brits1

Happy New Year, I hope it’s a good one for you and yours. lol my DH literally drags us into any graveyard of age on our travels lol both here in the UK and overseas and I can now say I also find it really interesting. In the 1700’s my husbands family were living in Cromford Derbyshire prior to that they had “migrated” from Buckinghamshire via Stoke looking for work (part of my family were doing the same thing via Devon,Wales and then through Stoke, they were in Stoke at the same time….a small world) other than that my side of the family came from Wales and Scotland all moving to find work. Our DS has a lovely girlfriend from Sheffield (just off the snake pass) and her family are German/Scottish and Lincolnshire decent….and most of our friends have lived in the North West for a few generations but all of them Originated from all over England….that ruddy Industrial revolution lol

Gordon Barlow

There was a lot more internal migration in Britain that many people think. I found a lot of it in my family-history research - and even a lot of travellers to and from the British colonies. An ancestor of Linda's went from southern England across to California and came back, before heading for Victoria (Australia). One of mine went from England to New South Wales and thence to the USA and then back to NSW. He had earlier moved from Cornwall to Leeds as a strike-breaker during the early days of the labour unions in central England, working for a Mr Salt in his mill outside Leeds. Back in Sydney after his US adventure, he dragged his wife and sons up to Queensland, where they (the boys) first ferried goods up and down the Brisbane River to Ipswich, and then went into the timber business. Hancock is still a reasonably big name in timber in the district.

brits1

I was telling a friend about this and she said the furthest her family had moved was from Lancashire ( looking from the early 1700’s) to just a mile over to Yorkshire where all of the close and extended family still very happily live, I sometimes think people like her a very lucky indeed.

Gordon Barlow

Returning to Page One for a minute... I haven't yet found an answer to my original question: why so few shrimps on the Barbie? It's still a puzzle.

Are British immigrants in Oz more sedate by nature than those in Canada, for instance? Maybe. "The Maple Leaf" - BE's Canadian counterpart of "the Barbie" - has many more active threads. Why is that? Are Australians more wary of dealing with anonymity than Canadians? Could be. Online sites like BE may well be a dying breed, in the face of Facebook and its like. We have anonymity, Facebook etc doesn't. I wonder if that is a factor..

I have three BE threads on the go: this one, the Canadian "Life's Turning Points", and "Back in the Day" on The Rest of the World Forum. I keep a rough tab on how they compete. Canada gets about 2000 visits a month, The Rest of the World gets one thousand, and this one comes in the middle. There's no problem. It's not a matter of problem. But it's a puzzle. Does Canada get more British migrants than the others? Maybe that's the answer.

Gordon Barlow

A recent Daily Mail had an article on Australian slang-terms old and new, and which old ones had passed their use-by date and which hadn't. Reportedly, men no longer "have to see a man about a dog" somewhere among the trees; and nobody is urged not to "come the raw prawn". However, among the survivors is ""fair suck of the sav/saveloy", I'm glad to say; and winning the lottery is still in most places "better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick". Nice to know.

I am always suspicious of new slang terms. Too often they originate with a bunch of drunk ockers deliberately inventing stupid new stuff. "Flat out like a lizard drinking" is one of those, and I hope no immigrants give it legs.

Gordon Barlow

Over on the Canadian "Maple Leaf" Forum we're talking about the latest "Woke" terms for what used to be everyday words. But it's a topic that is fully relevant to our "Barbie", too. I grew up in Australia at a time when words for our new immigrants were plentiful, and when we didn't take much care about their effect on the newcomers. These days, of course, names that could be dismissed as disparaging or dismissive are now ranked as "hate speech" - which I consider overkill. The word "hate" has been severely devalued, surely. It isn't hateful to abbreviate the names of certain communities - Pakistanis, aboriginals, and Japanese, for instance. Substituting slang-words used in common speech, for the formal versions of certain nationalities, is also not an example of hate. I'm thinking of the F-WORD for the French, the K-WORD for Germans, and the several C-WORDS for the Chinese. The DP-TERM for the people from the Baltic nations, and of course the W-word for the Italians that was a mild variant for that nation's word for "handsome". Are all those unmentionable dismissive and/or disparaging words really expressions of communal hatred? Of course not.

We aren't asked to abandon the word "cretin" because it derives from "Christian" (according to my Oxford Etymological Dictionary) or the word "slave" because it is a mild variant of the word "Slav". Or are we? The bad, bad, unspeakably bad N-WORD has been replaced in the USA by a newly recruited J-WORD. I can't even tell you what the J-WORD is, because that would be immediately censored. You'll have to scratch around and find out for yourselves! It's only a matter of time before that replacement is banned as racist hate-speech, and a new circle will begin. What a mess we're in.

Here's a cautionary tale... One of Linda's great-aunts married a Von Birt immigrant from Schlesvig-Holstein, back in the day. During The Great War (WWI), anti-German sentiment obliged him to drop the Von, and he became plain old Mister Birt. He resented that very much. So he named his first daughter Yvonne. Nice one!

Gordon Barlow

On an Internet site's comments page yesterday I had occasion to refer to Linda's and my days "on the road" in Turkey back in the 1960s. I wrote, "Turkey was immensely kind to us. Someone reckoned that being Australian must have helped, with the Turks feeling superior because their army had beaten back the ANZAC invaders in 1915 at Gallipoli....But most of the people we mixed with would never have heard of the invasion."

My question to readers of this thread is: was I correct in calling it an invasion? I think so, but invasion is a pretty provocative word with some folk. The nation had only been in existence for fourteen years; so its its citizens' previous invasions were done as British - the invasion of the Afrikaaner republics in South Africa, and of course the wholesale dispossession of the Australian aborigines. The colonies ("States", only since 1901) had been under martial law until just a few decades before - except for South Australia - although at least one of its early Governors had been a British Army officer.

So. What does The Team think? Is Anzac Day a celebration of the nation's first foreign invasion? How would you describe the event to a Turk?

Gordon Barlow

I've just this minute posted on the Rest of the World forum an amusing little report on our (Linda's and my) entry into the USSR in 1965. Collecting my Beetle from the Customs Shed in Ankara after three months' hitching our way through the Middle East, we drove up inside the Iron Curtain to the border of East Germany. There we were refused entry and had to gallop to safety in The West before our visa expired that midnight. After a bit of a tiff, she and I made our separate ways up to Finland and picked up the thread again there. (We might never have met again, except we both had visas for the USSR and we didn't want them to go to waste!) We eventually made it back to England, via Poland and East Germany. My Mum was waiting for me in London. She and I travelled around Britain for a while, and Linda went off to Canada to stay with her sister. Exactly how and why I got to Canada, I've told in my Life's Turning Points thread in The Maple Leaf in BE's Canada section, if anybody's interested.

Incidentally, the absence of a Turning Points thread in the Australian section is one major reason why there are "so few shrimps on The Barbie". Every immigrant to Australia must have a turning point that propelled him to come there and live. This present thread would be a natural place to report them. Any offers?

Pollyana

I think you will find that the few people left in the Barbie have told their stories several times over the years, and in spite of your best efforts a thread on the subject is highly unlikely to bring new posters online now!

the troubadour

I'd suggest that the term Ocker has become near enough to obsolete. I never see it or hear it mentioned in the media. I haven't heard the term mentioned in what seems decades. Bogan seems to have replaced it . In fact I hear very few of the traditional Aussie terms these days. Almost sounds odd when the odd one turns up in conversation. I guess in certain quarters more prominent.

Gordon Barlow

Okay. Thanks for the heads-up, trouba. I have read that "ocker" was a simple variant of English slang "acker". There was a Mr Acker Bilk, a famous jazz player in the '60s, of whom Wikipedia says He earned the nickname "Acker" from the Somerset slang for "friend" or "mate". Can anybody here support or deny that opinion? I'd always associated the word with Liverpool.

Gordon Barlow

Well, maybe... But this thread has had nearly twenty thousand visits in the eleven months it's been up, and surely all of those visitors can't have told their stories at some time or other! I don't suppose every one of them has an exciting tale to tell, but excitement is mainly a matter of definition. A while back I said that I wouldn't keep "nuturing" this thread, and I'm not going to change my mind about that. But there is always scope for new topics. Your post may indeed answer my question of "why so few shrimps on The Barbie?", but on the other hand, maybe it doesn't. Let's give it another eleven months, and see how many more visitors we get.

Gordon Barlow

Here's an old memory of mine about Queensland's "rabbit-proof fence" and dingo-fence, that some town-based immigrants might find interesting.

From the 1930s till 1955, my Dad had a little five-thousand-acre sheep farm on the Darling Downs in Queensland. It was inside both of the official fences that stretched a thousand miles or so across the State. The whole purpose of the fences (erected and maintained by the State government to this day I think) was to keep vermin out of where we lived, so by rights there shouldn't have been any dingoes or rabbits. But the local men organised dingo-drives every couple of years just in case. Mind you, I never saw any bodies, although they talked of finding one or two each time.

Dingoes were hated because they would kill or cripple sheep for fun (seemingly), and sheep were our livelihood. Kangaroos were classed as a pest - cute though they undoubtedly are - because they nibble the grass too close to the ground and leave none for the sheep. So do rabbits, which were a tremendous pest (though also cute, of course) and had to be poisoned en masse earlier in the century because there were too many to shoot.

Gordon Barlow

There are a couple of interesting posts about boarding-schools in the Maple Leaf section of the Canada forum - on my thread called "Life's Turning Points". There must be some Australia-based BE members who have been to boarding schools and who wouldn't mind sharing one or two of their experiences. Those experiences don't have to be "turning points": it's a fairly loose title!

old.sparkles

This thread isn't about turning points though

Unless you are suggesting posters 'migrate' to the Canada section?

Could always merge all into a lounge thread, and make them global?