

Today, when swear words are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination, the expletives of the past seem quaint.

“Gee, Crikey, Gosh, Sugar and Cobblers” appear old-fashioned, and indeed laughable. There were also wonderful sayings that applied to the city like “Shoot through like a Bondi Tram” or a scornful “He comes from beyond the Black Stump.”

Whether they came from the city or the bush, our turn of speech has an originality which belies the short period of our nationhood and we salute it.