Monkeys! Now that would be something.Whenever someone around here returns from Central America they know the first order of business is to share their monkey pictures with me.
Man you are definitely in the bush in this OP.
The Never Never is the northern region of The Outback, say from the Kimberleys, Northern Territory and across to Far North Queensland to the Great Dividing Range.
The Never Never was first referenced in Arch Stirling’s 1884 book “Ride in North Queensland”.
Also mentioned in Boake’s poem “Where the Dead Men Lie” (1891)
“Out on the wastes of the Never Never -
That’s where the dead men lie!
There where the heat-waves dance forever -
That’s where the dead men lie!”
1891 was a year of crippling drought and also the time of the Shearers Strike which saw the formation of the Australian Labor Party and the backstory to our unofficial national anthem Waltzing Matilda.
The area is subtropical and has only two seasons wet & dry and is a different from the more populated south east of the country as the Louisiana Bayous are from Chicago.
We of the Never Never (1908) was a novel, we’d consider it an Australia classic, by Jeannie Gunn about her time on Elsey Station an isolated cattle run of about 2.25mil acres. It’s a good read though the women of my family consider Jeanie to be a wimp because she was only out there for 18 months, not the decades popularly thought.
Woop Woop is another way back of beyond kind of place, perhaps Australia’s equivalent to the boonies.
Wagga Wagga is a real and rather attractive large inland city. As Australia is very urbanised and very coastal, any decent inland town is a notable aberration.
The southeastern equivalent to the Never Never was to locate something (or someone in the case of hero lost explorers and, more recently stranded German backpackers in combi vans) as ‘Beyond the Black Stump’.
You can also buy something on the never never which refers to purchasing something on credit or the old-fashioned system of ‘hire-purchase’ that would take years and years to pay off.
Platypus - very hard to see in the wild. Mostly nocturnal (they hunt with their eyes closed) and very shy. They are not as big as most people think.
They are not actually uncommon - there are quite a few around in creeks in the outer suburbs (as recorded by wildlife experts) - but good luck in seeing one.
I think I MAY have seen one or two in the wild - by which I mean I saw a brief flash of something splashing into the water and never seen again. Could have been a platypus - could have been a native water rat (also quite rare) - could have just been a black rat (which swim).
Platypus (actually platypodes:cool:) may be the second-cutest animal in Australia - fortunately, the cutest - the echidna - is very common, easy to spot, and slow-moving. And it’s always a good day when you see an echidna.
Yes, Monty Python mentioned the Australian table wine, Chateau Louis St Wagga Wagga.
(“This one has a bouquet like an aborigine’s armpit; it really opens up the sluices at both ends…”)
I bought a book over 10 years about echidnas with a lot of pictures (the book, not the echidnas). I like echidnas.
I just wanted to say this to a sympathetic audience.
Expanding a bit, doubling the word in the original indigenous language is usually* an intensifier. It’s thought that “wagga” means crow - so Wagga Wagga comes out to something like “place with lots of crows”.
As an import, living in central Victoria, I’m still pretty charmed by many of the native beasties. Wallabies and possums are darned cute little beasties, and when we lived out in the country they were pretty commonplace. Possums, unfortunately, have the most ungodly, death-rattle like call, and like to wake people up in the middle of the night.
Snakes I avoid with great care, but there were several out there. I once saw our landlady, who lived on the same property, beat a snake to death with a rake. Tough old broad.**
My wife (native Australian) is charmed by squirrels when we visit the States.
*There’s lots of indigenous languages - largely lost over the years, alas. As a result, we’re often unsure precisely what something means in a particular dialect.
**The landlady, not the snake. The snake went down pretty easy, as I recall.
translation: he got angry and bossy or just too obnoxious, so they sent him away
A refuse colleciton truck driver says his very australian friend is home, but his bin isn’t out.
He asks knocks on the door and says "Hey, where’s ya bin ? "
Answer: “On walkabout”
He says: "Nah, where’s ya wheelie bin ? "
Answer: “In jail”.
Just went back to your good post and went to the “this” cite, which and besides the photo I was expecting is a redirect from Merriam Webster, and it has a complete discussion of exactly the difference between “bush” and “outback.” So:
…The word was first used in the mid-1800s pretty literally: it was first used an adverb to refer to the space behind a house or a building, and especially the back yard of a house. The Aussies wittily borrowed this sense of out back to refer to the remote interior parts of their enormous continent:
Grass will be abundant out back.
— Wagga Wagga Advertiser, 17 Apr. 1869
By the end of the 19th century, the adverb had become the noun outback, and its generic “backyard” use dwindled as outback became more and more identified with the Australian interior…
Note: “Wagga Wagga” is in here, which I now can face with impunity, but…what the hell is “bonzer,” in the cite’s headline no less?
ETA: Never mind. Just read the whole cite, a list of words.
“'Ask an Aussie to name a truly Australian word, and they might yell “Bonzer!” Bonzer, sometimes also spelled bonza, means “first-rate” or “excellent,” and it is the Australian equivalent of the American ‘awesome’…[etymology unknown]”
FWIW, Wiki’s advanced scholars agree with you, and in light of the good recent US Southerners/Kentuckians: What’s a “holler?”, the following excerpt from the Wiki “boondocks” entry may be noted:
The term has evolved into American slang used to refer to the countryside or any implicitly isolated rural/wilderness area, regardless of topography or vegetation. Similar slang or colloquial words are “the sticks”, “the wops”, “the backblocks”, or “Woop Woop” in Australia and New Zealand, “bundu” in South Africa, and “out in the tules” in California. The diminutive “boonies” can be heard in films about the Vietnam War such as Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989) used by American soldiers to designate rural areas of Vietnam.
“The Wops…Backblocks” I also never heard of, not even as a vaguely Australian term. “Wops” in America is a pejorative for Italians, as I think it is generally in Anglo, but the non-American word “wog” for contemptible (dark-skinned?) foreigner may at times encompass or replace “wops.” I think.
Now I gotta ask Californians in another OP how often they hear “out of the tules,” because I never did.
ETA: I also thought “the sticks” was a purely American term, and if it’s used in Australia too it must have been be used in England first and spread to both of us, but I don’t know about its use in England now or in Australia.
Sticks is still used in Australia, as in someone might live ‘out in the sticks’ often interchangeable with ‘out in the bush’. Out in the sticks is not quite as far as Woop Woop, the Never Never, or ‘Back of Bourke’. But it’s a long way from the cities.
? Now you’re just fucking with me, right?
Still in play:
“Wops”
“Backblocks”
Nope, she’s giving you the drum.
Bourke is a town in north western NSW pop about 2,000.
It’s on the Darling River and there are no permanent inland rivers west or north of Bourke. If you are out the back of Bourke you are halfway to the Never Never.
When the Australian inland was being settled the properties/land originally the squatters took up was termed runs. These were usually vast. They weren’t surveyed and really had no well defined boundary. They would just be proclaimed to run from this creek to this creek or some other land mark.
Progressively, particularly after WW1 or when the railways were pushed out the runs were broken up. They were surveyed and cut up into units for sale called blocks. Size varied, the idea being that each was big enough for one family to earn a living off.
They were never large enough and usually a family would buy several adjoining blocks, notionally one for the parents, one for each son etc. They’d build on one which was called the home or house block. With development the main roads usually ran close to the various home blocks.
The others were called the back blocks which therefore are more remote, less developed etc. Access may only be via another property/block.
Yes, Bonzer is first rate, excellent, grouse, splendid, ripper, wacko, very pleasing.
Bonzer only comes with one acceptable qualifier i.e. bewdy bonzer.
Spoken deadpan it can also be used absolutely ironically.