G'day

This place, in The Rocks, is not the place to try this trick.

Sit, as I have done, in a crowd in a pub in Riga; a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps; a hamburger joint in Siem Reap; a reindeer restaurant in Bergen; a Greek café in Banff; a chippie in Glasgow; a tapas bar in Cuzco; a curry and Guinness house in San Francisco; high tea at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel; a coffee shop at Heathrow; a tea shop in Kandy; Rick’s in Casablanca (it’s a copy of the film set), a bangers-and-mash restaurant in Reykjavik or at an outside table of a pavement café near Gare de Lyon on a windy April day.

When you hear Australian tones in the crowd (and trust me, you will), project your voice and call out in broad Australian, “G’day!”. Deliver it with just a hint of a rising terminal, but do it with your lips hardly moving, and your diphthong as flat as a dead goanna after a road train convoy has passed through.

A likely sayer of G'day.

It always works. Sit silently, unblinking and poker-faced, watching as Australian heads turn like those of so many meerkats, urgently seeking their unseen compatriot who may, perhaps, have news from back Home. That’s the home we care about, and that single “G’day!” reminds us all of where Home is.

A tin-eared Seppo or Pommy, the people who assert that Australians wash in a bison, pronounce lane as line (adding that our line is delivered as loin), the people who, trying to be like us, flit around shouting “Gur-dye, mite!” will never succeed in getting our attention, not unless we have a spare and rancidly dead echidna to throw. We don’t react to this gormless mental flaccidity, of course, but we sneer, inwardly at their gaucherie. Prancing around pretending to be one of us by crying “gur-dye, mite” simply sets them up as a target.

At some point, I will turn my attention to Australianisms.