"You do have a foreign accent sir!"
Spoke the sub-continentally accented Australian Public Servant Lady, mentioned in the post below, explaining that the communication difficulties between her & Mine Host were not due to any deficiency in her verbal non-Australian English.
It is true that Mine Host does not possess a SydMelberra composite "New Australian" accent, nor the ridiculous rounded plummy accent of the southern newsreaders & soap actors, nor the proto-New Zealand flattened vowels (just like on commercial TV advertising) coming from the mouth of most of SydMelberra's Australian born population.
His accent is 200% Australian, generic, to be found the length & breadth of this land.
2 comments:
Hi Steve,
This comment doesn't relate to this thread -- but if I put it in the right one of several months ago, I didn't know whether it would get noticed.
My question is this. Back in the post on Kuala Terengganu, you mentioned that you knew an Aussie who had gone to fight for the Indos during Konfrontasi. But you didn't tell us what happened next. It's not fair -- I'm curious! :-)
Did they decide they had no use for him and send him home? Did he have a change of heart? Did he work for them in some capacity, and then slip back into Australia quietly afterwards?
Don't leave your loyal readers in suspense like that! :-)
Gosh, I was unaware there had to be more to the story! Apologies for not explaining properly and leaving you on tenterhooks!
All I know is that almost 50 years ago this fellow, born a practising mumslim (though Australian born of Scots ancestry) had gone to Indonesia to join some sort of foreign legion. He only ever talked of it fleetingly.
Everyone presumed it (the foreign legion) was a cacophany of rigid islamic adherents (which this fellow most definitely WAS) whose religious zealotry was in inverse ratio to their military aptitude, and that the Indonesians had little use for them.
Possibly allowed them to parade around a bit, and most definitely would have not let a bunch of inept twits within cooee of anywhere claret incursions were taking place.
We all assume that eventually the novelty wore off, boredom set in, they got sick of feeling useless and went home again.
I don't imagine it was all that well organised (if at all) Indonesia, deservedly or not, has serious form in being inept at organising even a chook raffle.
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