Uncle Sam and Britannia: the character of Australian English

But then Binyon is British.

But this is not typical. For the rest of the Australian year our tone of voice is our own: sometimes raucous, often pungent, understated, fatal to tall poppies and sympathetic to battlers; a mixture of John Clarke, Edna Everidge, Roy and H.G. We are becoming internationally famous for phrases like flat out like a lizard drinking, or for word plays like ambo, fierie and pollies: what other country would have politicians share a name with parrots?

We prefer our political leaders to be concise rather than wordy, to sound more like a mate with a beer at a barbie. The political bons mots that we remember are rather the Democrats' slogan “Keep the bastards honest” of a few years ago. Where else could bastard be a masthead for a political party? It certainly does not fit with the more sanitised rhetoric of American public political English. Or we remember Whitlam's resonant, flagellating Kerr's cur during the constitutional crisis of 1974.

And if we find that we need to compliment or stroke someone's ego, we may hedge by moderating the emotion, here following the British model of understatement. Or we may do something distinctively un-British, and counterbalance the positive emotion with a potential negative: not you generous person but you generous old bastard. You don't lightly call someone a bastard in Britain or America, where it is more likely to be taken as an insult. In Australia, in an appropriate context and with appropriate tone of voice, it can be indulgent, friendly and solidaristic. We use it between friends and mates. But we downplay the emotion.

Except, that is, in matters of sport. Here we are maximalists, not always magnanimous in defeat, triumphalist and often bombastic in victory. The kind of eulogies reserved by some other countries for their rivers, shores, mountains and peoples are relocated in Australia to teams and sporting heroes. We will brag endlessly in any pub on any continent about the pre-eminence of our sportspersons. Perhaps this is because it is only in sport that we clearly punch above our weight in the international arena. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi!

This does not sound quite like the British. But I suspect that Malouf is right about the way we have built our tone of voice from British material. That does not alter the fact that much of the surface of our language - some of our pronunciation and grammar, and a lot of our vocabulary - are converging with America's.

But not our style. J.F. Kennedy's “Think not what your country can do for you, think rather what you can do for your country” would sound a touch pretentious and overstated in Australia. We'd feel more comfortable if someone asked us just to lend a hand, mate.