Expressions the oldies remember

by John Wells
Over the years I've written a few stories about our changing language, and now I'm doing another. It is an ongoing interest of mine, so this is something of an indulgence – but changing ways of speech are certainly part of our history.
A guest described something or other at home here a few days ago as 'flash' and I had not heard that word used as an adjective for a very long time.
It reminded me of the expression 'As flash as a rat with a gold tooth' and that brought other rat sayings – well, not rat sayings, exactly, but sayings about rats – to mind. A really clever person might be called 'as cunning as a woodheap rat' and that was not a compliment. There was another version, too, but I'm not using it in the Gazette. 'Rat cunning' meant much the same thing.
A really fast move was made 'like a rat up a drainpipe".
A farmer was a 'cocky' and in Gippsland that usually meant a 'cow cocky'. A 'galah' was a bloke without any sense and is a word we frequently need these days.
The appropriate animals were used in many expressions such as 'flat out like a lizard drinking.' An angry person was as 'mad as a cut snake" or he might move as fast as "a cut cat". He could also be a 'real dingo' and that was not a nice thing to be called.
He, or she, might be 'as happy as a pig in mud'. About the only other animal-based expression that I can remember is 'bandicooting spuds'. Potatoes are grown in rows of raised earth and bandicooting was digging carefully underneath the plant, through the side of the rise, and pulling out potatoes without disturbing the plant too much, or not enough to be visible to the cocky. This was a common practice back in the days of the Great Depression but the expression seems to have died away when fewer men were on the wallaby track and desperate for tucker.
Holes in socks were also called spuds – back when socks were darned instead of discarded.
'A blackfellow's fire' is a description that might be politically incorrect but once, long ago, it meant a fire that was too small be give much warmth – and I heard it a month or so ago for the first time in at least 20 years. Other racially inappropriate descriptions we are better off without now, was that anything really untidy was like a "Chinese laundry."
Anything really hot, like a big fire or a late January heatwave was as 'hot as the hobs of Hell' and, for that matter how many of us remember the word 'hob'? To us the hob was an iron rail across the front of the fire where food could be kept warm or even cooking slowly. It was also used for the brick ledge each side of the fireplace where things were put to keep warm, or even to dry. School shoes in winter used the hobs but the fire had to be very low or the shoes would dry almost too stiff to wear. I wonder if anyone remembers drying school shoes in front of an open fire.
There were some really colourful swearing words that were used on recalcitrant cows, but men – decent men - did not swear in front of ladies. Ladies did not swear at all, so there is one great change in the use of our words. I've seen a cow stand on my mother's foot and refuse to move. We all waited for the language but she only said, after she'd pushed the cow away 'That really hurt'. The look on Dad's face was a sight as he tried not to laugh at her restraint and her choice of words. He was smart enough to ask her if he could be of any help.
Something good was 'bonzer' and all the blokes, even the bludgers, used that expression, but can you tell me just what was a 'humdinger'. Something really good, like a sixty-five yard dropkick or a good paddock of hay, anything very good, was a humdinger. I have wracked my brains for a source, with no luck at all. We need to record and understand these expressions. They are – were – a significant part of our culture, in some ways the least-valued and least-protected culture in Australia.
Once upon a time everyone would know what you meant when you referred to 'going on the wallaby', which was more or less what grey nomads do now.
Still, I have heard 'the black stump' referred to often enough recently and it is good that a few things from 'genuine, fair dinkum old Aussie' still survive. Still, one rarely hears about 'the outback' or the 'never-never'. In preparing this story, too, and as an aside, I looked up the Lawson poem with the lines "Out where the heatwaves dance forever, That's where the dead men lie" to find that it was written first by Barcroft Boake, born in 1866 and dead by hanging himself with a stockwhip only 26 years later.
He also was published in The Bulletin, as was Lawson so often. He wrote a long poem with the lines "Out on the wastes of the Never Never, That's where the dead men lie. There where the heatwaves dance forever, That's where the dead men lie…" He grew up in Sydney but worked in the outback as a drover and in various other jobs.
It is a little odd that such a colourful term has vanished at a time when more and more grey nomads go out there, 'out back', and we hear about conquering Big Red, out of Birdsville, and the Gunbarrel Highway and so forth.
If you were surprised by something you might once have said 'Well, strike me pink' or 'Stone the crows'.
If you had to 'make tracks' you might once have 'hopped the rattler' – but there are not too many 'rattlers' on the country tracks now. I would think that was also the source of name 'red rattler' for suburban trains.
We also had a fair few cockney-type rhyming slang words, like 'goanna' for 'piano' (or 'pianner'), 'frog and toad', which was sometimes shortened to just 'frog' as in 'I'd best get on the frog', and on we still do here occasionally, 'dog's eye' for a meat pie.
And, finally, we have lost the many names we once gave the policemen among us. Back when they were more among us. They were sometimes called 'rozzers' and I have no idea whence that came. They were 'John hops' (rhyming slang again) and they were often called 'demons'.