..and you Aussies know the rest. Someone asked me the other day about Aussies and swearing, and the Queensland government seems to have forgotten that it’s part of our national character, so here’s Adam Hills on Spicks and Specks a few months ago explaining a certain Oz tradition to one of you foreign types (the profanities are bleeped on this one).
The following videos are NSFW (Not Safe For playing at many Workplaces)
This whole traditional canto respondu to this particular Angels song sums up a lot about the Oz psyche, I reckon. We like our emphatic ejaculations peppering otherwise mundane sentences. What if Doc and the boys do a show in the Sunshine State? Is the whole crowd going to get fined? If not, then why will other people get fined for saying the same thing somewhere else?
The band was recorded (terribly quality on a phone) at the 2009 St Kilda Festival and you can hear the ritual very clearly. That’s what it’s really like, not the studio sanitised version above. I hope you can also appreciate that if the recording was on better equipment you’d be able to hear just how awesome they are as a live band.
I like this guy’s parody of it as a Farewell Anthem to John Howard after the 2007 election, too. Nice montage work.
Here’s Doc without the rest, but accompanied by the ever versatile RocKwiz orchestra, performing the ritual in the Gershwin room at the Esplanade Hotel in 2007.
For those feeling a little nostalgic, here are The Angels (apparently known overseas as Angel City) rocking it out in their 1976 prime (back when Doc was one of the rockers on my poster wall). This version IS SFW :
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* Quicklink to recent open threads
mindyhoyden: 
bluemilk: 
vivsmythe: 
CastIronBalcony: 
puzzlement: 
ChallyWrites: 
ilauredhel: 
Wow, I feel like I’ve missed half of Australian culture sometimes – I know this song but didn’t know this tradition!
There you go Chally – your Aussieness has been enhanced!
*beer magically appears in hand* *develops tan* It’s all happeniiiiiiiing, it’s like some kind of Australian-puberty or something!
I really need to stop commenting here until I can say something normal in your comments section. Carry on.
You’ll know you’ve got it down when you can say “rack off ya mongrel” in exactly the right tone.
Sorry, that should be “rack off ya flamin’ mongrel”.
*snerk* I remember the hilarity of trying to teach some Usian friends to swear like an Aussie, and one woman loved “Ya bloody drongo!” so much she apparently began using it in Chicago. I was rather tickled.
All prompted by Howard’s visit to the US, and him using some slang in a speech. Fair dinkum, I think. Anyone remember?
I do remember a bunch of cultural cringers making right galahs of themselves over it.
nopstalgia indeed! I was a fan then but must have blocked out the mullet and the bass! when did he stop playing bass?
umm that’s nostalgia
There’s even a lol cat!
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Note from a U.S.-dwelling ex-pat: I used to get into a bit of trouble swearing at work – not around customers, exactly, but possibly within earshot of them – but I think my boss has come around to my impassioned explanation that “swearing is like a national SPORT where I come from… the only one I’m good at!” …heh.
I’m going to be earwormed by this all day now. Which, as it happens, suits my mood today to perfection.
I’ve only seen The Angels live once, it was at the Metro not that long ago. Fun times.
What’s even more depressing is that the other great national linguistic skills are declining too – things like coming up with apt metaphors for things or chaining together curses extemporaneously working from least intense to most intense. Certainly when I demonstrate either of these, I tend to get funny looks, and people watching me as though my head is going to start spinning next…