When I was a boy at Cardiff, admittedly a long time ago, we would ride our pushbikes and play for a whole day well away from home. 

Then, around 5pm, the mothers would stand at the front door and call out the child’s name and indicate that tea was ready.

We had a mailman who would come around twice a day, and once on Saturdays, sometimes on a horse. 

When he left mail he would blow a whistle. The rabbit man would ply his trade on the gravel roads; the ice man would call in the back door, unannounced, and we didn’t have to wear helmets when we rode our bikes. Some bikes didn’t have brakes.

They were the good old days, or at least that’s how I remember them.

I thought about those days when I heard a man on the ABC telling how he used to give his girlfriend a “double dink”.

Although that was a blast from the past, I had to look it up. We used to give each other a dink, but I had always thought it was a word that we children had made up.

But there it was – dink and sometimes double dink; even double donk and double bank.

It brought back lots of memories, none of which you want to know about.

It didn’t refer to the modern term of double income, no kids.

My big dictionary listed the word as Australian, origin unknown. Its first reference is from The Bulletin in 1934, “the fortunate Melbourne schoolkid with a bike is asked by his cobbers for a dink”.

Sidney Baker in his Dictionary of Australian Slang also had the term donk. I had never heard of this term, and apparently neither had my big 20-volume dictionary, because it said donk was an abbreviation of donkey or “a very silly person”.

My only copy of Sidney Baker’s work is an old book called The Australian Language. This was published in 1945 and he mentions dink.

But I was disappointed to discover that we kids didn’t make up the word after all.

Dink also these days has several other meanings, according to the big dictionary, such as to dress finely, a tennis term, an abbreviation for dinkum and a derogatory term for a Vietnamese person.

I admit I had never heard of some of these terms, only the term to give a lift to a person on my bicycle.

The lift was very uncomfortable, because the person had to sit on the crossbar. There was no other place to sit.

GA Wilkes says the term came from doubling up on a horse. He refers to double bank or double dink.

The Australian Dictionary mentions dink, double dink and double bank.

A person once close to me jumped one side of a horse and promptly slid off the other side. The horse just stood there, I am sure with a smile on its face.

But that had nothing to do with dink.

I have to tell you about a Sydney Morning Herald story on February 13, 1980. The Herald reported that a particular boy only rode a pushbike.

Then it added: “Girls only start to get interesting after they cease to accept dinks on bikes.”

I decline to say that is the way I remember it.

lauriebarber.com; lbword@midcoast.com.au