Just to be clear, unless you're an Australian the word 'creek' is the noise made by walking on a loose floorboard and the word for water running off a hill is a 'stream' or if you're in Scotland, a 'burn'. Using the word 'thongs' to describe a pair of flip-flops could lead to an embarrassing misunderstanding but 'gummies' referring to waterproof rubber boots does seem to make some sense. All these are examples of differences that have crept into everyday use in Australia.
None of which explains how the pedestrian lights in Maryborough transformed into the Mary Poppins 'brolly' down or 'brolly' up symbols nor indeed why this 'sheila' (beautifully dressed lady) was so willing to have her picture taken. (This town is where P L Travers, author of the Mary Poppins novels, was born.)
Maryborough also gave us an iron pig,
a close encounter with a train,
a spectacular 'dunny'...
...and some incredibly old trees.
What more could you ask for.
On our visit there we were blessed with a sighting of a pair of 'brumbies' (wild horses) grazing at the side of the road
then on our return through Poona we finally got to see what any visit to Australia would not be complete without. (It turned out Poona is pretty much overrun with 'roos'.)
On one of our trips out we visited an 'op' shop, something we might have called a charity shop, and on the drive there we kept seeing yellow road signs with the word 'CREST' on them. At first we thought this was an instruction to hold outspread fingers to the head to imitate the crested cockatoo we'd seen earlier but eventually we realised that it was the equivalent of the 'Hidden Dip' sign used on UK roads. So just a different way of looking at the same thing. Thankfully these subtle changes to the language were easy for us 'pommies' to understand and we didn't make complete fools of ourselves during our time in 'Straya'.
No comments:
Post a Comment