Bogie or Bogey in Australian English

The Bogey Hole is popular swimming spot at Sydney’s Bronte Beach. In Newcastle, the convict built Bogey Hole is a heritage listed local landmark.

I knew these names, but had never thought of their meaning. They are, in fact, very Australian. The Australian National Dictionary Centre describes the word in this way:

“Bogey (also spelt bogie) is a borrowing into Australian English from Dharuk, the Aboriginal language of the Sydney region, where it meant 'to bathe or swim'.

The earliest records show the term being used in the pidgin English of Aborigines:

1788 Historical Records of New South Wales II: I have bathed, or have been bathing... Bogie d'oway. These were Colby's words on coming out of the water.

1830 R. Dawson, Present State of Australia: 'Top bit, massa, bogy,' (bathe) and he threw himself into the water.

By the 1840s it was naturalised in Australian English:

1841 Historical Records of Australia: I suppose you want your Boat, Sir; Yes, said Mr Dixon; well, said Crabb I suppose we must bogey for it. Yes, said Mr Dixon, any two of ye that can swim.

In Australian English a noun meaning 'a swim or bathe; a bath' was formed from the verb:

1847 A. Harris, Settlers and Convicts: In the cool of the evening had a 'bogie' (bathe) in the river.

1869 W.M. Howell, Diggings and Bush: Florence was much amused the other evening by her enquiring if she (Flory) was going down to the water to have a 'bogey'. Flory was much puzzled till she found out that a 'bogey', in colonial phraseology, meant a bath.

1924 Bulletin: A boar was discovered by two of us having a bogey in a 16,000-yard tank about five miles from the river.

1981 G. Mackenzie, Aurukun Diary: A bogey is the Queensland outback word for a bath or bathe.

A bogey-hole is a 'swimming or bathing hole'.”

Why should I suddenly discover this now? I have been reading Ian Hoskins’ Coast: A history of the New South Wales Edge (NewSouth Publishing, Sydney 2013).  One of the themes in the last part of my history of New England is the rise of the coastal strip, the fall of the inland. This actually happened quite suddenly and especially from 1980. So I was interested in if depressed by the phenomenon.

The social and economic changes that I had identified and Hoskins mapped are interesting in their own right; they add texture to my story. However, in writing, Hoskins refers to to bogie as the word that came to be adopted for sea bathing.

The early British settlers did not swim as such for sport. Swimming described a physical activity, but most bathed. They went into the sea and especially the still waters for that purpose. The sea was, I suppose, the equivalent of the Roman baths.

The Australian coast with its surf was rough and dangerous for those, and this was most, who could not swim. Worried about deaths from drowning at the Newcastle convict settlement, Governor Macquarie directed that people should avoid the surf and bath only in the sheltered waters. Quite quickly, bogie became a word for sea bathing, bogey hole a place where it was safe to bath.   

London to a brick

Now for a number of reasons, part sentiment, I salt my spoken language with Australianisms. Well, it's London to a brick that I will be pulled up from time to time both younger and recent Australians. What do you mean, they say in puzzled terms? 

London to a brick, you say? It just means to bet on an absolute certainty. I don't know when it first came in, although my memory was that it came from a race caller. How very Australian! I bit like betting on two blowies crawling up a wall!

That would fit with this account, although it appears from Bob's advice that the phrase changed a little. I have never heard it with the word "on" added. Well, London to a brick, I'm probably wrong!

Postscript  

For the edification and perhaps confusion of my international visitors, kvd kindly referred me to this dictionary of Australian slang.

2010's worst jargon

Interesting story in last Friday's Financial Review  by Joanna Mather on the latest English jargon. Each year there is a wave of new business jargon. However, the monitoring done by the Plain English Foundation suggests that 2010 was special. After all, this was that a phrase long abandoned by the business community, "moving forward", was adopted by Julia Gillard!

"Thought showers", "repurposing" and and "cascade" were the emerging jargon of 2010. Another term, "key take-outs", may not be new, but seems to to have had new life, even appearing in job advertisements. Let me unpack this for you, to use another 2010 term.

Unpack, the article suggests, means to explain. Columnist David Astle is quoted as saying that there has been more unpacking going on than at a scout's jamboree. I do use this word, but in the sense of disentangling rather than explanation. I also use it in the very specific context of a topic whose component parts cannot be easily seen; discussion focuses on the case, not the content.

The Foundation suggests that 2010's worst jargon, not all new, included:

• KPIs. Short for key performance indicators. As abrasive as "key result areas" or KRAs. This one is obviously not new, but remains all pervasive. And slippery.
• granularity. Replaces drill down, We're now required to examine things with a high level of granularity. I have wondered about this one which seems to be especially popular with CEOs. It seems to carry the connotation of paying attention to detail, with the implication that this had not previously been happening. Maybe a case for revising KPIs and KRAs?
• disintermediate. Economists term meaning cut out the middle-man.
• Julia's moving forward.
• Cascade. To communicate. As in information needs to cascade through the organisation. I have used this one, but in the very specific sense to describe a process of communication.
• Thought showers replaces brainstorm. Ugly, very ugly.
• Repurpose. To recycle. Rather than something being recycled, it is repurposed. Mmm. I'm not sure this fully captures the meaning, but then I've never been sure just what the word means anyway.
• Strategic staircase. Replaces the tautology forward plan with something even worse. I do use the term forward plan, maybe I shouldn't, but I have no idea really what strategic staircase means.

Apparently, "artefact" is one emerging piece of jargon that we need to watch for, with one telco already fond of artefacting. According to David Astle, you need to create a trail of evidence to show that you are actioning something. You need to create artefacts, tangible evidence that you are on the case.

Well, what can I say on this one other than noting that the most common way I use the word is a physical objective dug up out of the ground, as in artefacts from the Minoan period? Does this mean that the telco in question is mummifying, preparing its business for internment and later discovery by some business archeologist?          

Fair crack of the whip

Fair crack of the whip is an Australian phrase meaning give everybody a fair go. If used in a particular tone, it means that the other person has not done this.

I had thought that fair crack of the whip was just an Australian phrase. Searching around, I could not find out when it was first used, but it does seem to have been British as well, if not first.

I mention all this because the other night I learned something about the actual crack of a whip that I had not known.

The Australian stock whip is made up of a handle with a long leather tail split at the end.

The tail could be pretty long. A bullock driver, for example, needed a long whip to reach the front bullocks. Experts could crack the whip so that the split at the end reached an exact spot on the leading bullocks.

The term crack came from the sound, a cracking noise.

My brother and I were townies, town dwellers. Still, the whips were around and we tried them.

It's actually very hard to make the whip crack. You are likely to get it tangled around yourself or anything else in the neighbourhood. Still, I did get it right sometimes.

I was fascinated to learn the other night from a British TV show that the actual crack is, apparently, a mini-sonic boom brought about by the speed of the split end.

I am not sure about this because you can get something of the same effect by cracking a beach towel. This can be quite painful properly applied! I very much doubt the towel gets to the required speed. Still, it's interesting.  

Sunday Essay - a diminishing Australia?

Yesterday afternoon I took my wife and mother-in-law to the airport to meet a niece who was flying in from Noumea. She had been there on a school French language excursion. Having picked her up at the international terminal, we went across to one of the domestic terminals so that she and her grandmother could catch the plane to Brisbane. Her family has just relocated from Sydney to Brisbane.

Last night I completed a short piece that will come up later today on New England Australia on the Walcha painter Julia Griffin.

This morning I saw on What's On Sydney  that the Boy from Oz was being produced in Blacktown. This is a very popular musical, with productions also running in Gosford and Newcastle.  The Blacktown production is described in this way:

The Boy From Oz will take you on a musical journey through the Peter’s highs and low’s from his humble beginnings in a small pub in the Australian outback ('When I Get My Name In Lights'), through his brief marriage to Liza Minnelli (I'd Rather Leave While I'm In Love'), his love affair with long time companion Greg Connell ('I Honestly Love You') to his final performance in Sydney ('I Still Call Australia Home') plus many many more popular songs including the Oscar winning Arthur’s theme 'Best That You Can Do.

Three apparently disconnected things somehow connected in my mind.

This painting by Julia Griffin is simply called Rain on the Uralla Road. This is very familiar country for me. The road runs from Walcha through Uralla to Armidale, the university city in which I grew up.

This is high country by Australian standards, part of the self-contained world of the New England Tablelands, Australia's largest tablelands' area. The painting successfully captures the light and feel of this part of the Tablelands.

At the start of the description from the Boy from Oz, the small pub in the Australian outback is in fact the New England Hotel - the Newie - in Armidale. So I guess on this basis, Julia's painting could could be sub-titled "Outback Scene".

Modern Australian middle class young like my niece have many opportunities. They know cities and airports in many countries; they may have skied in Canada; toured the Tuscan countryside; studied French in Noumea or Paris; holidayed in Bali. Yet they also seem to live in a greatly shrunken country.

Armidale was a small city in population terms when Peter Allen lived there, a city by grace of its bishoprics. However, neither the New England Tablelands not Armidale can properly be described as the Australian outback. The Musical Society in Sydney's Blacktown can be excused their mistake, but it was not one that would have happened fifty years ago.

We all live with mental mud-maps made up, among other things, of boundaries, points and lines.

When I was growing up, the phrase "Back of Bourke" was used to describe the outback. Since then, the dotted mental line that people have in their mind to describe the outback has progressively shifted towards the coast. By the time my daughters were going to school in Sydney, the area selected by one group of their classmates for study in the Year of the Outback was, in fact, the Blue Mountains. For those who don't know Australia, these are the ranges just to the west of Sydney.

These types of mental shifts occur all the time. In Sydney, for example, the boundary of the "Eastern Suburbs"  in real estate terms has moved progressively south. The area described by my daughters as the Eastern Suburbs is not that same as the term I used when I was their age.

Geography and transport play key roles in these types of mental shifts. You can actually construct maps that look a bit like the stylised transport route maps. If you do, you will find that modern transport and communications has greatly increased the geographic scale, but also reduced the detail. Combine this with population shifts and suddenly large areas of Australia have progressively diminished in popular perception. They are now below the flight path.

There is another factor as well.

If you look at current Australian young, they like many of the same things. To some degree, there are still regional variations in things like clothing because of climate. But in pursuit of the great gods of shopping and fashion, they actually look at and buy the same type of things whether it be in Sydney, Brisbane or, for that matter, Noumea. There is a common urban life style.

It may sound strange to say this in an Australia marked by greater ethnic diversity, by apparently increased knowledge of different cultures, but I have the strong impression that actual interest in and knowledge of difference has declined.

I don't want to overstate this, and indeed I am struggling a little to capture the idea properly. It may just be that some things have been added in, others dropped out. However, I do think that there is more to it than this.

Change is inevitable. My problem is that the areas I am most interested in at a personal level are among those that have dropped below the flight path. They still exist, but are much dimished and still diminishing in Australian perception and recognition.

I find that this affects my writing and thought.

As an analyst and commentator, I try to look at what we might think of as broader issues, although my analysis is still affected by my own geographic interests. However, to the degree that I am a writer, I have become a regional writer in a way that I did not expect. The topics I select, the way I write, the people I write about, are all firmly embedded in that geographic space that I still think of as home.

Postscript:

The post I mentioned is now up - The paintings of Julia Griffin.  

Meaning of Australia English - two chances

Two chances is a popular Australian slang phrase. It is variously expressed as you've got two chances, you've got Buckley's or, in full, you've got two chances, Buckley's or none. The phrase means not a hope.

The phrase was probably Victorian in origin. Growing up in Northern NSW, I knew it but did not use it. Today, it's use wide spread.

Two different origins are generally given for the phrase, although other claims have been out forward.

The first and most widespread is that the phrase comes from the convict William Buckley. Buckley absconded from Port Phillip in 1803, living with the Aborigines until 1835. He captured the public imagination by surviving. If the phrase does link to this experience, then the meaning has been inverted, for Buckley did survive. Such inversion would fit with Australian culture.

Australian historian Russell Ward certainly believed this explanation, for that was the way he explained it to us in Australian History.

The second main explanation for the phrase is that it is rhyming slang drawn from the name of a popular Melbourne Department store, Buckley & Nunn. 

In exploring the origin of the phrase, Frederick Ludowyk notes that it does not appear to have come into common usage until the 1890s. Initially, it was written in inverted commas to mark the fact that it was slang Within ten years, the inverted commas had been dropped, making the phrase a normal part of the language.

The 1890s is very late for a term based on William Buckley's experiences. However, whatever the origin, the phrase is very Australian because of its ironical description of fate.    

Meaning of Australian English - Waltzing Matilda

Waltzing Matilda remains one of Australia's favourite songs. Yet as the age in which Australia rode on the sheep's back blurs further into the hazy past, an increasing number of Australians no longer remember what the words mean.

Just for the hell of it, one version of the lyrics follows with an explanation of the terms. 

The Lyrics

Once a jolly swagman camped by a Billabong
Under the shade of a Coolabah tree
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
"Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"

Down come a jumbuck to drink at the water hole
Up jumped a swagman and grabbed him in glee
And he sang as he stowed him away in his tucker bag
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me'".

Up rode the Squatter riding on thoroughbred
Up rode the Troopers - one, two, three
"Where's that jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?",
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me".

But the swagman he up and jumped in the water hole
Drowning himself by the Coolabah tree,
And his ghost may be heard as it sings in the Billabong,
"Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"

Chorus

Waltzing matilda, waltzing matilda
You'll come a waltzing matilda with me
And he sang as he sat and waited by the billabong
You'll come a waltzing matilda with me.

Defintions

BILLABONG. A blind channel or meander leading out from a river. Sometimes used just to describe a water hole.

BILLY. An open topped tin can, with a wire carrying handle, used as a kettle for boiling water into which tea was thrown. According to Geoffrey Blainey (Black Kettle and Full Moon: daily life in a vanished Australia , Penguin Books,  2004),  Australia consumed more tea in the 19th century than all of Europe combined. Tea was a satisfying reviver and also disguised the taste of sometimes muddy water.

COOLIBAH. Sometimes spelled coolabah: a species of gum or eucalyptus tree.

JUMBUCK. A sheep. The term is a corruption of ‘jump up' (Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd rev. ed. Sydney: Macquarie, 2001)

SQUATTER. The term squatter was originally applied to people who took their stock outside the official limits of European settlement and squatted on the land. Many became very wealthy, so that by the time of Waltzing Matilda the term referred to a well-off grazier or landowner. Hence the reference in the poem: "Up rode the Squatter riding on his thoroughbred." 

SWAG. The swag might be  chaff bag, containing his billy, provisions and blanket. Possessions could also be rolled up in the blanket. See supporting picture.   

SWAGMAN. An Australian tramp or itinerant worker, so called on account of the swag he carried.

TROOPER. Mounted policeman. The troopers, also known as traps, were not always popular, a dislike dating back to convict days. 

TUCKER BAG. A bag for tucker or food; part of the swag.     

WALTZING MATILDA. The act of carrying the ‘swag' (an alternate colloquial term is ‘humping the bluey').

More information

There are several versions of Waltzing Matilda. I actually prefer the lesser known Queensland version which has slightly different words and a different tune. You can find more information on all this here. 

Meaning of Australian English - such is life

I am still feeling bored with being serious! My last post, Meaning of Australian English - around the traps, garnered a comment from cousin Jamie that I have brought up in the main post simply because I liked it. I had forgotten what those rabbit traps were like!

Given my mood, I decided to continue with the meaning of Australian English.

One of the phrases I sometimes use is "such is life", usually accompanied by a shrug. For example, say that you have just lost a job or something else unexpected happens and you are telling friends: downplaying the whole thing, you say "such is life" and then shrug.

In an Australian context, the phrase was reportedly used by bush ranger Ned Kelly as he was about to be hung. Then Tom Collin (Joseph Furphy) used Such is Life for an 1897 book. Wikipedia  comments:

The book is full of mordant irony from start to finish, not least from the contrast between the narration and the action—the narrator at times employing extremely high blown language (and displaying Furphy's almost freakish degree of book-learning) in humorous contrast to the extremely low characters and mundane events he is describing.

I had thought that the phrase was uniquely Australian. Apparently, not so.

The Phrase Finder defines the phrase as meaning an acceptance of the unpredictable fortunes of existence, often spoken with an air of weary resignation. It also says:

The early uses of this phrase date from the mid 18th century. For example, Joseph Baretti's A Grammar of the Italian Language, 1762, translates "Cosi va'l mondo!" as "Such is life" and continues:

"Such is life, that whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing."

'Such is life', of course, mirrors the French 'C'est la vie', which equates to the English 'that's life', or 'life's like that'. Modern variants are 'that's the way it goes', 'that's the way the ball bounces', 'that's the way the cookie crumbles' etc.

Whether uniquely Australian or not, the phrase does capture the Australian sense of irony and sometimes understatement, as well as the desire to avoid emotion on an issue.

Meaning of Australian English - around the traps

I have my normal Sunday Essay largely completed, but I'm not really happy with it yet. In the meantime, Neil's Around the blogging traps… with its link through to a Wikipedia page on dated Australian English vocab caught my attention.

I actually use a fair number of Australianisms from various stages in my life because I find them so wonderfully evocative. One of them is around the traps. The Wikipedia article suggests that it means around one's usual haunts. That's actually not quite right.

I haven't checked the origins of the phrase, but I suspect that it may originally have come to Australian English from North America where trapping was so important. In Australia as in North America, trappers would set out traps around the bush to catch game. This became very important in Australia as the imported rabbit became a plague. During the Great Depression, rabbit and rabbit trapping was a major source of food and income for the unemployed. 

The phrase entered the Australian language to mean going out to your traps to see what you can find. This is not quite the same as usual haunts, because the phrase carries the connotation of going out to capture. It was and still is a country phase that then entered the political lexicon, especially in Labor and Country Parties.  

The phrase "around the traps" is generally associated with words like "heard" or "word": the word around traps is, heard around the traps, they tell me round the traps. Around the blogging traps implies that I or Neil have been out to see what we can capture: these are the results.

See why I like the phrase? It carries so much meaning.    

Postscript

A comment from cousin Jamie that I thought I should bring up into the main post:

As a young man who augmented his pocket money by trapping rabbits, I associate with this phrase. I certainly went out to check my traps to see what I had caught.

As an eight or nine year old, I think I caught my aged aunt Helen off guard when I asked her to put her foot on a specific spot so as to release my finger which I had inadvertently caught in my own trap!

I digress.

When I checked my traps, they were always in my "usual haunts" and if I returned to Glenroy today, I could show go straight to the warrens of my childhood. Hopefully they are still not there!

As a side, I sold my rabbits each Saturday Morning to a Rabbito who lived in a two story freestanding terrace in Uralla, which, when my father was born in 1911, moonlighted as a Hospital. Each year as we pass it, I point it out to his Grand Daughters whom he predeceased by some 15 years.

cheers

Jamie

So we do have usual haunts. However, it is still the action of going out to check that is central to the phrase or, alternatively, of receiving information while out there.

As townies, brother David and I did not go trapping. But I still remember the rusty rabbit traps hanging in bundles at places we visited. They were pretty lethal. I suspect that Jamie's caught finger really hurt.