Speaking Strine (Australian)
I've spent months on end in Australia and for the life of me I have yet to figure out what these blokes are talking about.
TULLAMORE, New South Wales – On my first trip to Australia, way back in 1989, I was on an international vacation that I’d somehow turned into a job interview.
As a suburban kid from know-nothing Syracuse, N.Y., the Land of Oz seemed a world away (actually, it was). It felt like just the right exotic place to begin my career as an itinerant adventure journalist.
For me, the real plus was that they spoke English there.
Well, sort of.
A 2012 study in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, found that the denizens Down Under consumed more marijuana than any other people on the planet – including the Jamaicans.
Well, that explains a lot about Aussie-speak. (Just reading that story made me wonder: Is it The Great Barrier Reefer? And, what, precisely, is a billabong? Actually, it’s a waterhole.)
In the Australian playful laid-back dialect, few things are taken seriously. Like the names of towns, for example. Communities aren’t merely called something simple, like Smith Town or River City.
Oh no, not on your life.
Instead, many geographic place names are cartoonish and often politically-incorrect, like Bong Bong, Boing Boing, Grong Grong and Tittybong. There’s Banana, Boyland, Butty Head, Broke (a home for the penniless,) Burpengary, Burrumbuttock and even Mount Buggery. (Haven’t a clue what they do there).
There’s Chinaman’s Knob, Chinkapook, Cock Wash and Come By Chance, not to mention Delicate Nobby, Diapur, Doo Town and Dunedoo.
How about Humpty Doo, Humpybong, Innaloo, Koolyanobbing, Eggs and Bacon Bay, Woolloomooloo and Woodie Woodie? (Seeing any trend here?)
And my faves Tom Ugly, Nowhere Else and The End of the World, which it certainly was to this Yank back in 1989.
Before I left the States, I’d sent a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the nation’s most-respected family-owned newspapers. The letter was pure whim, a long shot. I never expected anything to come of it, but mentioned to the editor, Max Prisk, (whose name and title I’d found in the trusted Editor and Publisher bible) that I would give him a ring when I arrived in-country.
When I dialed his office from my hotel pay phone, his secretary said something that almost floored me.
“Oh! You’re the American! He’s been expecting your call.”
As it turned out, Prisk wanted to meet me. I rushed out, bought a suit jacket shirt and tie from a Chinese merchandiser and showed up at his office the following day.
The newspaper had only had one American-born staffer in its history, Prisk said. The late Tony Horwitz went on to write several books, starting with “One for the Road: A Hitchhiker’s Outback,” work for the Wall Street Journal and win the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
I would have been a decidedly more-humble hire.
But Prisk was definitely interested. Horwitz was already long gone and he was ready to take a chance on another Yank. But there was more: He was thinking of having me write a Metro column from an American’s point of view, you know, pointing out such linguistic differences as the fact that we called it a sidewalk and they called it a footpath; we said windshield and they said windscreen.
I kid you not.
I sat there listening, sensing that I might be in a bit over my head. After all, I wasn’t quite sure about my own point of view at that age, let alone being able to speak for my entire country.
But no matter; Prisk hustled me off on my way and told me to call him when I’d acquired an Australian work visa.
I never went to Oz as a journo back then: When I finally reached Prisk a few months later, he said the paper had been purchased by a conglomerate (Nope, not Rupert, but close -- Fairfax Media). He announced that he himself was leaving and he didn’t think it was a good idea for me to come either.
Still, the trip to Oz, listening to all those blokes and their clipped accents, had left me a bit tongue-tied. When I got home, to demonstrate the cadence of the tongue, I’d often ask people to decipher a phrase I’d written on a piece of paper:
“R U natv strine?”
Translation: “Are you a native Australian?”
Some bearded bloke in a dusty roadside pub in Far North Queensland told me that his countrymen’s clipped manner of speaking came from time spent in the Outback, where you were advised not to open your mouth too wide for fear of capturing a few flies. (This, I seriously doubted.)
But where does this lyrical tongue find its roots? Where precisely did “strine” come from?
Well, part of the answer is that it’s a language forged from behind bars – from back in 1788 when the British government established a convict settlement in Sydney Cove.
Many of these working-class arrivals were pickpockets, thieves and murderers who might have spent the rest of their lives in prison if not for this new penal colony. Once ashore, they took the pomp of the Queen’s English and gave it a decidedly-convict twist.
They adlibbed, made it more conversational. They twisted meanings of conventional words and made up their own. Throw in a bit if Irish inappropriateness and the mystical sounds of the native tongue, the colorful Aboriginal language, and you’re off to a good start.
Which leads us to the roots of perhaps Australia’s best-known word: kangaroo.
As the story goes, British sea captain James Cook and his men were flabbergasted by the sight of the bounding animals and asked the people of the Guugu Yimidhirr tribe of North Queensland what they were called.
Cook wrote the answer in his diary and – voila! – a spritely new word was added to the English language. But years later, the true nature of the Aboriginals’ response became apparent. Apparently, in their tongue, kangaroo meant “I don’t know,” or worse, something very rude.
The cultural exchanges got even muddier from there.
Over the years, I have passed through Australia as a journalist, but never spent much professional time there.
Until now.
I’m here on a long-term project and am once again tuning into the wonders of Oz-speak. You have to love a language where the term for a busybody comes from an anteater; hence, a nosey person is a sticky beak.
The glorious Australian glossary is just getting started with the phrases Americans know so well, such as “G’Day mate!” “Sheila,” “Shrimp on the Barbie,” “Fair Dinkum” and “No worries.”
The Aussies are able to laugh at themselves. Noting escapes their razor wit. As one story goes, for example, the city of Melbourne was almost named Batmania after forefather John Batman, who selected the city site in 1835.
In Oz, everything is reduced to the diminutive. Breakfast is brekkie. Bricklayers are brickies, a cigarette is a ciggie, lipstick is lippie, a politician is a pollie and children are kiddiewinks. The language is as colorful as the nation’s currency, which comes in hues of yellow and orange.
It’s not goodbye, but “check ya!” If you’re good-looking, you’re a “spunk.” A toilet is a “thunderbox.”
Your nose is your “beak,” your mouth your “laughing gear,” your teeth are “ivories” and your beard is “face fungus.”
An idiot is a “bloody drongo, boofhead or great galah.” Want to tell a mate to get lost? It’s “Get a big black dog up ya!” Things that aren’t quite right are “squiffy” and “wonky.” Toilet paper is called “poo tickets.” And a very hot day is known as a “stinker.”
Want someone to hurry up? Tell them to “Rattle your dags!”
And my favorite: fast food is the old chew’n’spew.” (This means you, McDonalds.)
Much of this, of course, is beyond me because often I can barely understand what my hosts are saying.
But slowly, I am getting the hang of it.
Just this morning, I was entertaining my host Michael Karaitiana’s two granddaughters, aged seven and six, challenging them to spell words.
I asked the elder Bella, a lovely young girl with long hair and freckles, to tackle the word “summer.”
She did fine until the end, sussing it out phonetically in her mind, until she replaced the “er” with an “ah.”
I thought about it.
Of course! Summah!
She’d nailed it.
I just have to keep reminding myself that June in Oz is wintah, not summah.
Check ya!