Australia Days

Tones

These were its chief colours: gold, pink, khaki, black. By Christmas Day the mid-north was cast in gold: golden hills rolling away to the north, buttery gold stubble by the acre, dusty gold grain-spills at the paddock gates, dead gold grass on the uncultivated land, forearm hair bleached gold in the sun. Then wind, drought and time wore away the gold, and it was a pink country, the pinkness of dirt and dust and skin revealed to the open air. The sheep carried dusty pink fleeces upon their backs and tracked busy pink paths to water troughs, shade trees, hand-scattered hay.

-- Garry Disher, The Sunken Road

ANZAC Day

We had plenty of time to think and we all thought that the whole Gallipoli Campaign was a mistake and a terrible, unnecessary loss of life. We also worried about what would happen to that loyal brace of men that we had been forced to leave behind. When we were fighting we used to envy mates that were sent away sick or wounded, but now all that we felt was sadness and sorrow, and that we should be back with them.

-- A.B Facey, A Fortunate Life

19th century Melbourne

Tiring of this they turned and descended into Great Collins Street -- a spacious thoroughfare that dipped into the hollow and rose again, and was so long that on its western height pedestrians looked no bigger than ants. In the heart of the city men were everywhere at work, laying gas-and drain-pipes, macadamizing, paving, kerbing: no longer would the old wives' tale be credited of the infant drowned in the deeps of Swanston Street, or of the bullock which sank, inch by inch, before its owner's eyes in the Elizabeth Street bog.

-- Henry Handel Richardson, Australia Felix

Room of one's own

She thought she would die there that first day as she opened the closet door to look inside. She looked shyly at the tiny rooms and wandered about on the land looking at it and breathing the warm fragrance. The noise of the magpies poured into the stillness and she could hear the creek, in flood, running. She sank down on to the earth as if she would never get up from it again. She counted over the treasures of the cottage. After having nothing she seemed now to have everything, a bed, table, chairs and in the kitchen, a wood stove and two toasting forks, a kettle and five flat irons. There was a painted cupboard too and someone had made curtains of pale-blue stuff patterned with roses.

--Elizabeth Jolley, Pear Tree Dance

Hunting boomers

One day Charlie and I took the two kangaroo dogs out for a run. There were plenty of kangaroos around so I took my rifle. We hadn't been gone for long when the dogs startled some kangaroos on the run and scattered them in all directions. One big boomer came towards us when the dogs were after the others. It was about a hundred yards away when I had my first shot, the first time I had shot at anything other than a target. Charlie said, "You missed him." Then the boomer slackened his pace and crouched as he was hopping, and finally fell. Charlie called, "You got him, Bert." And that was so. My first shot had killed the boomer.

-- A.B. Facey, A Fortunate Life

What is Australia?

What's Australia? A big, thirsty, hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for the convenience of foreign speculators, and a few collections of humpies, called towns -- also for the convenience of foreign speculators; and populated mostly by mongrel sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European slaves in the town, and like dingoes in the bush -- who drivel about 'democracy,' and yet haven't any more spunk than to graft for a few Cockney dudes that razzle-dazzle most of the time in Paris.

-- Henry Lawson, His Country -- After All

Not missing London, much

When we made weekend visits to the country, I was less certain about our English hosts, hospitable though they were. They could not have been kinder, but I resented their air of superiority toward Australians. I wasn't used to being patronized by people less well read than I, nor to having the history I knew so well explained to me as thought I could not possibly know anything about it. I came to wait for the ultimate compliment which could be counted on by Sunday breakfast. I knew the confidential smile and the inclination of the head would be followed by "You know, my dear, one would hardly know you were not English."

-- Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain

Criminal argot, ca. 1800

Of all the myriad kinds of thief -- "the sons of St. Peter, with every finger a fish-hook" -- the most dexterous were the files and buzz-gloaks, or pickpockets. Dickens' description of Fagin's school for boy thieves in Oliver Twist was no fantasy. Larger schools ... taught the art of fogle-hunting (drawing out handkerchiefs), bung-diving (taking purses), speaking to the tattler (lifting a watch, with its onions, or seals) and chiving the froe (cutting off a woman's pockets with a razor). A pupil with no talent for this was scorned as a purple dromedary. A skilled, coordinated adept became a boman prig (from the French "beau," fine with rum daddles (expert hands).

-- Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore