Last week I found myself saying “Fair Dinkum” in response to an outrageous statement I’d just listened to. The person who had uttered that statement didn’t bat an eyelid. “Fair Dinkum” is mentioned as often here as “what’s the craic?” is back in Ireland. I remember a Polish shop attendant once saying that to me and as I was struck by how funny it sounded. Australians are much more forgiving when I mangle their vernacular.
For those wondering what Fair Dinkum means, it really depends on the inflection you put at the end of the last syllable. This is sometimes difficult to discern, as Aussies tend to raise their voice at the end of every sentence, so that everything sounds like a question. This is a particular problem when asking for directions from a teenager. I was only here a week when I needed to find the train station and made the mistake of questioning a surly youngster. I got a reply, which sounded like “You go to the end of this road and turn left?” To which I rudely answered, “Well if I knew that I wouldn’t be asking you, would I”?
The most common usage of Fair Dinkum is to register surprise or to ask whether the speaker is serious. It has a childish quality however, which makes me think that John McEnroe would not have had the same dramatic influence on the tennis world if he had been Australian. Shouting, “You cannot be fair dinkum” at an umpire just doesn’t sound so scary.
Strewth is another word I find myself using with worrying regularity. A mild exclamation, it can be included in most sentences without insulting God or any of his family. It can be used for example to express disgust at a bad pint of beer and is more economical than its Irish cousin, “Jesus, Mary and St Joseph”.
Sport has its own language in many countries. I can’t quite bring myself to call a football field “a paddock” but I do now ask people who they barrack for rather than asking who they support. Carlton are my team and one of the ongoing debates in our stuttering season has been whether we should play Lachie Henderson upfront instead of my Irish hero, Setanta O’Hailpin. Last week I found myself sending a text to a fellow Carlton fan that read “You’ve been spruiking that drongo Henderson all year. He couldn’t hit a roo’s clacker from two feet away”. I had to wash my mouth out with salt afterwards.
Australian rules football is a basic catch and kick game that has been sullied in recent years by the introduction of hand passing. Like many fans I hanker for the old days, except in my case I didn’t actually experience them. I can be found screaming at a player in possession “Put it on the slipper” which is an exultation for him to kick the bloody thing.
But it is not only in pubs and sports grounds that Australian English differs from the rest of the Anglophone world. The business pages regularly tell of business people or politicians who have ‘rorted’ the system. It refers to the act of defrauding and can be used as a noun or verb. I rort, you rort, he rorts etc.
Many of these Australian specific words come from old English slant terms. Rort for example derives from ‘rorty’, a term that means having fun or being boisterous, which gives an indication of early Australian attitudes to crime.
The Americans of course have also taken old English and given it a new life. They talk of sheriffs and penitentiaries but we’ve seen enough Hollywood films to make these terms acceptable all over the world. Indeed, it seems that American English is now the default version of the old Anglo tongue. The recent riots in London, for example, started with a text that said, “The Feds are chasing me”.
Australian English, on the other hand, is much less prevalent in the wider world. The makers of “Neighbours” and “Home and Away” have an eye on International sales and are careful not to include too many local phrases.
We Irish of course were forced by our oppressors to speak their tongue, but being the good natured people we are, we handed English back in a better condition than we had received it.
Our original language was vivid and full of expression (we have 31 words for seaweed for example), which might explain why Irish people spend words like sailors while the English hoard them like misers.
I tried to explain to an Australian recently that the richness of the Irish language was a result of its complex grammar and tense structure. This includes the “modh coinníollach” which is the bane of Irish school days. This is basically a conditional or as my Australian friend put it, a wishful thinking tense. It also explains why Irish people say, “Would have, could have, should have” so much.
In July, I celebrated four years in this land of kangaroos and funny words. A lot has happened in that time. The world has lurched from financial crisis to financial crisis. I fell off my bike and cracked my head and danced with cancer and came out the other side. And most importantly, I got married and have a kid on the way.
But one thing hasn’t changed in those four years. I still have my Irish accent. I still struggle to pronounce words beginning with ‘th’ and I put the emphasis at the beginning of words and not at the end as many Australians do.
I don’t have red hair or twinkling green eyes like many of my countrymen. I don’t even have an Irish sounding name. So my accent is my only means of preserving my identity. I hope it stays that way and that’s fair dinkum. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to throw a few prawns on the Barbie and to tuck into a few stubbies that I have chilling in my eski.
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