Monday Blues: Australia's Misleading Love of Avocado

For weeks, I thought my colleagues were obsessed with the avocado's creamy texture and mythical good fat.

Almost every third email or conversation with a colleague made some reference to this brownish green creamy fruit (It is a fruit, not a vegetable. Google confirmed it).

"Hey, can you get back to me with the report in the avo?"

"Nice to meet you. Let's catch up over a cuppa in the avo!"

It was only after I've missed a few meetings and deadlines that I realised they meant "arvo" i.e. afternoon. That was my first lesson in Australian's penchant for shortening words from a three-syllable mouthful to...two.

Being born and raised in Malaysia, a Commonwealth country and a former British colony, I thought I spoke the Queen's English. What I found only after moving to Australia, the Queen's overseas subjects loved to have a bit of fun with her language.

This realisation presented me with a dilemma.

Do I try to adopt this new way of speaking to assimilate myself into the local population, or will I come across as disingenuous or even thought of as mocking the localised slang?

Turns out, I didn't have to worry about the latter! Aussies loves it when people from other cultures try to speak like them (and fail miserably).

So to show my willingness to adapt to my new friends and surrounding, I started picking up a few Aussie-centric terms here and there.

Being a collaborative person, the first slang I picked up were during times when I am asking others for their opinions.

"You reckon...?"

I've also quickly learnt that the incorrect way to answer that is, "Yes. I reckon."

The other terms I've comfortably appropriated is the universal "mate", which means I've relegated my favourite (but admittedly non-gender neutral) "bro", now reserved only for when I meet my own countrymen.

One I've found to be fairly amusing is this. A budgie is a small parrot common to Australia. A smuggler is someone who traffics in contraband illegally. A budgie smuggler is a pair of Speedos.

Fair dinkum!

But no sooner have I thought I've conquered the treacherous landscape of the Aussie slang, did I learn that words which means something in one state means something else in another.

For example, for all the beer lovers, a very important term to learn is "schooner".

A schooner is measurement of beer ideal for someone who wants to drink a lot of beer, but doesn't want to be seen holding an actual "pint", for fear of being seen as having a drinking problem, or drinking a "middy" for fear of being stigmatised as someone who can't hold his beer.

According to Wikipedia, a schooner is 425 ml (which is 3/4 of a pint). However, in South Australia, a schooner is 285 ml (which is half a pint), which is known as a "middy" in NSW and Western Australia, a "handle" in Northern Territory, and a "seven" in Australia.

All these maths and terms will almost do your head in more than a pint of Furphy could.

There are countless other Australian slangs that would make it impossible to list it all in one blog post but it is certainly an aspect that makes living here so colourful. I reckon I've mastered most of these terms. All except one I came to learn of recently.

Can someone PLEASE explain to me what an "Eshay" is?