Mateship
The greatest pleasure I have
ever known is when my eyes meet the eyes of a mate over the top of two foaming
glasses of beer
Henry
Lawson, Australian
Legend,
Early 20th Century
We value excellence as well
as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship
Draft
Constitutional Preamble, John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, 1999
It would take
an awful lot of courage to jump on the back of a crocodile, but I suppose
that's what you do for a mate
Thursday Island
Police Sergeant Graham Burridge, The Courier Mail, August 20, 1999.
I lost my mate.
Stewart Euston, on the death of
a fellow miner, The Courier Mail, 28 May, 2000
The West Australians assumed that death was certain, and
each in the secret places of his mind debated how he would go to it. Mate,
having said goodbye to mate ... went forward to meet death instantly, running
as straight and swiftly as they could at the Turkish rifles. With that
regiment went the flower of the youth of Western Australia ...
War Historian C. Bean, writing from Gallipoli,
Sydney
Morning Herald, 17 May 2002
 |
| Mates
having a laugh over a beer |
Mateship as part of the
Australian Language
Australian love their mates. Or do
they? There is no doubt that linguistically, the word mate is strongly
entrenched in the Australian Language - more so than in any English variant in
the world. Although many Australians, and indeed Americans, would not know
it, mate is used and has been used for centuries in working class English
english. As with other working class English traits, what makes our mate
usage distinctly Australian is the fact that it is used unequivocally by all
layers of society. From brickies to pollies,
every dinkum Australian male uses the word mate
every day of their life.
So how is it used? And what does it
actually mean? Does it simply mean, 'friend'? Does it add anything at all to the
semantics of what is being said? As with any foreign language, you must consider
the context in which it is used over time to gauge a meaning. Consider,
for example, the following:
Last
week I received a phone call concerning the member for Burnett. The caller was
asking about workers compensation. I said, "Mate, according to protocol,
you should go to your local member." Do honourable members know what he
said to me? He said, "He's never home." He said, "He's about as
handy as an ashtray on a motor bike.
Hon.
Mr PEARCE, MP. 9
Jun 1999 Legislative Assembly 2271
This is a typical use. All
mate contributes here is that the speaker is not in a formal situation. If
mate were said in an aggressive tone, then that would also add to the
semantics. Somewhat paradoxically, the fact mate has been used does not
mean that the speakers are mates. For example, Prime Minister John Howard
would not consider Saddam Hussein to be his "mate", yet his advice to
international media was that:
If there is a faint hope of this thing being solved
without military force, that faint hope is for the whole world saying the same
thing and saying it very loudly to Iraq -- and most particularly the Arab
states saying, 'mate, the game is up'.
Reuters, Australian PM: Tell Iraq, 'Mate, the Game Is Up', Feb
10 2003
In all this usage appears to be
equivalent to the American buddy, which, tragically, is in some circles encroaching
on mate usage in Brisbane at least. Other examples of this usage are as
follows:
"Pot a XXXX thanks mate"
is how one would go about ordering beer in Queensland. Generally in
response to the question, "Are you right?"
"Thanks mate" is the
standard thank you, said, for example, after the beer has been handed
over. "Thank you", itself, is almost absurdly formal to an
Australian in most contexts.
Mate can also be used as a greeting,
or as part of a greeting:
"G'day mate" is a
standard greeting, either between mates or strangers. Normally not used
in a highly formal, introduction situation (although G'day, without the mate,
can be).
"G'day mate, how are
ya?" is a variation on this greeting. The standard response is,
"Good thanks mate. How are you?". Note well that
invariably ya is used in the question, whereas you is used in
the response.
"Maaaate!" is a greeting
sometimes used between mates who are pleased to see one another.
Mate may also be used as roughly meaning friend.
"He's my mate", "We're mates" or "He's my best
mate" are common examples. However, as with all translations,
something is lost when 'friend' replaces mate. "He's my friend",
"We're friends" or "He's my best friend" does not
communicate the same message. It sounds childish at best. There is no
other word for it in English.
One man was
caught through the side of the head, severing his right ear but not killing
him. He lay... in a dangerous position - right in line of a point from
which some snipers were were potting our lads... A man crawled out of our
shallow trench and wormed his way along the ground to a position within a
couple of yards from this man. Ping! Zipp! Zipp! Bullets hit the
ground... but the rescuer worked his way snake-wise until he got to the
wounded man. Clumsily turning the man over he shouted, "How's she
going, mate?". There was no answer. He yelled, "Strike me pink the
poor bugger's just about outed", and began to drag him... he got a bullet
through his ankle but managed it at last and we cheered him. He looked over
and grinned.
Private Percival
describing a rescue of one man by his brother, Gallipoli,
7 August 1915.
The rescuer was shot by the Turks shortly after. The brother lasted two days.
"orrr Maaate" may also be used, believe
it or not, as a means of persuasion: "Sorry guys, I can't join you for a
beer", "Orrr maaate, carn ya piker, just one
or two".
There are no doubt many other contexts and shades
of meaning we have not documented. Please let us
know.
It should be noted that the mate
usage documented above is the language of Australian males. As discussed
elsewhere, the Australian society has historically been male dominated, as
recognised by pollie Gareth Evans in the context of the preamble
debate, in which the Prime Minister of Australia suggested mateship should be in
our new constitution:
`Mateship' is a good and honourable word. It is
a great Australian word; it is a quintessentially Australian word—yes, it is
all of those things. But the trouble is it just does strike, on all the
available evidence, the overwhelming majority of Australian women as too
blokey and, accordingly, just not the right kind of word for this sort of
document. The trouble is that our whole history has been too blokey, and women
today and tomorrow just do not need language in the Constitution reinforcing
that kind of imagery.
Address by the Hon Gareth Evans QC MP to the
House of Representatives, Canberra, 24 March 1999 (Hansard pp 3582-4).
And it isn't just the men who
contend Australia essentially has a male history. Professor Marilyn
Lake also found the use of mateship in the preamble inappropriate:
It's a real return to
the spirit of the 1890s when what was quintessentially Australian was the
relationship between men. National identity was grounded in the writings of
people like Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson and continued with Gallipoli and
right through the Second World War to our social institutions such as surf
lifesaving and racing and the pub.
Professor Marilyn
Lake, Female
Historian, La Trobe University, Sydney Morning Herald, March 24
1999.
Of
course, Prime Minister John wouldn't have a bar of it:
It is one word in all
of this which is so unarguably, distinctively and dramatically and proudly
Australian ... I don't find that exclusively blokey and I don't believe any
fair-minded Australian understanding the history and the spirit of this
country would, either.
John
Howard, Prime Minister, March 23 1999.
So what then do women use instead of
mate? Some women, especially working class women or women in remote areas, have
adopted the male language (and attitudes) as their own. In North
Queensland recently, for example, one bloke was grievously insulted by another
as he stumbled home from the pub. As would be expected, he went
the biff and knocked the bastard to the
ground. It was only then that, to his horror, that he discovered that the
bloke was in fact an Aboriginal woman. He immediately helped her to her feet,
said something to the effect of, "Jeeze, look I'm really sorry about
that. I thought you were a bloke!". She just casually brushed
the dust away from her clothes and said, in a broad Australian accent,
"ahhh you're right maaate", and went on her merry way as though
nothing had happened.
In relation to mateship.... [it] is an attitude
that pervades Australian society, and in that context I have absolutely no
difficulty with it
Mr Olsten, Premier of South Australia,
Sydney
Morning Herald, 25 March, 1999
In the big smoke however, women, on
the whole, do not use mate nearly as much as men do. In a Brisbane law firm, a
young female solicitor was chastised by a male for saying, "Thanks
buddy" upon being handed some documents. "Try and be
Australian", was the reproach. Her retort, "what should I be saying,
'mate'?" demonstrated this too was inappropriate, and the gap in the
female Australian language was apparent. Unfortunately, it just the way
Australian society developed. The men spent time doing blokey things
including drinking with their mates while the women attended to domestic
chores. Now that women are out and about socially, they have
adopted the 'mate' speech usage. But on the whole they don't appear to want use the masculine
word. It will be interesting to see how this develops. In the
meantime, a woman's role in Australian society is discussed more here
and some usage feedback is here.
Finally it should be noted that men
normally do not call women mates. They may say, "She's a mate", or
"We're just mates'. But generally they will not say, "G'day
mate", or "thanks mate", or "pot a XXXX thanks mate" -
this usage is strictly reserved as part of the rituals of mateship. Generally,
the word mate is simply dropped from the sentence if it is being addressed to
a women.
Mateship as part of the
Australian Culture
I would like to see those great Australian
characteristics that have been the golden thread through successive
generations still there. I want us always to be seen as Australians, not as
Americans or as Europeans or as Englishmen or as Asians. As distinctive
Australians having those great qualities of classless-ness and mateship and
fairness which have been the hallmark of Australians through all experiences
and all generations.
Prime Minister, John Howard, 13 September
1998.
What does John Howard, Prime
Minister of Australia (and a conservative at that) actually mean when he speaks
of mateship? Why is it important to him, and why does he think that it is
important to the country? The notion of ones mates being important
is long entrenched in the Australian culture:
The typical
Australian ... was seldom religious in the sense in which the word was
generally used. So far as he held a prevailing creed, it was a romantic one
inherited from the gold-miner and the bushman, of which the chief article was
that a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate. That was and
is the one law which the good Australian must never break. It is bred in the
child and stays with him through life ...
CEW
Bean, The Story of ANZAC, 1921
Even before that, in the hard days of convict life and of gold
diggings, rebellions and floggings, it was a man's world, and a man had to stick
by his mates if he was to get by:
For more than 50 years Australia was almost entirely a
masculine country. As late as 1840 the proportion of males to females was two to
one. Not until the about 1880s was a reasonable balance struck between the sexes.
It was inevitable that men should be thrown together, that they
should rely on one another, that a strong accent should be placed on companionship. This
was the heritage passed on to men and youths long after the population balance between the
sexes had been adjusted.
Sidney Baker, The Australian
Language, 1945
That heritage between men is still alive and well as we approach
the eve of the twenty-first century. A man loves his mates, although he
would rarely admit it, and, should you look deep in into his heart, you will see
that he values them more than most things in his life. Often, as alluded
to above, this has traditionally had the effect of excluding women.
This is cultural - for the first hundred years the women
were simply not there. And if they were, they were not part of the drinking,
masculine culture that developed into mateship.
But - and there is no sense denying it - Australian
mateship is mainly for men. It was - and is - difficult to be mates with a
woman.
Phillip Knightley, Australia: A
Biography of a Nation, 2000
Do not our men habitually desert their women at social
gatherings and crowd around the beer keg, swapping yarns, laughing raucously,
literally wallowing in the rituals of mateship?
Ronald Conway, The Great
Australian Stupor, 1976.
Ronald goes on to ask 'what keeps so life consuming and
emotionally impoverishing a cult of male behaviour so alive for generations
after its social and historical relevance?'. His own theory is because an
Australian male is driven to his mates as they are privately manipulated and
motivated by their wives, and seek men out to 'air those unrealised fantasies of
manhood which the domestic rut at home has now made impossible'.
While some may say it might be true that a man
can driven to the drink by his
wife, it is not true to say that mateship continues to flourish because of women.
It is because the old culture continues, as cultures tend to do, just as the shouting
practice continues, and our language continues. We are a distinct
people, and this is our culture. Why should it change?
A simple code of mateship and nationalism
explains the enduring appeal of the Returned & Services League of
Australia. The unswerving loyalty to mates and assertive Australian
nationalism which give the League its strength are easy to understand.
Official Returned
& Services League History, 1999.
In the [Japanese POW] camps the Australians
discarded their differences and became a tribe, a tribe which was always the
most successful group. The core of this success was an ethos of mateship and
egalitarianism which not only survived the ultimate dehumanising duress of the
death camps, but shone through as the dominant Australian
characteristic.
Paul Sheehan, Among the Barbarians, 1998
But mateship has much more to it than just
drinking with the boys. It also has to do with other qualities that are dear to an
Australian's heart. Qualities such as giving everyone a "fair go",
and sticking by your mates, be they be in a blue or
be off their face. You can't let your mate down.
What is a mate nowadays? Someone you can rely on - through
thick, thin and middling; past hell and high-water... In any trouble you know
what he will do, without argument, because, since he is your mate, it is
exactly what you would have done yourself..... Seems contradictory, doesn't
he? - your mate. He is! My Australian oath he is!
Look at my mate! Take it from me, there was never such a pig-headed son of a
twisted mallee root since mates were discovered. Yet I stick to him; I can't
get rid of him; he is inside my skin; he's me, bother him.
Thomas Dodd, Australian Worker, 1926.
I don't abandon mates just because
they make mistakes.
Prime Minister John Howard, Daily
Telegraph, 20 March, 2002
A month shy of his 101st birthday, Norm Pope reflects "all
the time" on his war experiences.. "You think of all your mates
and what went on and the war itself. You think about how they got killed
and how you tried to save some of them and how you couldn't because they
were too far gone. You think about how you were lucky yourself and what
you would do if you could do it over again, how you would try to protect
them."
Memories of Kokoda still fresh, Sydney Morning Herald, 15
August 2005
The two world wars exacted a terrible price from us - the
full magnitude of that lost potential, of those unlived lives can never
be measured. And yet, some of the most admirable aspects of Australia's
national character were, if not conceived, then more fully ingrained within
us by the searing experiences of those conflicts. None more so than
the concept of mateship - regarded as a particularly Australian virtue - a
concept that encompasses unconditional
acceptance,
mutual and self respect, sharing whatever is available no matter how meagre,
a concept based on trust and selflessness and absolute interdependence.
In combat, men did live and die by its creed. 'Sticking by your mates'
was sometimes
the only reason for continuing on when all seemed hopeless. I was
moved by an account written by Hugh Clarke, who, like thousands of other
Australian and British servicemen, endured years of senseless cruelty
as a prisoner of the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. He couldn't
recall a single Australian dying alone without someone being there to look
after
him in some way. That's mateship.
Prime Minister John Howard's speech delivered at Australia
House in London on November 10, 2003
I had lots of good mates but they're all gone
Peter Casserly, Australia's last WW1 digger, aged 107, 2004
Mateship existed between the convicts. Mateship continued to
develop among the gold miners. Mateship thrived with our diggers in the
World Wars. Mateship survives, in the face of all cultural
onslaught, at all levels of Australian male society, from railee
to Prime Minister. We are mates.
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