ACL 2009
Australian Literature
Footscray Park
Lecture 11
'A Fair Suck of the Sauce Bottle' or 'Cooking With Gas' or 'The Suppository of Knowledge': The Language of Mateship and Bullying in Australian Literature
by Ian Syson
When I titled this lecture, I did so to have a bit of a go at Kevin Rudd's populist tendency to attempt to use Australian idiom to ingratiate himself to the electorate. I added recently the second phrase because it was such a bizarre anachronism and the third one in the interests of political balance and the fact that it was quite hilarious.
However, while I still want to have a crack at Rudd and and other politicians, it's clear that in this instance he wasn't as far off the mark as some would have it.
In some quarters there was dismay when Prime Minister Rudd used the expression fair shake of the sauce bottle in June this year. Some accused the prime minister of not being ‘the full bottle' on Australian idioms, and of mixing up the Australian fair suck of the sauce bottle with the international fair roll of the dice and the like. If the idiom is mistaken, it is a fairly well-entrenched mistake, first noted by the Australian National Dictionary Centre in a speech by Senator Kemp at a Senate Estimates Committee in 1995: ‘Mr Chairman, just so that all of us feel that we have had a fair shake of the sauce bottle, my colleague also has quite a number of environmental questions.'
The underlying idiom is the old and well-established fair go , which was first recorded in Australian English in 1904. As an interjection, this means ‘steady on!; be reasonable!; give us a go!' By 1924, an expanded variant of fair go had appeared: fair crack of the whip . From the late 1960s and early 1970s more variants appeared: fair suck of the sauce bottle (sometimes abbreviated to fair suck), fair suck of the saveloy (sometimes abbreviated to fair suck of the sav), fair suck of the sausage , and finally fair shake of the sauce bottle .
It seems that those criticizing Rudd could be accused of preferring an Americanism to Rudd's formulation.
We also need to take account of an number of other issues
- Regionality (Qld)
- Decorum (as PM he's hardly going to say ‘fair suck of the sav' – which is what I want to hear!)
- The fact that there are no set idiomatic phrases that aren't susceptible to historical and contextual change.
In the end what Rudd said was legitimate. Less legitimate was his attempt to connect with voters through an inauthentic adoption of ‘ordinary language'.
John Howard was another politician who connected strategically to the ‘Australian people'. His much-vaunted love of cricket and other sport are examples. But Howard also was aware of the need to capture the vernacular for his politics.
The Prime Minister's draft preamble, released on 23 March 1999 :
With hope in God, the Commonwealth of Australia is constituted by the equal sovereignty of all its citizens.
The Australian nation is woven together of people from many ancestries and arrivals.
Our vast island continent has helped to shape the destiny of our Commonwealth and the spirit of its people.
Since time immemorial our land has been inhabited by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, who are honoured for their ancient and continuing cultures.
In every generation immigrants have brought great enrichment to our nation's life.
Australians are free to be proud of their country and heritage, free to realise themselves as individuals, and free to pursue their hopes and ideals.
We value excellence as well as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship . Australia 's democratic and federal system of government exists under law to preserve and protect all Australians in an equal dignity which may never be infringed by prejudice or fashion or ideology nor invoked against achievement.
In this spirit we, the Australian people, commit ourselves to this Constitution.
Ref: Scalmer 'The Battlers versus the Elites' Overland 154; and, 'A postscript, A Prospect' Overland 191.
Melbourne historian, Sean Scalmer has demonstrated the way in which Howard appropriated terms previously associated with the left in order to connect with a certain section of the working class. Words and terms like
- Battler
- Mateship
- Fair go
These were turned into words that could apply to people who were well off but who saw themselves as being exploited by an inner-city left-wing elite.
People who were ‘natural' Labor voters (self-employed tradesmen, people working in the mining industry) were seduced by the rhetoric of their exploitation by greenies, do-gooders, queue-jumping asylum seekers and so forth.
It seemed in the early part of this century that 4wd-driving, foxtel-watching, 100k per annum battlers and their mates only wanted a fair go .
Terms that once applied to people who were unemployed, living below the poverty line or disadvantaged in other ways were turned on upside down to reconstruct these people as the oppressors of Howard's Battlers.
Howard on who are the battlers
No doubt this is all a little confusing. Who is right; just who are the battlers then?
The reasons politicians are so keen to capture the demotic is that Australia has a rich rhetorical history of egalitarianism and fair play. Whether Australia has a rich actual history of these characteristics is another matter.
Whoever sets the framework of this rhetoric weilds a lot of power
We hear many stories of fair play that have come down to us:
- convict solidarity
- bush mateship
- Ned Kelly
- bush unionism
- ANZAC
- sporting fairness
But each of them if taken too uncritically can mask stories of bullying, cruelty and treachery that sit alongside these more noble narratives.
This week's stories have been chosen because they engage with this question of the way Australians treat each other.
They ask:
- How do those in power treat those below them?
- How do insiders treat outsiders?
- How do those who mistreat others see their actions?
- How do people treat their peers?
- Just what is Australian egalitarianism?
Peter Carey, 'Crabs' – a surreal story about being trapped in a drive-in cinema – about what happens when refugees are gathered and the dynamics of power in such situations – about the absence of egalitarianism in high pressure situations – about the limits to anarchy.
The central character Crabs, a victim of bullying, borrows his friend Frank's car to go to the Drive-In with his girlfriend. It's a risky business but Crabs thinks it's worth the risk because of the potential benefits he will get out of it.
Unfortunately Frank's car has its wheels stolen and so they are stuck in the Drive-In indefinitely.
The story is an allegory: but an allegory of what? I see ways in which it prefigures the detention camps of the last decade.
239, 244
But perhaps it is also talking about a future in which our obsession with cars is complete.
241
Crabs morphs into a vehicle because he is totally at one with the idea that cars are at the centre of life. A changing Australia prompts Crabs to change into a "a motor car or vehicle in good health".
244-245
Olga Masters, 'The Rages of Mrs Torrens' – small town rejection of eccentricity and madness. Yet it reveals a hypocrisy beneath the rejection. The failure of the town to discuss the final rage of Mrs Torrens is because it was too close to some truths that weren't to be spoken.
306
John Morrison 'North Wind' – the story of a man who tries his best to do the right thing in a perilous situation – what happens when we read behind the main character's rhetoric. Is he in fact someone who has manipulated a situation and the telling of the story to put himself in a better light.
Morrison also wrote a fabulously mean story about a syndicate that won tattslotto and the person holding he ticket kept the winnings for himself
Les Murray – . His oeuvre might be read as a celebration of small town mindedness as opposed to the brutality of the city. This was revealed in 'Sydney and the Bush' .
Read 'Sprawl'
jas h duke – Australian history as a narrative of bullying.
Eureka poems and 'Happy Birthday Australia'
Dennis Macintosh, Beaten by a Blow –
Story of a boy who grows up beliving in hard work and who is proud of his capacity to work hard. He feels alienated by the city and factory work and embarks on a career as shearer (possibly one of the most romantic Australian profession) and while he is a relative success at the work he is never quite rewarded or satisfied.
He periodocally returns to the city and his girlfriend -- wife hoping to find satisfaction there but inevitably returns to the bush.
As a result h e fails to make and keep strong connections and he often seems to alienate his employers or the townspeople nearby the stations at which he shears.
The book dispels a number of myths
- hard work
- fair go/mateship -- demise of unionism.
Link to Dennis reading BBAB on Radio national.