The Australian's practice of singing his remarks I can only ascribe to the influence of the Chinese. During my stay in Melbourne, I spent one evening at supper in a Chinese cook-shop in Little Bourke street, and I was instantly struck by the resemblance between the intonation of the phrases passing between the Chinese attendants and that of the conversation of the cultivated Australians who accompanied me. But, in addition to this lack of good-breeding and the gross mispronunciation of common English words, the Australian interlards his conversation with large quantities of slang, which make him frequently unintelligible to the visitor. This use of slang is so common that the public memory forgets that it is slang, and it finds its way into most unexpected places. Chief Justices on their benches, leading newspapers in their editorials, statesmen--such as Australia boasts--all disfigure their utterances by jarring slang terms and phrases, so commonly used as to pass unnoticed by either their hearers or themselves.
English slang has a foundation of humour. There is a note of whimsical comedy about the Oxford undergraduate's practice of calling a bag a bagger, and nobody can repress a smile the first time he hears a coster call eyes "meat-pies" or trousers "round-the-houses." But there is no humour in Australian slang. It is drawn from the lowliest sources--the racecourse, the football match, and the prize-ring. Like most of the imagery of primitive people, it is largely metaphorical, so involved as to require an interpreter.
When a man's chances are regarded as hopeless, the invariable Australian comment is that "he's got Buckley's." After having heard this stupid expression a dozen times, I became curious, and set out on the task of tracing the meaning of it. I ascertained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century three convicts escaped from a party which landed at Port Phillip. Two were killed and eaten by the blacks, but the third, one Buckley, escaped death and lived on friendly terms with the aborigines, to be found alive and well when Melbourne was founded thirty years later. The remote chance of escaping with his life which Buckley secured has since been applied to all remote chances. This is typical of Australian slang, and the visitor who desires to understand fully the patois encountered in this country needs to employ an interpreter.