Hey, I know we’ve got a few Aussies on the board here! So I’m asking you to explain the slang in this song for me:
Specifically, “and the men chunder”.
What the hell is “chunder”?
Cuz I feel like chundering sometimes, except I don’t know what’s involved. Can I chunder by myself? Will people frown upon me if I do so? Hep me, I be hyp-mo-tized!
Chunder = vomit.
I don’t, but I have been known to plunder on occasions.
Hell no. You drive that porcelain bus.
A technicolour yawn. The big spit. The liquid laugh.
A spew.
A yak.
To quote Barry McKenzie:
So in Australia puking is considered a fun recreational activity, specifically for manly men?
THanks!
You got it.
A bit more on the origins of the word
I was in Australia in 1983-84, and my Aussie friends assured me that the term comes from “Watch Under!”.
Apparently, getting shitfaced while stuffing yourself with clams at a barbecue on the beach, then engaging in recreational distance barfing off a bridge/boardwalk/pier/balcony/whatever was available was considered great fun. It was only polite to give a warning to those under you.
Today is Australia Day* so there will be a bit of chunder about.
*The main Australia day tradition involves a BBQ and the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol - leading to stuff like this: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/police-call-for-australia-day-grog-ban/story-e6freuy9-1225818994464
If I may take the admittedly uncertain step of being an American answering a question about a foreign country, allow me to suggest that you may have misinterpreted a part of that delightful little prose by Barry McKenzie.
To wit - the “Manly Pier” he’s referencing is surely meant to refer to the actual pier in the town of Manly, Australia which, according to their website, is
1000 pardons if you were simply being irreverent there, or, indeed, if I’m wrong about what McKenzie actually meant; but having been to Manly before, it just seems like the kind of place that deserves whatever publicity it can get.
Bazza didn’t limit himself to singing about vomitus.
He wrote a ditty about his favourite pet, too.
I also seem to remember reading another term for barfing was “calling Earl.” It was either in the Tony Horwitz book One for the Road, or if not, Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country.
I sure miss Toohey’s Old.
Talking to God on the porcelain phone is one of my favourite euphemisms.
(I suspect that Aussies have words/descriptions for spew much in the same was as the inuit have words for snow)
I love this site & am bookmarking it!
I’m a kiwi, but we also use this expression. “Watch under” seems as good an explanation as any.
I’ve always been partial to “talking to Ralph on the big white phone.”
And Ralph’s friend Hughie, who has a nicely onomatopœic sound to his name. 
Tangential question: it seems to me that the singer doesn’t sound very Australian. Is this an Aussie accent, and just a different one from what many of us foreigners are used to, or what? Even early in the song, the way he sings "breakfast ", for example, is cute and interesting but I don’t know what accent I would associate with, if forced to have a guess.
And now I have to go and listen to “Men Without Hats” because I always tend to confuse those two groups such that one always ends up making me think of the other one and then I go off to listen. Yes, I am an expert in happy time-wasting.
Men Without Hats were Canadians weren’t they? Ah well, they’re all colonials.
Something I learned on this board is that the flute solo in that song is an adaptation of the Kookabarra song, and that Men at Work were unsuccessfully sued over it.
Geek trivia: written on the front of their “fried out kombi” is “TANELORN RULES”, which greatly excited me when I first saw the video, having read lots of Michael Moorcock (and thinking it cool at the time).