Australianisms

Having a squiz, a snag, and a gander on my first foray down under

I just got back from two weeks in Australia, where I was lucky enough to take part in a publishing fellowship sponsored by their government’s arts council (hooray for public arts funding) and got to hang out with book people from all over the world and all across Australia. You know the cliché of the first-time visitor to a place who quickly declares “I think I could live here”? That’s me.

Yes, I admit only saw a tiny part of the country — Sydney and Melbourne — but the fresh food, functional infrastructure, friendly people, and unexpected mix of cultures made it an appealing stay. And it also had one big advantage over other countries I’ve visited: I already speak the language.

Well, sort of.

Australian is its own variation of English, closer to British English than American English, but definitely its own unique thing. Yes, I did hear “g’day” or “mate” often, and occasionally in tandem, including from the customs officer at the airport. But thankfully, in my group outings and twenty-six 1:1 meetings with Australian publishing peeps, I was able to get a bit deeper than that and tick (rather than check) several of the boxes of Australia’s greatest slang hits.

Some of which are quite tasty. For example, during a visit to Allen & Unwin, one of the country’s premier independent publishers, they served us fresh salad and sausages cooked on their rooftop grill. But instead of “sausages,” they called them “snags.” Which is perfect. It’s sounds like something you want to snag and scarf down before you have time to ponder how exactly it is made.

I lost my hat a couple days into my trip, and learned several Australianisms while shopping for a new one. “Do you want to have a gander and a play?” asked the saleswoman, who looked like Mary Poppins in a light blue medical mask. Have a what now? "A gander is a look,” she explained, “a play is to try on, and if you’re just looking around that’s called ‘having a squiz’.” I liked the sound of it all, though I doubted I would say any of those things at home.

Seeing my amusement, she offered to teach me any other phrases I was curious about. “Do you know arvo?” she asked, explaining that it means "afternoon.” I didn’t, but I was eager to try it out. “I’m going to the footy match this arvo,” I offered tentatively. She shook her head. “Yes, but you wouldn’t say it that way. You’d just say ‘I’m going to the footy this arvo.’ We drop words any chance we get.”

“Footy” is Australia’s version of football (and also exemplifies another common linguistic maneuver of dropping a syllable and adding a “y” in its place). I went to see a game on Sunday at the famous Melbourne Cricket Grounds, where I got to mingle with tens of thousands of sports fans, drink several beers, eat a lamb pie, and then sober up in the second half with a flat white and jelly donut.

Footy is quite different from our football, England’s football, or rugby. I couldn’t make sense of it for the first 60 minutes of game play, even after reading the rules. It’s played on a 175 x 150 yard oval pitch, 18 versus 18, and at first glance it looks like utter chaos, with men catching, punching, and drop-kicking a ball, grappling over loose balls, and only giving each other space after a “mark,” or when you catch a kick cleanly. The players are much more versatile than the specialized roles in American football, since everyone has to act at times like a wide receiver, running back, punter/placekicker, or defensive back.

The man of the match was Max Gawn, the captain of the Melbourne Demons, a bald, goateed fellow known as “Maxy” or “Gawny” to the locals. When I asked the man next to me who his favorite player, he said “Maxy” without a moment of hesitation. I asked him why. “Well, he’s over 2 meters tall, and he’s just a good dude.” I have no idea how tall 2 meters is, but even from 100 yards away, Maxy looked immense.

There are a few things that felt upside-down to me down under. One was the direction of traffic, which I probably would have quickly got the hang of while driving, but got quite confused about while absentmindedly walking around. Several times I found myself facing off with someone on the sidewalk, wondering why they were hesitating and then realizing they were simply trying to assess what path I was taking since it was different than how a normal person would walk.

When we’d show up to our destination while walking in a group, our guide would say: “It’s just here” rather than “here we are” or “here it is.” Though for all I know that’s as much a British phrase as an Australian one. As is, perhaps, the use of “spicy” for “sexy/hot,” like the publisher who dismissed the popular romantasy genre as “tawdry stories about spicy dragons.”

The seasons confused me as well. It was nearly 90 degrees the week I left Kansas City, but two days later I was walking around drinking a warm flat white coffee in the light autumn rain over a damp sidewalk covered in a carpet of yellow sycamore leaves. I kept forgetting what month it was, which was strangely and subtly blissful. “It’s so strange to me that it’s fall here,” I said to a new Australian friend. She shook her head. “Not fall. Autumn.” My Mom’s cousin, who was born in Kansas City but has been in Australia since 1986, later explained that calling it fall only makes sense in places with mostly deciduous trees and not the tropicalesque climes of New South Wales.

One phrase she used that I loved was when she gave me directions and told me to get off at a certain bus stop and that she’d come “collect” me there in her car. I obviously knew what she meant, but still chuckled at the thought of someone collecting me, of being collected. “I guess that makes me collectible,” I thought with a tiny and mostly unwarranted burst of pride.

I wasn’t there near long enough to distinguish regional accents, but found that Australian accents can be quite subtle. Sometimes it was hard for me to tell if someone was American or Australian. And I don’t know enough linguistics to intelligently discuss the phonetics, but I do love the “o” sounds in Australia, the slight bend and more elastic vowels. I can only imagine how my lazy Kansas speech must sound to them, but I also didn’t ask.

One of the phrases that cracked me up the most was “Macca’s” which is (slight pause while you attempt to figure it out) the Australian nickname for McDonald’s. Having learned this, I don’t think I’ll be able to refer to the Golden Arches by their proper name ever again. Americans also attempt to humanize the ubiquitous and unhealthy fast food corporation with nicknames, but unlike the friendly “Mickey D’s”, “Macca’s” sounds faintly derisive, like the nickname for a friend you don’t really like all that much. One night I even thought about going there, as it was just a block away from my airbnb and I was feeling cheap, so I googled “Is McDonald’s in Australia better than in the USA.” Instead a reddit thread for r/australia popped up with the question “Why is Maccas shit now.” So I went with a milk bar snag instead. Sorry, Ronny.

Two more of my favorite phrases to close things out:

While walking from the Royal Botanical Gardens to the plaza near the Sydney opera house on our first day, I got stopped twice by people asking me to take their photograph. Only a coincidence, but I felt special. The editor I was walking with said it reminded her of when she had visited the same spot several years earlier with her parents. Seeing them taking a picture, an Australian woman had stopped and asked if they wanted their picture taken, to which they reluctantly said yes even though they hadn’t really asked her to. As the woman lined up the shot, she grew impatient with some tourists who were walking slowly through the frame. “Move along!” she yelled at them. “We’re not here to fuck spiders!” My friend was shocked, not at the vulgar phrase, but because she’d never heard anyone actually put the infamous Australianism to use. Although there’s a clip on YouTube of Margot Robbie explaining the phrase on a talk show, so maybe it’s not that uncommon after all.

And as great and seemingly un-toppable as that line is, my favorite Australian phrase was much more pedestrian. When people asked how I was getting on (knowing I was jet-lagged and/or in the middle of a 14-hour day of meetings and meals), rather than asking “How are you doing?” or “How’s it going?” they would say “How are you going?” I’m not sure why, but the slight variation made the query feel more genuine, and caused me to give pause actually think about how I was, in fact, going. Even 10 days into the trip, it still hit my ear a bit funny, but also felt increasingly apt. I mean, we’re all going through it, right? Life, that is. Going through the event, going through the day, going through existence. “How are you going?” feels like a frequent and important check-in along our miraculous and uncertain overlapping a moment of checking in on our miraculous, uncertain, and overlapping journeys from birth to the grave. But of course I didn’t say all this. I usually just said “great!”