I was just listening to the old “Men at Work” song Down Under, and some of the lyrics have me puzzled. Can anyone explain these (see full lyrics for context)?
I assume we’re talking about smoking marijuana here. Is that what “zombie” is? And a “Kombi” is an old VW bus, right?
I always thought they were saying “blow,” but LyricWiki says “glow.” Are they speaking of sweating (as in “horses sweat, men perspire, women glow”) or something else?
Chunder? Does this mean vomit?
Yes, apparently. Quite a downer when I learned that.
The lyrics rely heavily on rhyme, obviously. I wouldn’t read much more into it than that. I would guess that the lyricist started from the phrase “down under” and quickly came up with thunder, plunder and chunder. He or she then ran with the idea and built the whole song out of slightly forced rhymes, such as “beer flows”/“women glow”.
I’m a big fan of a lot of Australian TV and a lot of is is full of rhyme slang, which is so odd that sometimes it has to be explained on the TV plot.
And a lot of common expressions, according to my Australian friends, will start out dirty and be adjusted to a “clean version” that gets broadcast. So it makes more sense in the original but dirty version.
I know I’ve had a drink or five, but… a “Wombat” is asking these questions?
“Chunder” in British English does, indeed, mean vomit. I assume it’s the same in Oz.
On a hippie trailhead full of zombies.
Different than “on a hippie trail, head full of zombie”.
Whatever the intent, the sentence seems to simply mean that the writer is in a microbus as the terminus of a trail travelled by hippie burnouts.
Plunderers steal what glows. Simple rhyming. No need to read any sweat-related metaphor into it.
one o’ them expatriate wombats …
It was introduced into British English by a Mr Barry Humphries, so I think we can assume that, yes.
Only, the line is On a hippie trail, head full of zombie. There’s clearly a comma as it is sung, and ‘zombie’ is not plural. Also, the video does not show them at a trailhead. Rather, it shows them traveling in a fried-out Kombie. (The hippies are in back.) I’ve always interpreted it as ‘We were living the hippie live, stoned on weed and driving a VW Bus.’
I wouldn’t take the lyrics of Down Under as necessarily indicative of Australian slang. Those lyrics are pretty weird, even to Australian ears.
And yes, Chunder does indeed mean “to vomit”.
“Chunder” comes from seafaring days when a sailor would yell, “Watch under!” as a warning to seamen on lower decks that he was indeed, about to hurl over the side so that no one below him would stick his head out of a porthole at an inopportune moment. This was quickly shortened to “Chunder!” as time was usually of the essence when it came time to making it to the side of the ship.
This link suggests a different etymology for “chunder”:
I agree that Kombie refers to a bus and that they’re travelling in it. I don’t discern any meaningful pause or change in tone or tempo on the album version of the song that would lead me to believe that he’s singing anything other than “trailhead”. It’s not trail… sax solo… head. Do you have a cite that makes reasonable claim that “head full of zombie” is Australian slang for high on drugs… one that doesn’t directly reference the Men At Work song, please.
I do discern a comma. ‘Trail’ is drawn out a little. Also, they are ‘traveling’. Traveling on a trail; not stopped at a trailhead. And again, ‘zombie’ is singluar; not plural. It doesn’t make sense for someplace to be ‘full’ of one zombie; but it does make sense if ‘zombie’ is slang for an intoxicant. And the video does not show anything resembling a trailhead.
As for a cite that ‘zombie’ is Australian slang for marijuana, no; I don’t have that. I said that ‘marijuana’ was my interpretation of it. It could be LSD or something. The narrator finds himself in a den in Bombay ‘with a slack jaw and not much to say’. ‘Zombie’ being a drug would not be out of place in the context of the song.
Almost all the etymological histories that claim to be from seafaring days turn out to not be true. See “Whole Nine Yards” and “Brass Monkey” for example.
‘Trailhead’ seems a peculiarly US term to me (and Merriam-Webster’s Learners Dictionary seems to agree) so it would seem a bit strange, to me at least, if that was the phrasing in an Australian song. If only for that reason, I’d go with the way Johnny L.A. hears it, even if that requires a bit of convoluted derivation for ‘zombie’.
Seems to me the music video explains every line, though you may need an antipodean outlook to connect some dots.
You seem to be working pretty hard to hear that comma. I just listened again - no pause. Trailhead, clearly.
He could have said staccato - Trail… Head…
He says trailhead.
You seem to be working pretty hard to not hear that comma. I just listened to your link, and again – ‘trail’ is slightly drawn out. ‘… Trail, head…’, clearly.