Poor Fellow, My Language: 'Im Bugger-Up.

It was when I was editing library catalogue headings for the University of Sydney, around 1996-1997, that I first began to realize just how non-standard Australian English had become. I had been gone from the country about 15 years at that stage, and so had lost any sense of the texture of Australian life.

Since then what seems to me to have been some kind of linguistic – movement, more than revolution – in the quality press. Fairfax, to be particular: I have not been able to overcome my dislike of the Murdoch media long enough to actually read The Australian since 1975.

I used to read The Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald online before going to work. I did that from late 1996 till, I suppose 2008, when they had both become tabloid: everything was sport, conflict, sex, crime – lurid and inescapable. I found that frustrating because I wanted to know what was going on, and footy and gangland murder, drug arrests and police corruption were what I was being given instead of political and social coverage. I used to find Michelle Grattan interesting and informative, but her column appeared to have denatured itself. The books pages – originally updated weekly, and particular to the papers they appeared in, first became more toothless, then began to be updated less and less frequently until they finally became one page pointed to by two different URLs, and almost changeless.

However, the period between 2001 and 2007 was interesting because language which had never before been in the register of newspapers of record regularly appeared on the front page, and this language was what would once have been called "coarse."

The first example that comes to mind is the word "stoush." It means "fight" – verbal or physical conflict long after the initial point of contention or conflict has been identified, and argued about. Originally the word belonged to the street. It would have been used in good and earnest by the Irish gangs of Sydney before the turn of the last century, and to comic effect by C.J. Dennis in the 1920s.

These words are Australian in the sense that they have been in Australian English for a long time (carried over from Cockney or London working-class or criminal or semi-criminal speech). They have not been part of the standard Australian English. Thirty years ago they were archaic. But like "bonza" and others, they have been resurrected and injected into the mainstream of Australian English as Australian identifiers.

To complain about "the coarsening of language" is not only to sound Victorian, but to miss the point.

Language like this is intensely political. It does not signify the sudden inclusion of formerly excluded groups, a new and pervasive flavour of Scottish shop-stewards, as it were.

This kind of language was being introduced and intensified as the "children overboard" incident was passed on as truth so John Howard could win a Federal election, as boats of Afghani or Iraqui refugees were being intercepted by the Australian Navy and turned back to Indonesia or offloaded at the prison on Christmas Island, as refugees were imprisoned in horrifying camps near Woomera or other places on the mainland or off-shored to camps / prisons on Nauru (paid for by Australian taxpayers), as the infamous Cronulla riots occurred.

Language like this is:

a) historically Australian, and so guarantees the "Australianness" of what is being said - that the matter is particularly or primarily Australian, unconnected to other happenings elsewhere, or virtuously Australian - that this should be thought or done to or for, by, with, or from Australia(ns)...
b) inflammatory

And, being inflammatory, it limits the scope of what may be readily perceived about what is being said.

It's the language of and imprimatur for right-wing street-thuggery, a la National Front, but without the embarrassment of an explicit political link.