Kathy Lette: Why the Aussie tendency to give quip-lash is clearly good for our health

If laughter is the best medicine, then it is no wonder Aussies live longer than Brits and Americans, writes Kathy Lette.

Aussies have a sense of humour drier than Prince Andrew’s armpit. But it’s the only dry thing about us as we do love a tipple. A mate just asked me to meet him in a North Sydney pub at beer o’clock. “Let’s get a pint at Diddy’s. It’s full of the most laconic old diggers.”

“Diddy’s? … Is the pub named after a town in Ireland?”

“Na. The customers cark it so often, the traditional greeting is “By the way, so-and-so died of a heart attack,” to which the regulars reply, “Did he?”

This cheeky irreverence is a perfect example of what I love most about Australians – our rascality. We have chronic Sceptic-emia too. But while we’re sceptical about most things, we’re not cynical. My British pals tend to think optimism is some kind of optical ailment, but antipodeans always seem able to find the funny. Nor do we suffer from an irony-deficiency.

At Cronulla I do laps across the beach with the Harold Halt Swim Team. They teasingly call my wettie a “sook suit”. Their beer bellies are a “liquid grain storage facility”. Anyone who whinges about having to get up at “sparrow’s fart” is dismissed as being “a few sausages short of a barbie”.

This cheeky irreverence is a perfect example of what I love most about Australians – our rascality.

This morning, surveying a huge wave with trepidation, I inquired nervously, if the swell wasn’t a bit too rough...

The locals gave a collective shrug. “Sure there have been some deaths in surf this big,” one salty replied, “…. but none of them serious. Now let’s go ride a vomit comet!”

Even in the hallowed halls of Parliament, the vernacular is spectacular. Brits marvel at our pollies’ colourful exchanges, particularly Paul Keating’s description of Prime Minister John Howard as “a shiver looking for a spine to run up” and Treasurer Peter Costello as “all tip and no ice berg”.

This Aussie tendency to give quip-lash is clearly good for our health.

This Aussie tendency to give quip-lash is clearly good for our health. Research published by the British Medical Journal reveals that life expectancy Down Under is two years longer than in the UK and nearly five years longer than in America. You don’t need a medical degree to deduce the reason: laughter is the best medicine. A good chortle brings about a drop in blood pressure and boosts the immune system. And listening to Parliamentary Questions is an excellent way to induce mirth. (Although, if Pauline Hanson is speaking, it should also come with a medical warning – “Contains Nuts.”)

Being able to laugh at life straps a giant shock absorber to your brain. From convict and immigrant hardships to our long list of Dorothy-Mackellar-esque “droughts and flooding rains”, our nation’s story is chock-a-block full of peril. Forget the School of Hard Knocks; our ancestors graduated from the Adversity University.

I was recently nail-chewingly glued to news reports of a woman stranded in an elevator during a Queensland cyclone. Precariously suspended in that claustrophobic cube in pitch darkness, winds howling, she managed to get a message to the outside world … “Send in chardonnay and chocolate.”

Aussies are world-famous for this kind of upbeat, ‘no worries’, can-do positivity. Picture: Alina Gozin'a

Aussies are world-famous for this kind of upbeat, ‘no worries’, can-do positivity. So, how did we develop this laid back, larrikin charm? Perhaps it’s due to our inauspicious beginnings as inmates in the world’s largest open prison. The dregs of British society, including my own rellos, were exported here with limbo-low hopes of survival.

Australia, planned as a colony of thieves, did actually begin by an act of theft. The indigenous population, an ancient and noble people who lived here for thousands of years before the fall of Troy, were deemed to have no greater rights to the country than the kangaroos – a wrong Australia must put right. But what this unique social experiment that became Australia proves is that unshackled from the class system and with the oxygen of optimism and opportunity, reinvention can take place.

Vida Goldstein. Picture: State Library of Victoria

Muriel Matters in 1910. Picture: Lena Connell

The future generations which sprung from these scrapings off the bottom of the biological barrel pioneered much social justice, including universal suffrage and votes for women.

Australia is often celebrated for the mateship of our Anzac heroes. But it was actually the courage and initiative of Aussie suffragettes, like Vida Goldstein, (the Edwardian Germaine Greer) who not only won the right to vote but also to stand for election in 1902, two decades before our British sisters, which thrust our fledgling nation into the global spotlight. At the time, Australia’s progressive stance on female emancipation earned us the accolade of most innovative and liberal nation on earth. (Though shamefully not all got the right to vote, with indigenous women being left out in the electoral cold.)

What’s more, Aussie suffragettes achieved their political aims with playful roguery. The aptly named Muriel Matters matters so much to British feminists for her ingenious defiance of the law. When King Edward VII officially opened parliament in 1909, London street protests were banned for the duration of the procession. Thinking laterally, Muriel simply hired a dirigible to shower the King with propaganda pamphlets for the Women’s Freedom League. Proving that not all political activism is hot air, her flight made headlines around the world.

Adelaide-born women's rights suffragette Muriel Matters’ dirigible which Muriel flew over London.

For me, Vida and Muriel embody the true spirit of Australia – an insouciant, devil may care derring-do and desire to give it a go, combined with a strong sense of sisterly solidarity. My Aussie female friends are fiercely loyal, loving and full of fun. This sense of camaraderie rather than rivalry is embodied in our slang. For example, two women who’ve slept with the same man are called “stick sisters” – the implication being “oh, you slept with him too; wasn’t he terrible!”

When Aussie women get together we have to be hospitalised from hilarity.

Just last night, over a nice cold Kard-onnay, one gal delighted our gaggle with this nugget, concerning a distressed bloke who whinged: “My wife of 15 years has just told me she’s faked orgasm every time we’ve had sex … I can’t believe she lied to me not once, but twice!”

Needless to say, dear reader, we cackled like kookaburras.

Kathy Lette has written 20 books, the latest of which is the best-selling The Revenge Club.

Originally published as Kathy Lette: Why the Aussie tendency to give quip-lash is clearly good for our health