Aussie Writing.
Aussie English

A broad brimmed Australian hat, like a Stetson outdoor hat but with a wider brim and often shaped in a Western style.  I should just say high quality cowboy hat and be done with it!

Okay.  Everything's all right.  She'll be right, mate.

Road surface.  Many Australians say bitumen which is also a type of blacktop but Sam is aware of the difference between bitumen and asphalt.  Americans might say pavement, but in Australia, pavement is a footpath, not a road surface.

Australian.  In Aussie Guards story #1, Sam teaches Quinn how to pronounce it.

Bathing suit.  Swim suit.  Cossie, short for swimming costume.  Togs.

Literally, if something is beyond you, it can be seen behind you.  You cannot reach it.  So if an idea is beyond you, you cannot grasp it.  If a task is getting beyond you, it is getting too hard for you to accomplish.

Australians tend to refer to a house block rather than a street block.

An ordinary man.  An old-fashioned term these days.

Really good.  In the olden days, your boncer was the best marble in your collection.

An exclamation of annoyance.

Half inch, approximately.

Australian soldier, so named because they dug many trenches in the world wars.

Duvet.  Australians use a lot of different words for quilts. We used to say continental quilt or eiderdown or comforter. Doonas are a lot more common than they used to be but unless you keep the air conditioning on, they cannot be used on the bed in spring or summer.   See the Australian Writers' Centre article about the origin of the term doona.

Australia.  So named because in the world globe, it is in the southern hemisphere, underneath the other countries in the northern hemisphere.

A drongo is a type of bird (which is actually quite a clever bird), but most people think the insult drongo is based on a racehorse called Drongo that never won a race.

Pronounced YOO-cull-IP-tus.  These are Australian native trees with a very tangy, clean scent, also known as gum trees.  There are a great many types and they are found all over Australia.

Washcloth or facecloth.

Good evening.  Hello this evening.

Good.  Everything is as it should be.

I'm agreeable.

Stunned.  In cricket, if a batter can hit (knock) the ball to the boundary without touching the ground, they score six runs.  The speaker is feeling like a cricket ball which has been hit very hard.

Friend, buddy, pal.  A good mate is the best friend a man can have.  Also used if you don't know someone's name.  "Mate, you're treading on my foot."

Mom. Actually this is pronounced the same in both Australia and America.  Because the accents are different, it has to be spelt (spelled!) differently.

Zero.

Literally, "of the clock", although nobody says that.  Specifies the time, so eight o'clock is either eight a.m. or eight p.m.  See the special section on military time.

Fenced off piece of farmland.  Unlike in the United Kingdom, paddocks can be hundreds of acres in area.

Petroleum fuel.  Called gasoline or gas in the United States.

Ask for a loan of money.

Registration plate.  Number plate.  Motor vehicle registration license number plate.

Treat.  To pay for someone else.  "Whose shout is it?  Whose turn is it to pay?"  "It's my shout."

Sheila was a common name for a woman in the early days of European settlement, being based on Sheilagh, an Irish name. Some people still call women sheilas or birds or chicks but these days if you want to refer to women casually you would probably just say girls.

Go for a walk or run.

Australian.  When read with an Australian accent, Strine sounds like Australian to us.  So... uh... I might have appropriated it for my pseudonym.

Suspicious.

Originally, "sweet as pie".  Now means awesome.

People having tea are having supper, so tea time is supper time.  Tea at other times might be morning tea or afternoon tea.

Rhymes with schoolie, the school leavers who have tremendous end-of-school celebrations.  Toolies lurk around the outskirts hoping to take advantage of drunken teenagers.

University.  Called college in the United States.  In Australia, colleges are generally secondary schools.

A roofed area outside the house.  An open porch or an attached patio or a roofed home deck.

Agreeing with the sentiment of the speaker but not agreeing with the opinion.

You little ripper.  Terrific.  Fantastic.

This list only describes Aussie terms used in my stories.  There is a longer list at the back of each book, which includes more obvious terms, like car park meaning parking lot, and US-Australian spelling differences.  There are more details again in the Sheila Strine discord for NSFW explanations.


There are far longer lists of Aussie terms in general. For example, the Australian National University, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics has a list with explanations at https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/meanings-origins/all and a lot of travel consultants have put together lists of Aussie phrases, some of which are hilarious.


For those interested in South Australia specifically, there are generally held to be four South Australian dialects, and analysis of the Adelaide one may be found in The Global Council for Anthropological Linguistics: The Adelaide dialect in Australia language at https://glocal.soas.ac.uk/adelaide-dialect-in-australia/.

What is literature?

The answers to this question are as numerous as there are authors.


Why are Jane Austen’s novels studied as literature now when they were merely considered to be light entertaining romances two hundred years ago? Even today’s best passionate well-written romances are not accepted as literature.


Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which begins with the moment of the author’s conception, and bawdy Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, some of the earliest English novels, include humor at its broadest, but are judged as literature because of the way they engage with ideas. However today, broad humor is automatically excluded from consideration as literature.


We need to be more thoughtful when we judge literature.  Literature can include romance. Literature can include broad humor.  Literature is text worth reading because it engages with ideas in original ways. It makes readers pause to reflect.  It broadens our thinking.


Having said all that, Aussie Guards has no pretensions towards literature whatsoever. Readers, go forth and multiply!

 

Grammar in Aussie Guards

I welcome any and all corrections to my grammar. If you are not a Patreon member, you can always email me at author@sheilastrine.com to kindly let me know of any solecisms I have committed. However I have been surprised by criticisms which were incorrect.


  • it’s always means “it is”.

The word its is used for ownership.  It is like theirs, yours and ours; these are possessive pronouns which do not have apostrophes for ownership.


  • discreet means tactful. discrete means in one piece.

They are homophones, being words with different spelling which sound the same.


I will add to this list if any more misunderstandings arise.