Australianisms

Now that I have lived in Sydney for a little while, I have naturally started to notice Australianisms. It’s the subtle ones that I find most interesting. Australians are well aware that things about the way they speak are particularly Australian, and there are plenty of books available on Australian slang. Many are now just corny cliches – I’m not sure if anybody still seriously refers to their mates as “cobber”. I imagine that most Australians who speak of putting “snags on the barbie this arvo” knows that this is Australian. I was not sure if I needed to explain that it means “sausages on the barbecue this afternoon”, but since my spell checker wanted to capitalize barbie, presumably in the belief that I was referring to a plastic doll, I thought perhaps I should.

I am more interested in the kind of Australianisms that a reasonably well-educated person would use when speaking more or less formally and perhaps not realize that an English (or for that matter Scots, American or what have you) English-speaker would find the expression odd, and perhaps detect that the speaker was Australian. As an example from elsewhere, I noticed in Ireland how the word “avail” was used in an extremely un-English way. For a start, the Irish say “avail” quite commonly, where in English English it is relatively rare, and rather more formal than Irish usage. What grated on my sensitivities when I first heard it, until I realized that it simply is the normal Irish way of speaking English, is that they do not use it reflexively. So where the English person might be judged to be pompous, but correct, to say “I availed myself of the opportunity to enter the dwelling”, an Irish grocer might put up a notice saying “Just collect coupons to avail of our half-price offer”. To see “to avail yourself of” in that context would be a surprise.

Inevitably I have now forgotten most of the subtle Australianisms that I have noticed until now, so this post is an opportunity to collect them over time. So far I have these:

• Trifecta – something like a hat-trick. Scarcely known in English English (well I, at least, had never heard it before) but not at all uncommon here.
• Identity – used in a context where English English might say “figure”: one hears, for instance of “underworld identity Bruce Smith” rather than ” underworld figure Bruce Smith”.
• Bash – whereas I would think of this as a somewhat colloquial word for a blow or series of blows, as when one bashes a nail into the woodwork, or even bashes somebody in the eye, in Australian English a bashing is used quite formally (again, I’m thinking of television news, for instance) to refer to somebody being mugged, beaten up or seriously assaulted. In the 19th century the word was sometimes used for a flogging – perhaps that is the origin of this usage?

And I know that I’ve noticed more, but what were they?