In case you missed the news, Australia will have a federal election on September 7.
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Already some of the key words are starting to appear, such as trust, care, I’m here to help and fair dinkum.
A city newspaper last week carried a letter that said people would soon tire of hearing and reading the expression fair dinkum. The letter added: “No ordinary Australian I know or have met uses it.”
The letter writer failed to acknowledge that many politicians, in some people’s eyes, are not ordinary Australians.
Somebody else in a city newspaper said “whoever says fair dinkum isn’t”.
Fair dinkum usually is associated with Australia, despite some thoughts that the Chinese in during the gold rush used to say ding kam to mean “real gold” while the Chinese were trying to sell their gold to government assayers.
Several people trace the expression to the Australian gold rush days. Some say the expression referred to “fair drinking”, with some foreigners having difficulty saying fair drinking, but I find that explanation difficult to believe.
The first use in print that I could find came in Rolf Boldrewood’s book Robbery Under Arms, published in 1888.
My book has on its cover pictures of Peter Finch, a much younger David McCallum (still appearing on our television screens as the forensic expert in NCIS and a host of others, including McCallum’s first wife Jill Ireland, Maureen Swanson, Ronald Lewis and Ursula Finlay.
In 1888 the word meant exertion, or hard work (“It took us an hour’s hard dinkum to get near the peak” wrote Rolf Boldrewood).
The word also had a wartime use with some Australian and New Zealand troops called The Dinkums.
From exertion, or work, the expression came to refer to reliability, or truthfulness.
In 1894 The Bulletin quoted a judge as asking if a witness was fair dinkum.
In 1916 the same magazine said a cure for mange in horses was “certified as being dinkum”.
I found many examples of somebody having been called a dinkum Aussie.
But we can’t be too careful. Crooked Mick in his book The Dinkum Aussie Dictionary says that if somebody says “fair dinkum mate, I wouldn’t lie to you now, would I?” the answer is probably “yes”.
Susan Butler, on a slightly more elevated plane, in The Dinkum Dictionary, disputes the story about the Chinese.
She says the word was brought to Australia in the dialectical speech of white settlers and refers to work requirements and to work generally.
Her work as the editor of the Macquarie Dictionary probably gives her a bit more credibility than was given to Crooked Mick.
Bruce Moore, from the Oxford camp, says dinkum has similar meaning to jonick and ryebuck. But I think dinkum sounds more Australian.
Some evidence exists that dinkum, or something similar with a similar meaning, existed in parts of England during the 19th century.
I suggest the expression dinky-di is a corruption of that fair dinkum. In 1918 N Campbell in a literary effort called Dinky-Di Soldier wrote “they makes me a dinky-di soldier”.
Many years later another bloke was called “a dinky-di Englishman”. Even the Canberra Times in 1984 described Rolf Harris as “that dinky-di da Vinci”. I think they were being complimentary.
But ask yourself : “When did you last say something was fair dinkum? Are we losing the more colourful aspects of our language?”
The Bulletin in 1974 said the people in Canberra “aren’t fair dinkum”.
And that’s where we came in…
lbword@midcoast.com.au