Listening to 'Strine

Today was the first really hot day we’ve had, and of course I decided to try walking back from North Sydney, where our classroom is, to my posh digs out here on the other side of the North Shore.  Luckily, I had stashed my shorts in my backpack as I set off for my 9 AM “co-taught” class, designated “UWP 198: Special Topics in Australian Culture,” and after changing after class had also stashed my heavy pile of in-class-writing journals back at the office of CAPA, our institutional partners here.  Even now, as the evening deepens, it is still over 30C (high 80sF) with the mugginess I associate with Europe or the East Coast in summer.  For the man whose Lakota Sioux name is “Sweats Brushing His Teeth,” let’s just say a soaking wet shirt was a feature as I made my sprightly way back along the bus route for awhile and then charged off through ‘burbs when I got tired of the traffic and noise.  One reason I’d walked was that I’d wanted to rattle the cage of the folks from the apartment rental place (located halfway between this place and my workplace), as I’d been asking via e-mail for a second set of keys since the day I moved in.  But no, maybe Tuesday, and of course “Ryan” was going to be on his holidays for two weeks, but “Georgia” might be able to help... 

I’d spent the morning listening to Wendy,  who’ll be teaching the first two Fridays of the quarter filling in for another CAPA-hired local lecturer Lorraine (who was double booked running some arts festival during her son’s school holidays)(If you get the idea that teaching these programs abroad means lots of improvising and fast footwork, you’d be right--and even this morning, when Wendy handed out the syllabus, I had a surprise, as suddenly the class was supposedly meeting from 9-12:30 and not from 9 to 12 as every other version of it had said)(I nixed the extra half hour, much to my students’ relief).  I’d enjoyably had coffee with Lorraine soon after I’d arrived here, and she’d assured me Wendy was super high energy in a super small package, and she was right.  Maybe something about teaching styles will be the focus of another post, but I thought since I’d had so much to listen to, so idiomatically (not to say ultra-coherently), that I’d do a bit of linguistic analysis, some of which I did on the fly for my students, most of whom were far too polite to realize they had no clue what was being said.

We learned during the lecture that Wendy had done her graduate work (in sociology? anthropology?) on toys and their meanings, and though the reading for today’s topic of “Australian Identity” centered on how the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games illustrated ways in which nations selectively exploit and distort their own myths, much of her presentation was a string of mini-raves and tangents sparked by student questions or by her own questions or by her long reactions to a minimal student answer.  It was all a bit like listening to a smart, articulate, hypercaffeinated but slightly dotty aunt for an hour and a half, and then after a 10-minute break, coming back, watching a couple of video clips (the beginning of the Opening Ceremonies, and a couple of QANTAS commercials) and listening some more.  Not much writing, not much co-teaching.  But hey.

We learned of the “cultural cringe” that characterizes a lingering sense of Antipodean inferiority or ambivalence, at the same time Australians take pride that “we punch above our weight” in sports and other areas; as part of a riff about the educational system we heard that “bluestone universities” were at the top tier, and that of course there were people at Uni with her who were “just bludging off the system,” but that she felt an obligation to give back, to not take for granted that she had actually been paid to be educated back before the fees and privatization had radically changed the educational landscape here as well. 

As she spoke I was struck by the “two nations separated by a common language” truism, and gave up trying to serve as interpreter for my wide-eyed students: how many of them would get the boxing analogy of a flyweight with a punch like a middleweight, much less the analogy between “bluestone universities” in Oz and the whole Oxbridge / redbrick / steelglass hierarchy that used to hold in the UK?  Her passing clarification, “you have your ‘Ivy League’ schools” was technically correct but inadequate, and I’m sure none of the UCD students had an idea that “bludging” meant cadging or clumsily borrowing or being lazy long before J.K. Rowling’s co-opted “Bludger” as a menacing ball in the wizarding sport of Quidditch. 

It went on, and on, and on, and only occasionally did I interject. When she talked about making fun of someone, “taking the mickey out of them,” I stopped her and asked my students what it meant--was it making fun of the Irish (the Micks) or perhaps Cockney rhyming slang for “taking the Mickey Bliss / piss” out of someone?  More fun with words, and the exact etymology as I said is open to debate.  As she talked about how sports-mad Australians were, especially this weekend which features the equivalent of the Super Bowl of Aussie-Rules footie and that of Rugby League, there would be people “barracking for Hawthorn, or barracking for Sydney,” I realized I’d better warn my little ducklings about a potentially embarrassing linguistic difference they probably weren’t aware of: they’d better not use the verb “root” in reference to following a sports team (recall “For it’s root, root root for the home team” sung in the seventh inning stretch at baseball games), since in Oz the verb is literally a four-letter word referring to, well, intercourse. (This is a family blog.)  Years ago one friend from Down Under had been travelling on Super Bowl Sunday and his Yank seatmate asked him, “Who are you rooting for?” to which my friend replied, “That’s a mighty personal question, mate!”

Of course, after I got home I met my neighbor Clive from the apartment next door, and in five minutes I noted several more examples of this linguistic variety that I found inexplicably endearing: I was carrying out my trash and recycling, and he cautioned me that the rubbish bins hadn’t been picked up that day (“I’ve already had a word with the Council, mind you”) and that there was no room in the bins for my bag: “Look at that, they’re both chockers!”  Nowhere in the US would you hear that, maybe nowhere else in the world would a speaker take “they’re chock-a-block” or “chock-full,” clip it down to “chock” and add the “ers” ending. Listening to ‘Strine, indeed.

And now it’s pissing down rain, a welcome thundershower that’ll maybe end the mugginess.