Our lost language

08 Jul 2017

Laurie Webb, from the Taringa Probus Club, misses the unique Aussie slang she heard growing up. She penned this love letter to the forgotten dialect to help keep it alive.

Growing up as I did in a small country town in the 1950s, the type of language heard in everyday conversation was very different to what we hear today. A rich amalgam of idiomatic metaphors, inventive similes and rhyming slang, plus the appending of “o” or “ie” to the stem of every other noun (for example “arvo” and “brickie”), produced a version of spoken English that was uniquely Australian.

Up until the end of the 1950s, something was never simply good or great; it was grouse, bonzer, curl-a- moe, a bottler, a humdinger, a ripper, a corker or, at the very least, better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. A dubious character was a coot, a ratbag, a no-hoper, a mongrel, or worst of all, a bad egg.

Someone lacking in judgement but nevertheless deserving of sympathy would be affectionately described as a dill. However, a serial fool was unsympathetically dismissed as a boofhead, not the full quid, a nong, a drongo or silly as a two bob watch.

If you lived in the city you came from the big smoke, otherwise you could be from Bullamakanka, Woop-Woop, the back of Bourke or from that most obscure of all locations: beyond the black stump. Mrs Kerfoops was a common epithet for a woman whose name escaped you. And an inanimate object whose name you couldn’t bring to mind was either a thingamajig or a doover.

Sadly, these colourful slang expressions have now been consigned to the dustbin of Australian linguistic history. So too, the broad Australian accent of yesteryear, with its lazy elongated vowels and non-aspirate aitches, is now rarely heard in its purest form.

I was recently reminded of how much the Australian locution has changed when I received a telephone call from a first-year university student who had been co-opted by the university’s alumni association to help upgrade their database.  

He asked me what I am doing with my recently acquired degree and what my career goals are. I replied that I am retired, to which his response  was “cool man, that’s awesome”. This is a good example of the way the colourful Australian colloquialisms of yesteryear have, to a considerable degree, been subsumed by Americanisms. 

It seems that traditional Australian slang disappeared from common usage during a relatively short period commencing in the early 1960s. How did this happen? The most likely explanation seems to have been the introduction of TV into Australia.

The 1930s, ’40s and ’50s was the golden age of radio, or “wireless” as it was known then, and our Stromberg Carlson, Radiola, STC or Astor took pride of place in our living room. Families listened enthusiastically to Dad and Dave, The Lawsons, Blue Hills, Hagen’s Circus and Smokey Dawson; or, on a higher cultural plane, George Wallace and Roy Rene. 

The majority of radio programs had Australian content – Aussie characters with Aussie accents and a good measure of Aussie slang. Radio was heard in our homes all day and every day, its Australian-made programs an affirmation of the way we had always spoken. But all this was about to change. 

By the early 1960s television was lighting up many Australian homes and the radio sat silently in the corner, neglected and forgotten. Now Australian homes were filled with the American accents of Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, Dr Kildare, Route 66, Surfside Six, Hawaii Five-O and Leave It to Beaver.  

Our home entertainment changed dramatically, and with it our everyday language. Within one generation our uniquely Australian version of spoken English was discarded. These days the colourful Australian slang expressions from the first half of the 20th century, if heard at all, are considered anachronistic. To anyone under 30 they sound like a foreign language. Sad, really.