Bastard is one of the great Australian terms | Peter Goers
If it’s bad to be a bastard there’s a long list of Aussie icons and leaders who never got the message, writes Peter Goers.
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This is a bastard of a column.
That word’s been on our minds lately as to whether Sam Kerr – star soccer player – said it or not to an English policeman and whether the rather slow English judicial system will agree with the greatest English poet who wrote “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”
Let’s salute bastards. They’re everywhere. It’s a word long since separated from its actual meaning.
Fortunately, children born out of so-called wedlock are no longer called bastards. Approximately 25 per cent of all Australian children are now born to parents who are not married.
Defacto relationships have equal rights to those actually married in law and this has destigmatised bastardry. It was absurd anyway. How can any child be illegitimate?
We can blame the Bible which warns that “A bastard child shall not enter the congregation of the Lord” and neither will a bastard’s descendants for ten generations.
They’re in good company as homosexuals, menstruating women and people (shock! horror!) wearing mixed fibres are also forbidden.
Slavery and genocide are fine but heaven forfend (OK) Christianity from a gay bastard wearing mixed fibres.
They are going straight to hell via empty judgmental churches which only accept heterosexuals born in wedlock and not wearing mixed fibres.
Bastard is a great Australian word. “How are you, you old bastard?” is a term of endearment. “It’s a bastard” and “what a bastard” are common expressions for vexations great and small. Gallipoli and Kokoda where both described by Diggers as “a bastard of a place”.
What was once invective is now fondly marketed. I’ve had cause to use a product on my car engine called Start Ya Bastard! (it didn’t) and you can use Shift Ya Bastard! on stubborn bolts and buy a bastard cut rasp.
The great cultural commentator (late of these pages), Max Harris famously wrote “There are no heroes in Australia, just good blokes and bastards” and ain’t that the truth.
That martyr to English imperialism, the bushy Breaker Morant faced his firing squad in the Boer War shouting “Shoot straight you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it”. Australian Democrats founder Don Chipp wanted to “keep the bastards honest”.
NSW Premier Robert Askin (who once gave a long interview on why he didn’t want to give an interview) was in a motorcade in Sydney in 1966 with President Lyndon Johnson and when confronted by anti-war protesters he said, “Run over the bastards”.
There’s bastardry and bastardisation and sadly the graffito ACAB – “All Coppers Are Bastards” which they’re certainly not.
Some feminists intone that “all men are bastards” and they’re probably right.
The word bastard means many things to many people but the only thing it doesn’t mean is its real meaning.
That harmed and stigmatised too many for too long.
Society finally took Shakespeare’s advice and stood up for actual bastards but when it comes to the other kinds of bastards, that’s most of us at least some of the time.
Sam Kerr and all of us can agree with the mock Latin maxim – Illegitimi non carborundum – don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Originally published as Bastard is one of the great Australian terms | Peter Goers
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