Phraseology and Culture in English

possum up a gum tree was probably the chorus line from a song and / or 
dance, and its use as a cry of approbation is noted in the Australian Na-
tional Dictionary (1989). But the AND documents the transformation of 
the simile from the 1890s, with citations in which it means a speedy retreat 
to safety, or other expeditious movement. It evokes the Australian possum 
darting up a Eucalyptus tree, thus being in one’s element and unassailable. 
This total reinterpretation of the American simile demonstrates the force 
of Lakoff’s observation (1987: 451–452), that native-speakers of a lan-
guage may have different understandings of the same idiom, and of the 
metaphor generated by a conventional image. Despite this, the phrase up a
gumtree (minus the possum) still means ‘in difficulties’ for Australians 
(Macquarie Dictionary, 1997), as it does in the United States (Webster’s
Third International, 1986) and in the United Kingdom (New Oxford Dic-
tionary, 1998). The phrase play possum ‘pretend to be asleep or uncon-
scious, feign ignorance’, is also American by origin (Oxford English Dic-
tionary, 1989), and current in British English. Australians use play possum
in the same sense, but have coined their own counterversion of it with the 

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Pam Peters 
phrase stir the possum*, meaning ‘liven things up’. This usage, also worded 
as rouse the possum, is attested from 1900 (AND). It is used especially of a 
verbal stimulus to a group of others, and increasingly of political contro-
versy. Yet the possum’s way of thumping across rooftops in the night 
gives stir / rouse the possum a naturalistic force as well. The fact that pos-
sums impinge so much on suburban life would help to explain its continu-
ing popularity in Australian idiom.
Australian birds provide the reference point in similes for loneliness and 
madness, in all alone like a shag on a rock*, and mad as a gumtree full of
galahs*.
4
Both similes are motivated by the bird’s social behavior – solitary 
in the first case, noisily gregarious in the second – though the first (dating 
from 1845) is older by a century. The lizard’s drinking posture is the focus 
of the simile flat out like a lizard drinking* (also as flat out as a lizard drink-
ing) – except that the simile embeds a kind of word play which is quite com-
monly vested in the key words of conventionalized Australian similes (see 
below Section 5). Here flat out carries the colloquial sense of working fast 
and furiously, and the reference to the drinking lizard becomes irrelevant, a 
rather opaque intensifier of the adjective. 
If Australian fauna makea only occasional appearances in traditional 
similes and idioms, the built environment is even less evident. The one 
striking exception is iconoclastic: the rather frequent idiomatic references 
to the country dunny (or just dunny) i.e. ‘privy’. In the usual configuration 
of buildings on a farm, the dunny stood apart from the main dwelling, a 
small shed on its own, hence the simile all alone like a country dunny, first 
reported in Baker (1953: 268). In its uses it refers to someone being alone, 
and sometimes to the fact that they stand out in some way (usually awk-
ward). The country dunny is typically a wooden or iron construction, hence 
the journalist’s comment, that the Australian movie star Paul Hogan (of 
Crocodile Dundee, 1988) was as Australian as a slab off a dunny door
(Sunday Telegraph, September 1974). However a man
5
of unusually for-
midable physique is now said to be built like a brick dunny (or shithouse),
with a play on the word built, as well as the British simile built like a for-
tress. The dunny was built into malevolent humor by Barry Humphreys 
(Barry McKenzie Holds his own, 1974) in lines of verse that ran May
all your chooks (‘chickens’) turn into emus / And kick your dunny down.
This far-fetched curse went further than it might otherwise through be-
coming the title of a song (M7 Records, 1975), and a focus of mystifi-
cation for the newly arrived immigrant in Yasmine Gooneratne’s novel 
Change of Skies (1991). The dunny has wider currency as a deprecating 

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Similes and other evaluative idioms in Australian English
241
element in the conventional simile as cunning as a dunny rat (Sunday
Mail, October 1981), and the humorous / dismissive couldn’t train a choko
vine
6
over a country dunny (National Times, March 1981), an evalua- 
tive comment on an unsuccessful football coach. The play on the word 
‘train’ makes the referent incompetent on the sportsfield and in the hypo-
thetical garden, unable to cultivate even a plant which grows vigorously 
by itself.
These elements of the Australian rural landscape are still pervasive in 
twentieth and twenty-first century discourse, and the bush provided the larg-
est number of similes and evaluative phrases of any of the domains sur-
veyed by Baker (1978). However, suburban reference points increase no-
ticeably with the advance of the twentieth century. Rural and urban imagery 
combine in the simile like the cocky on a biscuit tin*, alluding to the rosella 
parrot
7
which was the trade mark of biscuit-maker Arnott’s, and stamped on 
their distribution vans as well as the metal containers in which biscuits 
were then packaged. Because the bird was “on it not in it”, the simile con-
veys the sense of being an outsider (Wilkes 1995). Urban street names ap-
pear in postwar idioms for confusion or being flustered: doesn’t know
whether it’s Tuesday or Bourke Street (Melbourne), which becomes doesn’t
know whether it’s Pitt Street or Christmas (Sydney) – or doesn’t know if
it’s Thursday or Anthony Horderns, a reference to a former Sydney de-