The City Bushman

• Barry Humphries breathed life into Australia’s “slanguage” – but it was often an imagined life.
• Humphries took linguistic invention to extremes – plucking words and phrases out of obscurity, but also pushing or exceeding acceptability.

“Slangy philosophers” in Australian history

• During a great period of Australian myth-making (1890-1925), newspapers and magazines such as the Argus, Australian Tit-Bits and the Bulletin enabled the public to write letters or stories and debate one another.
• Readers aggressively debated Australian word etymologies - and the degree to which these words were or were not Australian.
• For instance, a Bulletin writer by the name of “Blue Duck” dismissed the emerging Australian slang, writing, “Much Australian slang is simply cockney flash, introduced every mailboat by stewards”.
• Many aspects of the Australian lexicon first emerge in Britain, or in the imaginations of our middle-class citizens or artists.

Humphries and the lexicon of New Nationalism

• Barry Humphries’s Bazza McKenzie character emerged during Australia’s New Nationalism in the 1960s/1970s.
• In linguistic terms, this was an era of growing colloquiality in Australian English.
• Humphries noted that
  words like cobber and bonzer still intrude as a sop to Pommy readers, though such words are seldom, if ever, used in present-day Australia.

Bazza, taboo and the Australian lexicon

• Of course, Humphries – especially through Bazza McKenzie – didn’t just breath fresh life into old Australian words, but coined many of his own.
• Slang generally flourishes wherever things go bump in the night, and Humphries had in his sights Victorian taboos around body parts and bodily effluvia.
• He was also a master of the frankenphrase – pulling together bits and pieces of the Australian lexicon, and reinventing them.

Beer-swilling Bazza and our slang from ‘Down Under’

• The verses were very much inspired by a character he had called Barry McKenzie, who was a beer-swilling Australian who travelled to England, a very larger-than-life character.
• He’s a master of comedy and he had a lot of expressions that we grew up listening to and emulating.
• To survive, slang expressions require what Ben Zimmer once described as a “perfect lexicographical storm”.