Back to basics Filed on May 23, 2021
Until the end of 2019, we did not attach much importance to the simple act of breathing.
Breath is Life. That is the first thing we do when we are born as well as the last thing we do on the earth. In between the first and last breath is our life. Since the last one year and more, we have only been hearing about people struggling to breathe when struck by Covid 19, because this virus notoriously threatens our very existence by attacking our respiratory system. Some win the battle and some don’t.
Until the end of 2019, we did not attach much importance to the simple act of breathing. It was happening 24/7 and without our even realising it. That is human nature we take the things that come to us easily for granted. But when that very same thing is endangered, we suddenly value it more than anything else. We are not worried about our house, cars or jewels. We want to simply be alive and for that we need to breathe.
A swag of snags â where Aussie English came from
The convict author of Australiaâs very first dictionary would be delighted to know many âflashâ terms from his day still linger on in our everyday lexicon.
If you say there are swags of snags on the barbie, youâre using âflashâ language.Â
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A nation is defined by its dictionaries. So it is somehow appropriate that Australiaâs first lexicon guide was a dictionary of slang and was written by a convict.
If you call your clothes your âdudsâ or your âtogsâ, ask for a âdollopâ of ice cream on your dessert, say you have âswagsâ of sausages for the barbie, or call a drunk a âlushâ you are talking like a convict â using âflashâ words. There are hundreds of examples of convict slang still alive and functioning in the Australian language today.
Fiona McGregor and the art of the incisive essay
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By Declan Fry
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Giramondo, $26.95
âThings fall apart as soon as they form.â And nowhere more so than in the cultural scenes surveyed by Fiona McGregor in her debut essay collection. Its subjects range from performance art through to refugee policy, gentrification, friendship, and the joy of queer scenes.
This last subject accounts for much of the bookâs pathos â the sense of how, when we look back on the past (that vanished and endlessly receding place), we realise how almost everyone we once knew there is gone: he moved out, she fled the city, they died of AIDS; each a dull, subterranean shock.
Matilda Munro
, May 3rd, 2021 11:54
Matilda Munro reviews Mark Mordue s new book on the early life of a Bad Seed
Photo by Bleddyn Butcher
To write about Australianness is a contradiction in terms, as one of the country’s effects is to rob you of all will to put it into words. It tends to be only those who leave that get anywhere near laying out the truth of the place. It’s the case for many of its major wordsmiths over the past decades: Patrick White, Peter Carey, Clive James, David Malouf, Tim Winton, Robert Hughes, as well as for painters Brett Whiteley and Sidney Nolan. The bass notes of the place rumble out and away from the coastal cities, beneath the unforgiving sky, and through an eternal California of the intellect, where addiction is endemic, threat of violence constant, and the blood of all the convicts and all the natives lies in the dust. There is all the quiet horror of the Church, and the contradiction – through the sheer distance itself – that Australia enf
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Itâs 7pm on a weeknight and 13 blokes are talking raucously over beers at a Collingwood pub once frequented by standover man Mark Brandon âChopperâ Read.
Some wear black hoodies and scarves emblazoned with their logo â a tattoo parlour-style, circular image of a skull with a candle oozing over it.
Books can be tough: Shay Leighton, front right, at a Tough Guy Book Club meeting at Goldyâs Tavern, Collingwood.
Credit:Joe Armao
But this isnât an outlaw motorcycle club meeting.
Welcome to the Tough Guy Book Club, whose members are more likely to be discussing Ernest Hemingwayâs depiction of masculinity than terrorising neighbourhoods.