Apart from Abbott’s booby (the gannet Sula abbotti, which now breeds only on Christmas Island), all entries on the first two pages of the Australian National Dictionary pertain to race and white foundation. Is this mere chance, or do we here have an instance of the knack of language to trap and reticulate human experience from its very springs? Probably a spot of both. Whatever: how apt that a dictionary of Australianisms based on historical principles should start with words such as Aboriginal, abolition act, abscond, and absolute pardon. Absolute pardon is followed by acacia, whose bloom is the emblem of our national besottedness.

I went from A to Z, and could find little that smacked of the eschatological or even the mildly terminal, which might augur well for pale Australia as it hops towards the end of the second millennium. The very last entry is, however, zygomaturus – a large extinct marsupial.

The Australian National Dictionary, subtitled ‘Australian Words and Their Origins’, edited by W.S. Ramsom, is the first historically based dictionary of Australianisms after E. E. Morris’s Austral English (London 1898). Ninety years seems a long time to wait. Since the gumnut patriotism of the Bulletin School epoch Australia has steeped itself in some seventy years of cultural servility. So, given the preparation time for such a volume, its appearance now should come as no great shock.

W.S. Ramson’s creditably brief and crisp introduction states ‘Our intention was to record as fully as possible that part of the vocabulary which could be regarded as fully accessible to most Australians.’ The Macquarie Dictionary seems snooty and prescriptive by comparison, when he goes on to say ‘We have taken the view that, while it is sometimes a proper part of the descriptive process to use a subject label to indicate that a word is restricted to a particular field of activity, there is a danger that using labels to indicate register can be over-interpretative and over-restrictive. This seems particularly true of Australian English, which allows easy movement between formal and informal usage. ... Labels like coarse, colloq., derog., and vulgar, which tend unnecessarily to categorize, have therefore been omitted.’

At the front of the dictionary, a table of fifty-eight Aboriginal languages is provided, along with a map of Australia locating the counties of use. ‘Some four hundred borrowings from Aboriginal languages are recorded. For most a source language has been identified, no small task given that there were over two hundred languages at the time of European settlement, of which many are now dead and a good number of the remainder in decline.’

A fair specimen is borak, as in ‘to poke borak’ at a person. It is adapted from burag, a word of the Wathawurung language (that of the Geelong push) expressing negation. Borak, as once held, has no connection with barrack - the latter probably derives from Northern Ireland dialect: ‘barrack, to brag, to be boastful of one’s fighting powers’. Aboriginals have certainly influenced our language. I sometimes wonder, particularly when watching the plays of Jack Davis, whether they have not shaped behaviour, especially our infamous laconic humour.

An enthralling feature of the Australian National Dictionary (I refuse to abbreviate it into AND!) is the wealth and variety of citations which attend the entries, illustrating and illuminating usages. Ramson, with a team of assistants and researchers, has scoured fastidiously through fiction, poetry, drama, history, biography, diaries, letters, other dictionaries, works of science, newspapers, and journals.

I very much enjoyed, for example, a citation to battler, that overworked and unctuous substantive deployed to romanticise Australian mediocrity. It comes from The National Times 10 January 1986: ‘You bloody trendies,’ he shouted, ‘you move ... and the housing prices go bloody berserk. And what happens to your poor Aussie battler. One day this whole place’ll be just like Balmain – a refuge for the terminally smug.’ Was this Barry Dickins attempting to purchase a house by auction in Leichhardt?

Another pleasing citation accompanies tats, or tatts, meaning teeth, usually false teeth, a figurative use of English slang for dice, especially false dice. It is one that would appeal to citizens of the turf, and comes from the Bulletin 1939: ‘Where will you find a man willing to crawl up behind a horse and fasten his tats in its fetlock?’

While on the topic of racing, it was satisfying to find expressions such as emu, urger, whisperer, swallow-catcher (a rapid horse), there’s a whale in the bay (big spender on the course) and to bet like the Watsons (prodigally). Missing are gutter (the area in front of the totalizer), shillelagh (whip), pigskin artist (jockey) and, with respect to greyhounding, dish-tickers (dogs). Smokie, a term much in use on the courses and public bars, was not to be found in the sense of an obscure rustic horse that gets up in a boilover at a city track. I’d be surprised if its use were exclusive oral.

The entries on smoke are all intriguing, in particular smoke concert (an informal social occasion at which guests smoke and chat), and the verb smoke, intransitive and transitive (to make a hasty departure, and to effect the departure of a person). What a shame the wonderful utterance of Jimmy Brockett (in the novel of that name by Dal Stivens), ‘Watch my smoke’, did not earn inclusion.

The scorn with which mainlanders have held Tasmania is enshrined in terms like the Speck and Tight Little Island for that aristocratic state. I was almost relieved to discover Insect Isle absent. While on the Apple Isle, here is the lament of a tainted ‘Tasmanian lady’ in 1872: ‘It will be long, long years before the stain of our birthmark shall wear away; it will break out again and again; it will cling to us as Gehazi’s leprosy clung to his accursed and suffering offspring.’

Among a few citations I found Australianisms – or what I assumed were Australianisms – which did not appear as entries elsewhere. The most obvious was harolds, from Bazza Pulls it Off by Barry Humphries: ‘I reckon she would have dropped her harolds and gone off like a two-bob watch at the first Pom to have a Captain Cook at her bloody norks!’

I’ve consulted dictionaries of English and American slang, but to no avail. I’ve consulted whackers from suburbs such as Footscray and far­flung Port Adelaide. I have even con­sulted alumni of South Camberwell Primary School (which school Humphries attended). The word remains a mystery. Please don’t write in. I’d now prefer to think of it as a barmy neologism.

As an adenoidal and rheumy lad, I, and other guttersnipes, would scale fences around Bendigo and plunder trees for quangers. The Australian National Dictionary suggests that quanger comes from the French for quince, coing. I’d suggest another possibility, that quanger is a mere diminutive of quince. Tin lids and ankle-biters have a great propensity to form diminutives, and frequently favour ‘g’ in the affix. For instance, sparrows were often known as spags, though we sawn-off Bendigonians called them spriggers; we named wattlebirds wattlings. While addressing diminutives, it seems to me that franger (not included) might derive from Frenchie (French letter), or be a figurative diminutive of frankfurt (as in cocktail); or, more reconditely, be an ironic diminutive of frangible.

Unless hard historical evidence in the form of citations exists, it can be dangerous to link quanger to coing, and franger to frangible. By way of illustration it would be possible to suggest that orchs (slang for testicles) derives from the Greek for testicle, orkhis. Instead, we have a choice of linguistic accident: orcha is a shortening of orchestra stalls (English and Australian rhyming slang for balls). Orchs does not appear in Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.

I was delighted to find hooer in the Australian National Dictionary. It was a popular insult of my youth. I have always assumed hooer to be an Australianism (from whore), but found it (as a term of abuse) among some dialect dialogue in a play by Henry Livings several years ago. Henry’s formative years were passed in Lancashire.

Henry reminds me of another Henry, the word for turd, from Henry the Third. The book at hand has a William, obviously from William the Third. Plumbers of my acquaintance, ranging from my late father to contemporaries in Melbourne, have all used Henrys on the job. This might sound prescriptive, but I find Henry much funnier than William, and feel the former should usurp the latter. Still, part of me relishes the connection between William of Orange and soil.

One of the gun entries in the Australian National Dictionary is Barcoo, a river and district of western Queensland. This Edenic shire is responsible for the Barcoo Sandwich (a curlew between two sheets of bark; not to be confused with the Paroo Sandwich: a blend of beer and wine), the Barcoo Spew (a chundering affliction pretty much the same as the Beylando Spew, Burdekin Vomit, and Chim Park Chuck), and the Barcoo Rot (a species of land scurvy distinguished by recalcitrant festering sores and scrofules of the arms and legs). At the risk of revealing more of my interests, I must say how much I appreciated many of the entries relating to alcoholic beverages, not the least being sting, tangle, wallop, Adrian Quist, brewer’s goitre, sunset rum (metho, kero, Worcestershire sauce, ginger, and sugar), shypoo, and chain lightning (a cheap, crude spirit). An obsolete verb, surround, is surely worth reviving ... ‘He used to surround a good deal of liquor .. . ‘.

It was reassuring that Jimmy Woodser (one who drinks alone; a drink taken on one’s own) does not seem much in need of revival, since the several citations ranged from 1892 (when the Barcroft Boake poem about a lone drinker, Jimmy Wood, was first published) to 1981. Near Woodser apears the graphic verb wooden (to strike down, to stun), and the related noun woodener: ‘A woodener on the jaw ... sent him down for the count.’

Did you know that blowie (Lucilia cuprina) was introduced to Australia this century? I, like Keith Dunstan, assumed it indigenous. What is a blister? Does it astound you that Sydney was at first styled the camp? Did you know that yahoos were at large in Australia before their ‘invention’ by Dean Swift? Were you aware that a wine dot is a pun on Wyandotte (an American breed of heavy fowl)? What do bong tongs and a shivoo have in common? Finally, where are the Shaky Isles?

I can at least tell you that they’ve nothing to do with the Hawkesbury Rivers, which is akin to the Joe Blakes, a trembling of the dooks manifest the day after a leanaway has got inkypoo on lunatic soup.

The Australian National Dictionary contains some sweet meta-lexico­graphical touches. Firstly, in a citation to sucker-basher (Bulletin 1972): ‘One job that gave me great pride, if only from an etymological point of view, was that of ring-barker, sucker­basher.’ Secondly, in a citation to Australianism we have from the Macquarie Dictionary (1981): ‘Our dictionary is not merely a dictionary of Australianisms.’ W.S. Ramson was one of the four authors of the Macquarie.

Among the dictionary’s six thousand main entries, among its myriad combinations and collocations, I most missed dud and dudder, job and snot, dingo degree, singleton, cluster, tossle, squirrel-grip, to open your lunch, to pack a nice lunch, Mrs Palmer and her five daughters, Spanish Dancer and Bengal Lancer, Skip, to throw a map, sprog, spong, Mexicans and Gringos, goose, agricultural shot, screamer, pluto, poop, pill, and surface (as in ‘How did you surface after a night of Africa speaks?’). Some of these, such as Skip (a term for an Aussie used by young Greek and Italian Australians), are oral, and may take a while to seep into our printed literatures.

How to characterise Australianisms? I’d say they were a peculiar amalgam of the ornate and taciturn, elliptical in style yet direct in content, often figurative and devious - bespeaking a code of silence more physical than metaphysical: ingenious rather than genuine, the comic language of an ostensibly rulerless class over-inclined to dodge Pompey but not inclined to rock the head sherang’s boat, the idioms of alienation and non-identify: irony, distance, rhyme, and pith.

Australianisms, while ‘fully accessible co most Australians’, shou1d not be viewed as the expressions of most Australians. Australianisms have more to do with invention and wit.

With this in mind, I would like to cite a citation for scalper: ‘Two scalpers entered a liquor house in Springsure, ordered two pints, and passed a dingo scalp over the bar in payment. Mrs Public-house ... handed over as change three wallaby scalps.’

Australoid also warrants a mention, given its definition: ‘Of, allied to, or resembling the ethnological type of the Aborigines.’ B. Yamaguchi (Comparative Osteol. Study 1967) is quoted thus: ‘... Australoid type ... is characterized by the narrow cranial vault, flat and inclined frontal squama, protruding superciliary arches, nearly triangular orbital margins, deep canine fossae and marked alveolar prognathism.’

Could there possibly be a finer description of that noble savage, the Ocker? I have a firm belief in the powerful but undiscriminating shaping powers of natural environment. It is no accident that many of us in speech screech and squawk like cockatoos, or grunt like wombats. The rising inflection could as much be a mimesis of migratory bird sounds as a manifestation of colonial anxieties. With the decay of Aboriginal tongues, the sounds of our fauna and flora, our weathers, our landscapes and silences, may be influencing the way we speak.

I read the Australian National Dictionary with the speed and absorption usually reserved for gripping detective fiction or rich family sagas. It gave me such pleasure that my lists of omissions seem sinless. I did not have time to fully check the select bibliography, but observed that my volume of short plays, Squibs, was not listed even though it is the source of a citation for bushfire blonde. Perhaps the selection of the select bibliog­raphy is based on frequency. Who cares? The Australian National Dictionary will always be within mind-range, if not arm-range, of my desk.

This book has drawn comment from press gallery journalists that the author’s background as a finance writer has led to weaknesses in its political analysis. The political sections, however, strike this reader as every bit up to the standard of the press gallery contributions on the subject, and, indeed, add some useful detail on Paul Keating’s early years, which were devoted with such unswerving dedication to entering parliament at the age of twenty-five. Both the gallery and Carew agree that Keating is an outstanding politician and enormously successful treasurer. While it is not always fair to lament that a book is different from the one you might have preferred to read – the author’s task is hard enough as it is – I would have hoped that the economic issues would have been explored with a much broader brush.

Short stories are often disappointing, and this collection is no exception. What a pity that so much strength and force has been put into a book that lacks a plan and presents too many inconclusive pieces.

It is claimed that there is great diversity of subject and situation used by the seven authors writing in and about the same city – our fair capital. Perhaps this can be partially justified in that bureaucratic bungling is approached in varied ways. At the same time, there is an unfortunate feeling that the book has come about as the result of an exercise given to an adult education class in creative writing with remarks to be found in margins: ‘Well done, but not quite good enough for publication. Try again.’

The cover story of the first issue of The Australian’s new coloured magazine was of five people who had made a million dollars in their twenties. These young people’s achievements were presented for us to admire and to envy. Nowhere in the interviews with them was it suggested that people might be motivated by different values from the ones that drive these lives.

The growing cultural legitimation of selfishness and greed poses problems for the left which has traditionally appealed to the values of justice and equality and argued for the need for cooperative solutions to social problems. This shift to a more individualist and materialist political culture, combined with changes in the international environment, has created new constraints for Labor governments. The Hawke government has responded to these constraints by breaking with many of the traditional Labor verities, in particular the commitment to increasing equality through government intervention. Instead, like their opponents, they are now committed to economic growth as the solution to the problems of inequality; it is only if the cake gets bigger that there will be more to go round, Treasurer Paul Keating tells us. They have also embraced many of the traditional Liberal arguments about the need to allow more play to market forces in achieving this growth.

One of the characters in Stephen Spender’s novel The Temple, written in the early 1930s, is a young German photographer. They met in Hamburg in 1929. Spender, a university student just discovering the autobiographical bent of his own inspiration, observed that his friend’s attitude was very different. Instead of wanting to preserve the sensuality of the moment in monumental form, the German photographer set out to report the opposite – the death of every moment – which, at the time of being lived, is also passing. His photographs, he told Spender, were not intended to live, they were not communicative. Records of moments already gone at the click of a shutter, they annihilated even memory. Or were intended to do so.

Spender’s description of his friend’s imagery – ‘a great stream of magnificent young people, mostly young men, lying on the sand, standing, with their heads enshadowed and pressed back as though leaning against the sun, rising from bulrushes and grasses, swimming in seas and rivers, laughing from verandas, embracing one another’ is immediately reminiscent of Max Dupain’s famous ‘Sunbaker’ image of 1937 and his numerous other records of the good life on Australian beaches.

Both young photographers, one in Hamburg, the other in Sydney, shared the 1920s and 1930s cult of the body, the sun and sport. Likewise their images frequently show people back view or with their faces in shadow.

‘About the appearance of them all and about the very technique of the photography, there was the same glaze and gleam of the “modern”’, writes Spender, ‘something making them seem released and uninhibited yet anonymous, as they asserted themselves by the mere force of their undistinguishable instincts.’

Dupain’s photographs have this quality of anonymity. A spick-and-span detachment tranquilises even the most autobiographical. A photograph of Ayers Rock, a portrait of his wife, a shot of his wife and infant child asleep, a grandly rococo image of the cupola, Elizabeth Bay House, or a foggy pictorialist one of Nine Mile Store, Mona Vale (which Dupain describes as ‘a popular general store’ of the early 1930s), although diverse in occasion and personal association, are alike in expressing an immaculate style. Depending on your point of view Dupain is either blessed or cursed with a style which capably reforms nature in its own splendid terms. It strips the lives it reports to a generic form.

The two books of Max Dupain’s photography reviewed here, one new, the other a reprint, are companion volumes, having the same format and no overlap in photographs. Together they add to a much richer representation of Dupain’s photography than either volume offers singly, though, because it has a variety of subjects, I have enjoyed Max Dupain’s Australia more. The landscape category is too limited for Dupain. Besides, in Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes the selection of photographs is slightly monotonous and there are some infelicitous pairings of images.

Dupain explains his aesthetic in essays at the front of each volume, and by good use of extended captions. He photographs ‘intimate visual relationships’, that is, he photographs images with a monumental form, either of light or geometry, usually both. His style is not subjective, not intimate in the usual sense of the word. He observes ‘a certain serenity’ in his work. Indeed, the one thing he declares against is shock: ‘Moments of agony are out.’

Photographs traditionally are not created. They are found. Some of those I like least by Dupain have been arranged. Otherwise he writes modestly about luck and chance while his most splendid photographs prove the opposite. He has lived camera in hand, sunbathing with a camera to his chest (taking those shots of bodies stalwart as trees), shooting the view through the window during a rainy holiday, stopping the car to take the image of a roadside tramp, joining a crowd of camera-wielding tourists around Queen Elizabeth. Dupain’s best genre is architecture, where his subject is in complete accord with the geometric abstraction favoured by his style of photography. As a youth he rather wanted to be an architect.

Writing about his own career, Dupain, unlike a good many painters, does not cast himself in the role of avant-garde hero, but instead displays a marvellous practicality: ‘Much of my work has the blessing of recording history, with a large dose of nostalgia thrown in for its soothing effect.’ With rare historical sense he writes about a production determined by his experiences during a photographic career which began in the early 1930s, a period when modern design was married to documentary subjects, and the modern style emphasised dynamic rhythms. Before then he was an art student when landscape and light and the Heidelberg School tradition were virtually synonymous terms. He has worked at advertising and documentary photography, as a camouflage artist during the war, afterwards for the Department of Information, and more recently has had nearly thirty years specialising in architectural photography.

Along the way, fulfilling commissions for books about Australia, Dupain acquired ideas about what constitutes an ‘Australian’ imagery. After the war his job with the Department of Information was to photograph ‘the Australian way of life’ for overseas publicity; work that was directed at potential migrants. Exactly the same brief had governed nineteenth-century illustrators of books about the Australian colonies. In the twentieth century, the urge to define Australia through its landscape has if anything been more urgent. Dupain takes a place among those who have contributed Australian icons: his photographs of the Sunbaker and Maroubra lifesavers, for example, though his landscapes rely on an iconography already well established.

It is fascinating to notice in landscapes stamped with Dupain’s particular style, the same compositions and imagery used by others outside his field. Among the images are a few of the outback that, like Hans Heysen’s, are composed of bony ridges crossed in the foreground by a tree trunk’s stark diagonal. Others, like Clarice Beckett’s 1920s images of bayside streets in Melbourne, play a procession of upright squarish automobiles against the rectangular spacing of verandah posts along the roadway. Predictably, there are images with the graceful lines and fuzzy atmosphere of the 1890s and early 1900s ‘pictorialist’ style. There are photographs of sunlight and shadow on rolling pastureland; and high skies full of clouds that recall 1920s to 1950s paintings by Elioth Gruner, Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin. And so on. Dupain’s landscape photography is a great artist’s demonstration that in Australia’s pictorial vocabulary some images have much greater adhesiveness than others. The satisfying sense of history they convey is due to an iconography that is shared by most Australians. This iconography again shows him referring to a type, outside and apart from his own sensibility.

I have claimed that Dupain’s serene formality overrides the best known characteristic of photography, its throwaway ‘slice of life’. This is the key to his style. But how does it show? Why does it matter? Many of his images appear to describe natural ‘laws’, as in the orderly growth patterns of shell and plant forms, pattern of waves and geological strata, ribbed lines of wind and water on sand, cloud forms, and the swelling passage of rivers. There is something solemn and strict about these images. Dupain says that in photography he has ‘tried to rise above the dark undercurrents of survival’, a philosophy expressed most clearly in his essay for the Australian Landscapes book where two sides of nature are compared, one side illustrated by the brutal preying of one insect on another in a garden, and the other by the experience of the gardener, walking the ordered stone paths and feeling another side of nature altogether, ‘balm of hurt minds, ... chief nourisher in life’s feast’. In the other book Dupain lists some of his artistic reference points: Beethoven, ‘whose clarity of thought and execution I have loved and sworn by’, Lewellyn Powys, remembered for his ‘poetic acceptance of life’s indifference to man’, T.S. Eliot, who gave lessons on the laconic. Finally, he names that dead young celebrant of death-through-war, Rupert Brooke, who meant much more to Dupain’s generation than younger people can properly understand. In trying to analyse Dupain’s style – the anonymous, neo-classical, monumental modern style of his generation – Rupert Brooke is crucial. Brooke’s immortal image of a young dead soldier shadowed the healthy young Australian ‘Sunbakers’ of the 1930s, who approached another world war. Somewhere between the cult of the body and the cult of death lies the reason for the anonymity of the modern style. Dupain quotes:

Oh, never a doubt but somewhere I shall wake
And give what’s left of love again and make
New friends, now strangers ...
But the best I’ve known
Stays here and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world and fades
from brains of living men and dies.
       Nothing remains

The mind, a friend of mine (female) once said to me, is the sexiest organ. I agree absolutely; and this extremely uneven anthology is replete with evidence that what turns us on – in the flesh, in art, in literature – is not genital activity per se, but the reactive imagination.

Of or pertaining to sexual love; arousing or satisfying sexual desire, the Macquarie Dictionary says of erotic, though the Greek erotikas means simply ‘pertaining to love’. The editorial introduction to this book (though, happily, not the actual editorial exercise of selection) opts for the Macquarie’s first definition and interprets it narrowly:

Two women really did walk into a bar recently. Their four elbows met the bar in unison. Their two schooners were embraced by four lips with the precision of guardsmen at the palace.

There was a bit of a silence.
There was no eye contact.

By and by one enquired about the other.
‘Have you heard about Bill Hayden?’
‘What’s he reckon, now?’
‘Well, he reckons that he’s prepared to take the job of Governor-General. He reckons he’s prepared to take the cut in salary.’
‘That’s very good of him.’
‘Yeah. He reckons that if he gets Dallas to do the shopping, he’ll just about break even.’