Phraseology and Culture in English

6. Scripting Australian experience and Australian mores 
The previous sections have provided several different perspectives on similes 
and evaluative idioms found in Australian sources from the nineteenth cen-
tury on. Their status as idioms is not in doubt, since those that are not fixed 
in their lexical contents are unquestionably formed according to marked 
syntactic patterns, which invest them with distinctive semantic and prag-
matic purposes. Their verbal connections with the Australian environment 
have been demonstrated, and the themes and values that they express. Many 
of the similes discussed involve aspects of Australian cultural history, with 
rural allusions giving way to more urban conditions of life. The indigenous 
idioms of Australia, like those of New Zealand, “convey aspects of everyday 
life of the language community that has coined them” (Glaser 1999: 167). 
The adaptation in Australia of idioms shared with other varieties of Eng-
lish provides sharp insights into the settlers’ thinking: what they found the 
same but different about the new continent and the new society established 
on it. They highlight the more abstract themes of Australian experience: 
loneliness in the physical setting as well as in terms of social integration – 
the need to fit in, and the impossibility of it at times (like a streetgirl at a
christening). A rank-and-file respect for bravado and putting on a brave front 
is paralleled by contempt for indecisiveness and incompetence. The frailty 
of the human condition is also acknowledged, however allusively: drunk-
enness, erratic states of mind and the ultimate defencelessness of the body. 
These essential themes are not unique to Australia, but highlighted in a 
pioneering society, and in Australian terms. 
Idioms are at their most important in connecting with oral tradition, and 
with the discourse of an egalitarian society, where access to education and 
learning were to be played down. Though books were a much prized com-
modity from the earlier nineteenth century (Webby 2000: 54), and lending 
libraries established later supported autodidacticism (Lyons and Arnold 
2001: 180ff, 210ff), in Australia it has never been advisable to show off 
one’s command of letters (“talk like a dictionary”), let alone reveal one’s 
interest in literary creativity, as writer David Malouf confirms from his 
Brisbane childhood in the 1950s. Australian idioms typically speak in plain 
language, in similes like flat as a tack; full as a boot; silly as a wheel, drawn 
straight from everyday life. The rhetorical flourishes of idioms such as those 
discussed in Section 5 are put to iconoclastic humor. The Australian prefer-
ence for more informal and colloquial styles of speech is manifest in much 
of the phraseology discussed, from couldn’t pick a seat at the pictures to 

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Pam Peters 
busy as a blowie at a barbie. They illustrate the Australian penchant for 
colloquial contractions and for abbreviations, noted by Wierzbicka (1992: 
375–388), among others. Australians are more inclined towards informal 
usage, where there is a choice (Peters 2001: 175–176). 
The colloquial and informal characteristics of Australian English have 
been strongly affirmed in its defining moments alongside those of national 
identity, as in the two decades preceding federation (1901) on the pages of 
the Bulletin magazine (Moore 2001). Likewise following World War II amid 
a new phase of cultural independence, there was strong interest in Austra-
lian idioms with the publication of Baker’s The Australian Language (1st ed. 
1945). Baker’s title is clearly modeled on that of H. L. Mencken’s The Ameri-
can Language (1919); and it is similarly concerned with amassing a body 
of distinctive idioms to establish one’s independence from British English. 
The inventiveness of Australian idiom (whether locally originated, or 
based on British or American patterns) is evidence of the general vitality of 
English down-under, and the particular productivity of the larger lexico-
syntactic units of the language. Multiword units are demonstrably as produc-
tive or “profitable” (Bauer 2001: 213ff) as the morphology of the language, 
though the process must be as much analogical as generative. This very 
productivity also makes them better exponents of Australian culture than 
fixed idioms with sometimes faded meanings. Their adaptive formulation 
makes them lively expressions of Australian society as it is experienced (cf. 
Lakoff 1987: 266–268). As cultural scripts they are at least as important as 
the key words proposed for Australian English by Wierzbicka (1992, 1997,
2001), or by Ramson (2001, 2002). The conversation of the nation is cer-
tainly reflected in these highly significant components of the language. 
Notes
1. Citations extracted from the Australian Corpus of English are identified by 
the acronym ACE, and those from the Australian component of the Interna-
tional Corpus of English as ICE-AUS (see Section 2). 
2. The 
bandicoot is a small rat-like Australian marsupial. Its name is derived from 
Telegu, where it means “pig rat”, and was earlier applied to an Indian mam-
mal somewhat like the Australian bandicoot.
3. In the USA too, as American as apple pie may perhaps seem somewhat clichéd, 
judging from the cartoon (reproduced from the New Yorker Collection, 1992) 
in Tottie (2002: 72). It depicts the afternoon tea table at which husband in John 
Bull stripes says to wife in Statue of Liberty dress: “Not apple pie again!” 

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Similes and other evaluative idioms in Australian English
253
4. The 
galah is a medium-sized Autralian parrot, which roosts above ground in 
noisy flocks. 
5. A rare instance of its use in reference to a woman can be found in ACE S12: 
2121, where a doughty nun on night duty is said to be “built like a brick shit-
house”.
6. The 
choko is the fruit of a perennial vine of South American origin (Brazilian 
Indian chuchu), which grows without cultivation in Australian gardens, and is 
eaten as a vegetable. 
7.
Rosella is the name for several brightly colored kinds of Australian parrot, in 
this case the Eastern Rosella. 
8.
Battler is a byword in Australian English for a person who works persistently 
against the odds, e.g. the economic problems of small-farming (also Aussie
battler).
9. The last example comes from a radio discussion of these phrases reported in 
OZWORDS (October 2003). 
10. Baker (1987: 225) sees it as an endemic social issue, originating with “grog 
fever” in the early decades of colonialism, but intensifying after World War II 
with growing consumption of alcohol relative to the population. 
11. American dictionaries such as Webster’s Third International (1986) and Ran-
dom House (1987) gloss flooey as meaning “awry, out of order”, without men-
tioning drunkenness. 
12. A pissant is Australian coarse slang for a foolish or foolhardy person. Lexi-
cographers agree that it is a compound of “piss” and “ant” (not the suffix –ant),
but the underlying semantics are disputed. 
13. The solidarity of Australian laborers against being worked too hard is amus-
ingly satirized by O’Grady in They’re a Weird Mob (1966), where the recently 
arrived Italian immigrant is advised against laying too many bricks in an hour. 
14. This simile is also worded as charge like a Mallee bull (ICE-AUS S2A-016 
(c): 215), though the Mallee bull (toughened by living in the Victorian scrub 
country) mostly appears in the simile fit as a Mallee bull.