Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Reflections of the land and its inhabitants, rural and urban 
environments
Idioms projecting elements of the Australian landscape are particularly no-
ticeable among older examples dating from the nineteenth and earlier twen-
tieth century. The land of “droughts and flooding rains”, in the words of 
poet Dorothea Mackellar (“My Country”, 1918), is cast less romantically in 
references to ground that is either wet enough to bog a duck (Wilkes 1995) 
or so bare that you could flog a flea across it (Sydney Morning Herald,
June 1972). Both idioms are now most used in those terse colloquial forms, 
though the key elements of the second appear much earlier in wordier 
Standard English: you could hunt a flea across it with a stock-whip, as ex-
pressed by Rolf Boldrewood (Cornhill Magazine, 1866). The barrenness
of the land also finds expression through the simile dry as a chip, used 
(1889) of the thin and wiry kind of grass, white and dry as a chip, an image 
which captures the brittleness of nature in the Australian interior. The dev-
astation of bushfire is expressed through the image of being alone like a
bandicoot on a burnt ridge, used by Henry Lawson (Joe Wilson’s Court-
ship, 1900). This was elaborated by The Bulletin (1904) in miserable as an
orphan bandicoot on a burnt ridge, and refashioned by HR Williams (Com-
rades of the Great Adventure, 1935) as like a bandicoot on an ironstone
ridge, alluding to the dry sandstone outcrop that crowns many an Austra-
lian peak.
The Australian bandicoot
2
has been mentioned in several of the similes 
quoted so far, and it seems to have attained proverbial status quite early on 
in the settlement of the country. Travel writers of the 1840s and 50s (R. 
Howitt, Impressions of Australia; Felix J. Askew, Voyage to Australia and
New Zealand) both comment on how often the phrase poor as a bandicoot
is heard. It picks up on another colonial commonplace said of land that is 
good for nothing: A bandicoot would starve on it. H. Kingsley (Recollections
of Geoffry Hamlyn, 1859) gives us a specific example: That Van Diemen’s
bush would starve a bandicoot. The bandicoot thus became a symbol for 
eking out a miserable existence, hence also miserable as a bandicoot*. Yet 
within two decades, the same simile could also be used to refer to emotional 
misery, as in He hadn’t a soul to talk to…and was as miserable as a bandi-
coot (Rolf Boldrewood, A Colonial Reformer, 1877). The balance between 
the two senses of ‘miserable’ seems to have shifted towards the second, judg-
ing from the fact that late twentieth century reference dictionaries give pri-
ority to the emotional sense. But it makes the simile more opaque. Densey 

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Similes and other evaluative idioms in Australian English
239
Clyne (Sydney Morning Herald, August 1980) suggests that the bandicoot’s 
rather long nose makes it a symbol of unhappiness. Several other similes 
rather inexplicably associated with the bandicoot are reported by Baker 
(1978: 88), including bald as a bandicoot / barm(e)y as a bandicoot / bandy
as a bandicoot. The three adjectives ‘bald’, ‘barmy’, ‘bandy’ would seem to 
be motivated simply by alliteration, rather than any known or proverbial 
characteristics of the bandicoot. A fourth, rather equivocal simile for the 
animal is lousy as a bandicoot, where the colloquial adjective dubs it ‘mis-
erly’. It represents a radical shift from the earlier more empathetic portrayal 
of the bandicoot. 
No other Australian animal seems to be as deeply embedded in idiom 
as the bandicoot. The Australian macropods are strangely underrepre-
sented in similes, though the kangaroo is the focus of the metaphorical 
phrase kangaroos loose in the top paddock, an Australian approximation 
to the British bats in the belfry (see also Section 4 below). Yet the possum 
figures interestingly in the simile like a possum up a gumtree, which in 
twentieth and twenty-first century Australian English connotes happiness 
and satisfaction with the situation – quite the opposite of the bandicoot. In 
fact the possum simile originated in nineteenth century American English, 
where it meant that the animal was entrapped in a tree (of the North 
American genus Nyssa, or other gum-yielding tree), and therefore in des-
perate straits. Citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) show that