Barry McKenzie, Australian at Large, made his debut in the 10 July 1964 issue of Private Eye. He was the creation of the comedian Barry Humphries, then, like a number of other creative Aussie expats, resident in London. Hero of a new strip cartoon, illustrations by Nicholas Garland, Bazza, as he would become known, was identified in this first outing as “a strapping young specimen of Australian manhood” and self-described as “an ordinary honest working-class bloke”. His first words “Excuse I, what’s gone flaming wrong?” informed readers that they were in the presence of an antipodean Candide, the classic hick, come to the big city and ready to surf on a tide of Foster’s lager into what within a year would be apostrophised as “Swinging London”.
Naive he surely was — and while over his nine-year career at the Eye he might increasingly turn the tables on the Brits, that innocence never wholly disappeared — in one respect he was omnipotent. His slang-laden, all-Australian language burst into the Eye reader’s consciousness fully-formed and quite astounding. By 1968 Bazza was offering freckle puncher, smell like an Abo’s armpit, bang like a shithouse door, dry as a nun’s nasty, point Percy at the porcelain, siphon the python and perhaps the most celebrated, the Technicolour yawn (aka the liquid laugh or the big spit).
[…]
It was also resolutely carnal: in its concentration on defecation and urination, drinking (and the seemingly inevitable vomiting it induced) and copulation (even if Bazza remains the eternal virgin), Humphries either created or collated a vocabulary that would not be rivalled until Viz magazine’s “swearing dictionary” Roger’s Profanisaurus began appearing in 1997.
Rooted, from Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University and chief editor of the Australian National Dictionary, focuses on this side of the Australian vocabulary. Rooted comes from root, a euphemism for fuck, both literally, in the context of sex, and figuratively, as in harm, destroy, and so on. It falls into what Laugesen is happy to term “bad language”, even if one might suspect that with her formidable knowledge it is a term she knows perfectly well is a construct of tabloid moralising and empty religiosity. (Perhaps I am hardened by proximity, but I find it sad she feels the need to warn readers they will encounter the language that is the subject of her work.)
Jonathon Green, “Fair dinkum dictionary”, The Critic, 2021-04-08.
July 7, 2021
QotD: Bad language from Down Under
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