The Decline and Fall of Okker* Chic

Don't you love Paul Hogan? He's the Rogue Okker in the Australian Tourist Commission commercials chucking prawns on the barbie. Have you seen the Foster's Lager campaign? Hogan again, in his cashmere jumper, gasping for a drop of the amber nectar.

They love him in Beverly Hills. Since "Crocodile" Dundee, they've been sending him all the scripts that Harrison Ford doesn't want to do. The studio intellectuals have actually read The Thorn Birds—not just the press coverage—and quite a few of them drop into Koala Blue on Melrose after they've had lunch at Trumps or Moustache Cafe. And if all that hadn't attracted their attention, there was Rupert Murdoch buying up half of 20th Century Fox.

Murdoch muscled his way in by waving greenbacks, but Hogan's a natural. He's got the born-innocent Bondi-blue eyes and the straw hair and the seamless amber tan and the sloppy grin and the cauliflower knees you get from kneeling on a surfboard and the whole who-gives-a-root-she's-apples Rogue Okker insouciance he was born with. But it's the verbal they love in L.A. That wacky dinky-di slang. And the vowels—those excruciating A's and E's and oi's ricocheting off the adenoids and resonating up there in the sinuses like a blowfly caught in a bottle of Château Tanunda. It's the way he says "G'day."

The way he speaks, that dinkum larrikin adenoidal vibrato, is the way entire suburbs in Australia speak. The entire North Shore of Sydney and everybody else with two bob to rub together have been trying to stamp out that peculiar noise in their sons and daughters ever since World War Two. But that was before Okker Chic.

Okker Chic really became official the day it went international, on October 4, 1983, when Olivia Newton-John opened Koala Blue on Melrose. By then, there were agents in Hollywood—hardhearted men, real ruthless, liver-eating hyenas—who had menus from Sydney's Berowra Waters Inn in frames. They'd bludged a free trip to Sydney to tell a few funny stories at some movie conference, they'd spent the day on a yacht in Sydney Harbor and they'd had lunch on the Hawkesbury River. Now they were foaming at the mouth, talking about the oysters and the lobsters and the wine that smelled faintly of passion fruit. They were raving about the women, especially the wild, fresh, amusing and—here was the thing—oddly intelligent women, in miniskirts up to here. The word was out, and the word was: If you were looking for the next best thing to heaven on earth, Pan Am 815 flew nonstop to Sydney three days a week.

Meanwhile, on the up-and-coming 7300 block on highly desirable Melrose Avenue, there was Koala Blue. Forget the fact that Olivia's a ring in, an arriviste, like the Gibb boys or Mel Gibson, for that matter, or all the other boys and girls of penniless migrants who arrived in Australia when they were 12 and never looked back. As far as anybody in Hollywood was concerned, Olivia Newton-John was as dinky-di as, well, Lorraine Crapp. But the Koala Blue in Hollywood had the real Aussie goods: Eta peanut butter, Vegemite, the full range of I [Love] Australia T-shirts and Ayers Rock T-shirts and hand-knitted Merino-wool cardigans with a kanga on the back, or a koala or a kookaburra, op'ra-house stuff, America's Cup stuff, beach towels spelling out the rules of cricket or the complete lyrics of Waltzing Matilda.

Stone the crows! It was amazing. Suddenly all this Okker junk had meaning. Cling peaches! Jaffas! Minties! Lamingtons! Hoadley's Violet Crumble Bars! Pelaco shirts! Akubra hats! These things had become cultural artifacts, as though Australia had not just a look, not just weather, not just good oysters and cold beer and big surf and funny accents, not just infinite space and light and waterfrontage but a culture. It was embarrassing. What was next? Jo'burg? Voortrekker Chic?

Okker Chic owed its early speed not to friendly, freckle-faced Paul Hogan, thank you, but to Sydney radio host John Singleton. Singo was the architect, the Wernher von Braun of the affair; he lit the match. Singo's a big bodgie with a loud voice and a foul mouth and a chip on his shoulder the size of a trailer home. His view of the fancier things in life came across loud and clear when some dingbat phoned in on The Singo Show on station 2KY and asked him what he thought about arts and culture in Australia. "Jeez, mate," he goes, "what race is she in?"

Singo may have the manners of a professional lawn mower, but he was the last half-witted voice of the indigenous white English-speaking culture that found its hero in the iconoclast. He spoke for the little battlers, a breed of men with no time for bankrupt European airs and nothing but scorn for trashy American high-rise and hard-sell. There used to be an entire nation of them. All the little battler asked out of life was a cooked breakfast and a few beers and a float to take to Randwick to get stuck into the bookies. Sunday morning, he'd wake up stony broke and still laughing, pull on his navy-blue singlet and a pair of daggy King Gee shorts and take the street kids fishing off the rocks. Afterward, he'd fire up the barbie on a stretch of empty beach and fry flatheads and yellow jackets for breakfast.

Nobody dared get up himself that far—but there was an ethic here: Nobody had any status he couldn't defend. If you didn't see eye to eye with the bloke at the bar, you stepped outside. You didn't discuss it. You settled it. It was rough, but it was just.

What you had here, in the postwar years, until the big boom in the Sixties, was a society unlike any other in the history of the planet. You had equality. You had resolute, doctrinaire mediocrity. If you got a cab, you rode up front with the driver. Everybody shined his own shoes. There were no rungs on the social ladder. There was no ladder. There were only two unforgivable heresies: success and failure.

Failure was shame. All anybody had to do to make a decent living was get out of bed in the morning. The country was so rich and so empty that if you failed to make the grade in Australia, you got what you deserved. Success was worse. Success was subversive. It broke the first unwritten law of mediocrity, which is: No tall poppies. It sounded like hard yakka, like five days a week, or else it was theft. Either way, it was unnatural.

Australians—indigenous white English-speaking Australians—didn't much like to work. Adults worked. And Australians didn't much like the idea of adulthood. What they liked was adolescence until death.

•

It was Singo who first heard the nagging didgeridoo hum in the national marrow. There was a growing need to paint the Union Jack off the flag, change the national anthem, kiss off the queen and the entire embarrassing colonial pals' act and stand up and be seen among the front runners, internationally speaking. Singo knew what the mob would put their money down for.

Hogan cracked it first in advertising. He came straight off the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, which he was painting at the time. Hogan said, "Anyhow, have a Winfield," and Winfield became the market leader. It was those vowels. Hogan was talking to people in their own language, Okker to Okker, ratbag to ratbag, and it was thrilling. After years of being made to feel vaguely ashamed of themselves, Australians looked in the mirror and fell in love.

Okker Chic spread like a bush fire: All was quiet, one match flared and whhhoooooooosssshhh! It transformed everything, rewrote the consciousness, turned known facts upside down. It wasn't just a matter of accent, though accent was fun for a while, like suddenly learning how to sing in tune. There were other things. Take Albert Namatjira, the aboriginal artist. All anybody ever gave Albert Namatjira while he was alive was all the beer he could drink. Namatjira landscapes of central Australia were pure play school dreck, but people began to look at them again. Now they saw space and color and form and naive mystical geometries.

Everything home-grown became achingly significant, invested with patriotic magic. Arnott's Sao dry biscuits, Sargeants' pies, Avers Rock, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the Aeroplane Jelly song, 19th Century paintings of gum trees, 20th Century paintings of gum trees, the gum trees themselves.

Oh, but the op'ra house was it. The most fantastic building of the 20th Century, a glittering armada docked in Sydney Harbor, the very flagship of born-again Okker pride, a daily reminder of how far we'd come up in the world. It's traditional to put up an opera house when you've gotten rich quick and yearn for status. But the Sydney Op'ra House, as everybody knew, was the best fuckiri op'ra house in the world!.

In throngs, the mob flocked to the colors. The rush was on. For years, the rush had all been the other way: All most people with any brains wanted to do was get out of Australia, even if it meant traveling six to a cabin on a Greek boat. You couldn't shake off the feeling that you were shipwrecked on a remote pink rock at the bottom of the atlas, and no matter how loud you shouted, nobody could hear.

Okker Chic did away with all that. By the Eighties, it was one-way traffic home. All the unbelievers who, in the Sixties, couldn't wait to get out realized on reflection that adolescence until death had a lot to recommend it.

Okker Chic really got out of hand when we won the America's Cup. The hum in the national marrow became a 10,000-voice choir singing in tune. This is a country that likes sport. We very nearly quit the Empire in the Thirties over a cricket match. Australians read the paper from the back; 100,000 of them turn up every weekend at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch Australian Rules football, and one of Australia's biggest-selling records in the Eighties was some clown doing a foul-mouthed parody of a cricket telecast. Pure Okker Chic, in fact. But when we won the America's Cup—when skipper John Bertrand came back from the dead and broke the longest winning streak in sporting history—the barrage of popping corks sounded like war breaking out. Great Western champagne had the best day's sales in the history of grapes. By Christ, you should've seen us. If you thought folks in America were a bit worked up when the hostages got back from Tehran, if you thought Mrs. Gandhi's funeral got a little out of hand, you should've been in Sydney the day we won the cup. It was sheer frenzy. Bob Hawke had a fit.

Prime Minister Hawke, who is now on the wagon, showed up at the Royal Perth Yacht Club with tears streaming down his cheeks. They drenched him in Great Western, and it must have soaked through his skin and gotten into his blood stream, because he started flailing about as if he were trying to bite himself on the back of the neck. He was slapping people on the back, being everyone's best mate—this is the prime minister, mind you—and when they finally got a microphone on him, he yelled, '"Any boss who sacks a bloke for not showing up at work today is a bum!"

People were still staggering around days later, evil, inky udders under their eyes, tears spilling down their cheeks, kissing policemen in the street. We carried on that way because the America's Cup had been unwinnable. It was bolted down in an inner chamber, under glass, and guarded by the Grail knights of the New York Yacht Club. Bertrand's attack on it was heresy. When he smashed the glass and grabbed the Grail, brought it home for the current cup chase on our own stretch of ocean off Fremantle, he proved once and for all that we could do anything.

Ask Clay Felker. He knows all about that. He found out the hard way. It was Clay, remember, who first took on Rupert Murdoch. What Clay discovered too late—when the bathroom door opened and the Dirty Digger stepped into the 11th-hour board-room meeting and all Clay's old friends suddenly looked the other way—was this: Okkers play dirty.

Clay couldn't believe it. He can't to this day. He, Clay Felker—inventor of New York magazine when it was in a class of its own and before that of the legendary Herald Tribune magazine, a legend himself, Mr. Manhattan, practically, with one of the top tables at Elaine's—outwitted, outflanked, totally trounced by this rube, this baboon, in fact, this badly dressed nobody from a remote pink rock at the bottom of the atlas where they still wear corks on their hats to keep the flies off!

Clay has never recovered. And Rupert has never looked back. Now no newspaper in the Western world is safe. No corporation is too big. The bigger, the better—you just build up a holding and make a silly offer. It's taken a few years to sink in, but the board rooms and news desks are beginning to recognize the ghastly truth: It's not just Murdoch. There's a pack of them down there—a rogue Mafia of Dirty Diggers with more money than sense and no scruples whatsoever—and they're barking at the door. Alan Bond, of Bond Corporation, barks loudest of all. Bond's mascot—the kangaroo that flew on the mainsail of Australia II—was wearing boxing gloves. The message was plain: Get out of the way or get thumped.

•

Singo is still going strong on 2KY, defending the larrikin way of life. But he's lost the plot—there's nobody out there in navy-blue singlets anymore. They're all wearing alligator shirts and running shoes. They're sitting around in butterfly chairs, under the ficus in the open-plan distressed-pine dining-cum-sitting room of their $250,000 home units with a view of the yachts on Sydriey Harbor, eating guacamole quiche and drinking LA beer. And what are they talking about? They're talking about giving up smoking. They're driving Datsuns. Half the people in Sydney don't even speak the same language.

The bottom's fallen out of Rugby League. Nobody wants to watch grown men kick one another's teeth in and gouge one another's eyes out anymore, so nobody goes. There are no fights in Australia anymore, either. There are no fighters. No more little battlers. If you went looking for a dinkum Okker little battler these days, you'd need four-wheel drive and a Mobil map and a few days to spare. (continued on page 138) Okker Chic (continued from page 82) You might just find a few throwbacks at the Silverton Pub outside Broken Hill, and you'd be all right in Tibooburra. But you'd be buggered in Sydney. Tim Bristow's eating quiche.

There was a time when just the drop of Bristow's name sent icy Chopin up and down your spine. When this free-lance thug turned race-horse trainer turned detective walked into the Newport Arms, there was a hush. Heads turned. Grown men—six-footers, 200-pounders—went weak at the knees. It was like a volcano just took a seat at the bar: You could feel the heat, hear a deep, subterranean rumbling, sniff the sickening, sulphurous fumes of sheer unadulterated terror; it was just a matter of time before he'd blow. Some numbskull with a skinful would put his young manhood on the line in front of his mates and pick a fight, and then, blam! Hammer! This was what Tim liked, what he was good at, what he was famous for. Tim Bristow in full cry was the most violent human being I have ever seen. Now he sits in the sunshine, nursing his belly, thinking about all the things he'd like to do to Bo Derek, drinking LA beer.

LA is a market leader these days. It's sissy piss with scarcely a trace of alcohol, but if you don't want to get banned for years if the police flag you down on the Wakehurst Parkway, it's the only way to go. Australia has the lowest, meanest breath-test fail score in the non-Islamic world: The sniff of a cork and you're over the limit, and $50 won't help—these days, a traffic cop costs four figures.

It's all part of the Ulterior Agenda, the grand plan to detoxify the society. They say they want to save lives, but what they're really doing is laundering the sap, physically wringing the booze out of the blood and reprograming the national genetic inheritance. For years, on all the indexes, the number-one expenditure in the average little battler's household budget was booze. Gambling ran a close second, and then you'd get down to food and shelter. But booze was where the money went—gallons of it, lakes and oceans of frothing middies and schooners of KB and DA and Tooth's Old and Toohey's New.

Before the rot set in, before the Ulterior Agenda took shape, the pubs closed at six p.m., so all you had was an hour after work to down the amber nectar. The Six O'Clock Swill, it was called. When the big hand got to five, everybody would drop everything and stampede for the pub and start sinking schooners. Just getting to the bar was like fourth down and inches. You either had to launch yourself, Marcus Allen-like, over the pile-up at the line of scrimmage or get down low and duck and dive and burrow and elbow and somehow worm your way near enough to scream at the barmaid. The noise! The roar! These places would hold 200 or 300 thirsty Okkers, all shouting at the top of their voices, bawling in one another's faces, getting drunker and louder by the minute.

At 5:30, when the pub was so full you couldn't move an inch and the air was full of smoke and noise and B.O., the latecomers would arrive. More and more people, till the clock's hands crept round to 5:45 and the very-late-comers came charging in the door like mad rhinos. There was this sea of jabbing fists full of money waving frantically in the air and heads pogoing up and down and a noise that killed fish underwater, a roar like the Super Bowl in an eggcup.

When the pubs closed, the streets filled with wild cries and the gutters ran with chunder. Legless drunks came staggering up the street, barking at the pavement, caroming off the buildings and the plate glass, crawling on their hands and knees the last few yards to their cars, fumbling for the keys, spilling change, carrying on these totally blotto conversations:

"I'll be buggered."

"You'll be lucky."

"Fuckin' dickhead."

"Who's a fuckin' dickhead?"

"Who d'you think?"

"Don't you fuckin' call me a fuckin' dickhead, you fuckin' dickhead"—and so on. Totally blotto, they'd crawl into the car, shut one eye and drive home. There were only two ways to drive home in this condition: dead slow or flat out. Flat out, if you hit something, you had the momentum. Dead slow, limping along at 20 miles per hour in third gear, there was the danger you'd forget where you lived, that you'd blink and fall asleep suddenly.

You have to go a long way to find a pub in Sydney in 1987. The Newcastle and the Brooklyn have been knocked down to make way for the skyline. All the pubs have been turned into building societies—just to save a few miserable lives.

They've got the numbers to prove it. Since the Ulterior Agenda took root, with front and back seat belts and breath tests and big concrete ramps in the middle of the road and red lights everywhere that don't change for so long you've got time to read the Mirror, since the arrival of LA and detoxification, the number of people killed on the roads has fallen off a lot. Days go by without a decent prang.

The big right-hand bend on the Wake-hurst Parkway—the main drag from the beach to Sydney—was so famous for head-ons and total write-offs that it used to draw a crowd. All these ghouls would picnic in the stringybark trees, waiting for the next scccrreeeeech of brakes, the kkaarrrrruunnnch of metal as another North Shore boy in a TR4 with .twin cams hit Kamikaze Korner blind drunk and flat to the boards.

Road accidents were the daily bread of the Australian popular culture. Without the Wakehurst Parkway, you might never have heard of Rupert Murdoch. It wasn't tits and ass and garrotings and scalpings and air conditioners falling from the sky that sold Murdoch's Sydney Daily Mirror, it was these fantastic front-page pictures of twisted steel and burning rubber and telltale pools of black blood, followed up inside with all the grisliest details—hospital shots, the fatherless kids, the limbless girlfriends, the weeping widows, the grieving mums. You people in New York think the Post is cheap? You think the London Sun and the News of the World lower the tone? You should see the Mirror, where it all began.

This may not seem so important to you Paul Hogan fans. You may think it a wee bit capricious to decry the passing of multicar pile-ups and drunken brawling and grown men on their knees being sick in the street. But English-speaking white Australian culture was hatched in the pubs. It was rooted in drunkenness. The jokes, the songs, the poems of Henry Lawson, The Man from Snowy River and The Sentimental Bloke, the language and the who-gives-a-root-she's-apples Rogue Okker insouciance that was the blood and guts of Okker Chic were born in the boozy democracy of the Six O'Clock Swill. Australia on low-alcohol beer is like a car without gas. It just sits there looking good.

But LA was only half the story: There's the wog channel, for instance. Channel 0/28, ethnic TV, is only serving its audience when it puts out all these Egyptian soap operas and Iraqi sitcoms and wacky zero-rating Herzegovinian folk-dancing shows. When Okkers refer to the immigrant population that now numbers more than half the country as reffos, when they talk of Maltese and Greeks and Cypriots and Kurds and Calabrians and Lebanese and Serbs and Croats and Montenegrins and Herzegovinians and Shi'ites and Sunnis and bewildered Salvadorans as dagos and grease-eating turd burglars, they're only joking. These people have done wonders.

They've taught the mob how to eat pasta and quiche and falafel. They've brought violins: You can hear Mozart and Mendelssohn 24 hours a day on F'M. They've raised the tone. They've certainly taught the economy a few tricks. Middle Europeans, wily Hungarians and plausible Poles with a flair for green mail have built huge conglomerate empires.

And oh, my, those Chinese deals! Nineteen ninety-seven isn't far off, and all the shrewd Hong Kong money's flooding into Sydney, but you've got to understand the way the Chinese like to play the game. They always give*you room to take unfair advantage, a certain latitude to steal. This is to see what you're made of. If you don't steal anything, they're not interested. If you steal too much, they couldn't care less. But if you're devious enough, if you've read Confucius and you steal just the right Confucian amount, then you're in business with the best and the sky's the limit. The Chinese like buildings, and they like them big, with all the lights on. They're sinking untold zillions into the skyline. Not to mention our, ahem, Japanese friends: All the Hitachi personnel are quietly colonizing the garden suburbs. They have made the country prosper.

What Okker malcontents are muttering about—because they don't want to be overheard by the Hitachi personnel at the next table—is this: Half the population hardly even speaks the same language. It was funny to start with. There were books about the pratfalls of a newly landed migrant from Italy. The first cappuccino machines drew a crowd just to watch them steam and hiss.

What began in the Sixties is now past the post. Nobody talks about New Australians anymore. It's bad taste and it's out of date—the mongrels are in charge. The little battler has lost the plot. As the known world was rewritten before its very eyes along brighter, more TV-like lines and the new hybrid society shrugged off doctrinal mediocrity and surrendered to the dizzy delights of status envy—the extra leg room in Clipper Class, the faultless engineering of the 280SL, etc.—as social ladders sprouted like oil rigs, the indigenous white English-speaking culture retreated into truculent pockets of resistance, with small cells of paranoid men and women clinging to the wreckage. A few of the boys started putting some of the more inflammatory graffiti into effect and beating up boat people, who struck back with shiny knives.

This is the unacceptable face of Okker Chic, the creepy paranoid streak that came out of the closet when Australia won the cup. This is the sharp end of flag-waving national pride. It peaked at the 11th hour, just as the tide was turning and the little battler and all he ever stood for was left standing on the shore with his pants rolled up round his ankles, shaking his puny fist at the ocean. Okker Chic, in this sense, offered a last fling, a last defiant adolescent rapture before the curtain came down for good.

Welcome to Sydney in the Eighties. It's bliss—a lot like California but without the obvious drawbacks. Lovely homes, big pools, plenty of Porsches, and you can still live your whole life in shorts and thongs. Champagne's dirt cheap. The surf's big, the oysters are good, the sun shines, the yachts come and go on the harbor, the op'ra house is divine. There's money to burn. If it reminds you of somewhere else—Sausalito, perhaps, or Marbella or the Hamptons—if the Ozone looks like the Carlton Terrace at the Cannes Film Festival, that's the point.

If you like ironies, this is it: As Okker Chic sweeps the civilized world and all an Australian has to do is open his mouth and eyes light up all round the room, here's a memo to all you Paul Hogan fans—you missed it. Tough luck. It's all a dream. It's not there anymore. Tim Bristow eats quiche.

The Aussie Impact It Came from Down Under

1 Three Billion B.O.C.* Australia, future playground for marsupials, solidifies down under

2 500,000,000 B.O.C. Ayres Rock formed

3 1788 First shipment of British crooks and hooligans

4 1947 Pan Am begins excruciating multistop service to Sydney

5 1962 Rod Laver wins grand slam of tennis

6 1973 Foster's Lager, the amber nectar, flows Stateside

7 1977The Thorn Birds alights in U.S.

8 1979 Australian Rules football cable-cast on ESPN

9 1982 Men at Work hit pay dirt

10 1982The Road Warrior opens in U.S.

11 1983 Stone the crows! Australia wins the America's Cup!

12 1986 Foster's pitchman Paul Hogan stars in "Crocodile" Dundee

*Okker (noun): Australian rogue; presumed extinct due to low-alcohol beer and loss of habitat.

Say What, Mate?

A Glossary of Aussie Argot

Akubra hats. Cowboywear, hopelessly out of date but coming back with the help of Aussie golfer Greg Norman.

amber nectar. Beer, especially Foster's Lager.

Australian Rules. High-kicking, nonstop rugbylike game of football.

barbie. Barbecue.

bludged. Lit., borrowed, but implying gravel rash on the knees; very, very insulting.

bodgie. Unlettered lout.

Bondi. Sydney's best-known surfing beach.

bottle-brush. Flower with blooms like punk lavatory brushes.

Château Tanunda. Australian answer to Night Train and Wild Irish Rose.

chunder. Drunken vomit.

Crapp, Lorraine. Olympic champion swimmer of the mid-Fifties.

daggy. Unattractive.

didgeridoo. Aboriginal wind instrument fashioned from a hollow log; when blown, sounds like the world's coming to an end.

dinkum. Cf. Dinky-Di.

dinky-di. Genuine, unalloyed, the real thing.

Dirty Digger. Rupert Murdoch.

float. Enough money in your pocket to back the first horserace winner.

G'day. Universal salutation.

get stuck into. Attack.

gum tree. Eucalyptus, native to Australia. Its leaves are the staple diet of the koala bear.

Hoadley's Violet Crumble Bars. Chocolate-coated honeycomb that sticks to your teeth.

Jaffas. Orange-jacketed chocolate balls for rolling down the uncarpeted aisles of sub-urban cinemas.

jumper. Sweater.

kanga. As in 'roo.

King Gee shorts. Daggy.

kookaburra. Cheeky, king-fisherlike, carnivorous bird with a laugh like gravel in a bucket.

lamingtons. Day-old sponge-cake, dressed in chocolate syrup and sprinkled with desiccated coconut.

Lantana. Flowering bush with a pretty flower and a disappointing bouquet.

Iarrikin. Rowdy, undisciplined lout.

Merino. Wool off the sheep's back.

Minties Hard peppermint candy, famous for the cartoon and slogan on the box. Sample subject: A bloke is caught with his Strides (q.v.) round his ankles, rooting the ass of the boss's wife, and the slogan reads, "It's moments like these you need Minties."

Okker. Australian, but the meaning changes depending on who says it. Said by a Reffo (q.v.), it's derogatory if not inflammatory. Said by an Okker himself, it's a backhanded boast.

Pelaco shirts. Officewear.

prang. Road accident.

reffo. Feringi. Lit., refugee; by extension, any lowborn foreigner.

ring in. Illegal or unauthorized entry.

schooner. About a pint.

She's apples. Everything's A-OK.

singlet. Sleeveless undergarment.

"Stone the crows!" Expletive equivalent to "You could've knocked me down with a feather!"

strides. Trousers.

turn-up for the books. Unexpected, form-defying result, such as Australia's winning the America's Cup.

up himself. Pretentious.

wattle. Flowering tree.

yakka. Labor.

*Before Okker Chic

"All you had was an hour after work to down the amber nectar. The Six O'Clock Swill, it was called."