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| Stand with your mates old and new. Reclaim the one nation the Anzacs fought to defend. |
As we pause this Anzac Day to remember the fallen and their mates, spare a thought for our native language that few outsiders ever fully master. It is not the formal speech of the silvertails with their airs and graces. It is the laconic ‘Diggerspeak’ that binds Australian servicemen and women tighter than any oath. It entered our military from regional and rural Australia, and it went back and forth from navvie to digger and continues to do so. It is an evolving language that reflects our deep-seated sense of nationhood.
The rhyming slang, the ironic understatement, the rural shorthand and the deadpan inversions turned ordinary blokes into a code. The enemy and even our closest allies struggled to crack it. In the jungles of New Guinea or the paddy fields of Vietnam, it was not just talk. It was a language of belonging.
The Yanks noticed early. By 1942 the US Department of War and the Navy were issuing pocket guides to Australia. These guides were crammed with glossaries of our slang. Their troops kept staring blankly when an Aussie said something was fair dinkum or that the situation was apples. She’ll be right. The guides were well-meaning. They missed the point.
The real test was not whether you could look it up. The real test was whether you got it without asking. Pause to ask for clarification in the heat of the moment, and you quietly announced yourself an outsider. Aussies are not unwelcoming. Far from it. True mateship assumes a shared frame of reference. You do not need to be born here. You just need to be willing to learn the code and live it.
Australian slang has always been a living thing. It evolves with each new trial. What began in the trenches of the Great War absorbed French, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Malaysian influences. (I don’t know how many times I had to diddly-bop off for some makan.)
The language keeps mutating. A bludger in one war became a walloper in the next. In my time it was a Jack-man. She’ll be right carried the same laconic optimism. (Politely put, a Jack-man says: ‘She’ll be right, Jack, I’m okay!) The language is derived from shared challenges, hardships, and best of all, shared glory. The code adapts. Its purpose never changes. It marks those who belong.
The evolutionary nature of the Australian vernacular goes something like this. I remember at Duntroon a particular word came to be used when something was excellently cool. As legend has it, later this word happened to be the surname of a fourthie who was regarded as a complete quamby. He kept getting bumphed ‘cause his work was NUTS. His mates ended up sharing his pineapples. So the word went from being excellently cool to something that was completely bished, if you get what I mean.
It’s not just in the military. In many of the store docks I deliver to, there exists a language of belonging. I learnt quickly not to say, ‘good morning’. What’s bloody good about it? Next time, Morning! At least you didn’t say good, this place is a loony bin. You’ll be lucky if you get out. Hey Chezza, did you tell him he lives here now? This place is awesome! (I wish I could provide the appropriate onomatopoeia for the quiet guttural groan accompanying the bewildered facial expressions.)
I doubt many of my academic and journalist mates could understand Australian like this. In many eyes, modern academics and journalists don’t belong in such places.
Even my good mate from Pakistan. He’s completing a degree in English. He’s working at a servo and a bloke walks in. ‘Packeta Winnie Blues Mate.’ He recalls fondly the process of becoming Aussie. It took him a while, but he got there. Loves his cricket and his snooker, too. And he’s a toiler.
And that’s the point. Australian slang is a language of belonging. A language forged out of our history through shared hardship and a sense of knowing what we’re all about. You can’t learn it. You have to live it.
That same code echoes every Anzac Day. At dawn services from Gallipoli to Kokoda to the local RSL. You hear it still. The wry asides. The understatement that masks profound respect. The easy familiarity turns strangers into cobbers for a day. If you can’t understand the lingo, you won’t get the stories, either.
The stories of the Owen gun’s legendary performance, or the corporal instructor who gives lessons on the Owen’s successor, the F1 submachine gun: ‘The F1 submachine gun can be fitted with a bayonet and used as a dart’ as he throws it into a nearby tree. The yippee shoots. The forced marches where some bloke pulls up from plantar fasciitis. Only it was a piece of wire gone through his GP and into his foot.
The legendary free grog at the boozer then woken at 3am for a forced march. The bloke who did it in his Reg Grundies while smoking a dart. The dargon leading the run who lights up his own darb under the cover of the palm of his hand. He breathes in deeply. Ah, that’s bet-ter! He says in his clipped, guttural, side-of-the-mouth enunciation.
Or the day our Colonel Commandant turns up on the gun position. I’ve taken over the gun position mid-ex from one of my fourthies who was NUTS. And Davo’s left his cam net back at the last position, and he can’t use his platform ‘cause he’s busted the legs on it. The Colonel asks me, ‘where is that gun’s cam net?’ A UD goes off in the CP just as my OPCP SGT starts shooting. I groan. Test-firing, Sir. Johnno’s Bravo crew is up cause Davo’s doin’ his ‘nana at the Alpha boys who have to go back and get the cam net. Karrumpah! Johnno’s gun sends down the first bomb. The dry grass lights up and the entire gun position is on fire. Who’s got the rakes and beaters? I groan again. I look over at my OPCP SGT and he smirks wryly and shrugs. FUBAR. What can ya do, boss? ‘Ere are, I’ve rolled ya a darb, and the lads grabbed a goffer and a gumpy for ya. God bless him.
It is the vernacular of belonging. It says we have been through the fire together. We know the score. We stand shoulder to shoulder anyway. Anzac Day does not demand uniformity of background. It demands unity of spirit. That spirit has always been more powerful than any official policy or government-sanctioned school curriculum.
Which makes the present moment feel particularly sharp. Decades of mass immigration without a corresponding insistence on cultural integration have left too many newcomers unwilling or unable to learn the code. Their cheer squads in the academy and the media make the problem worse. Some arrive in a nation that offers them every material advantage. They then treat its founding myths, its institutions and its very language of mateship as relics to be deconstructed rather than embraced. Decolonised, if you will.
The result is not the vibrant mosaic we were promised. It is parallel societies, simmering resentments, and a fracturing of the very sense of us that Anzac Day once renewed so effortlessly.
Worse. Those divisions have been actively cultivated. Outsiders to our national story and the domestic elites who amplify their grievances have worked systematically to undermine the institutions that once transmitted the Anzac ethos. The schools once taught pride in our military history. The media once celebrated it. The public square once honoured it without apology. The campaign has relentlessly targeted our shared identity. That identity transcends class, ethnicity, or postcode. When that identity frays, social cohesion frays with it.
No wonder Australians are looking outside the major parties. In the latest Sky News Pulse survey, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has surged to level pegging with Labor on the primary vote at 27 per cent. This is a remarkable shift. It reflects deep disillusionment with the major parties’ failure to defend the things that make Australia work.
Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has reached for the language of one nation in his rhetoric. His government’s approach has too often amplified the very divisions that erode it. One Nation’s appeal is not narrow ethnic nationalism as its critics sneer. It is precisely the opposite. It is the insistence on one nation. Belonging is available to anyone prepared to adopt the values. It includes the work ethic, the fair go egalitarianism, and even the lingo that has defined us since before the trenches of the Great War. It is the Anzac spirit translated into contemporary politics.
That is why a return to the Anzac ethos is not nostalgia. It is remedy. It is not about excluding newcomers. Many Diggers were sons of immigrants. It is by insisting that those who come here join the code rather than rewrite it. The willingness to belong is what separates the citizen from the passenger. Anzac Day reminds us that belonging is earned in the quiet moments. It is the shared joke no outsider quite catches. It is the understatement that carries the weight of history. It is the instinctive understanding that she’ll be right only works when everyone is pulling in the same direction.
So today, as the last post sounds and the crowd murmurs Lest We Forget, listen for the deeper message beneath the words. It is an invitation. Learn the code. Embrace the spirit. Stand with your mates old and new. Reclaim the one nation the Anzacs fought to defend. The alternative is not diversity. It is division. And Australia has had quite enough of that.
This article first appeared in The Spectator Australia on Anzac Day 2026 as The Digger’s Code: Anzac Day and the Vernacular of Belonging.
As we pause this Anzac Day to remember the fallen and their mates, spare a thought for our native language that few outsiders ever fully master.
— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) April 24, 2026
It is not the formal speech of the silvertails with their airs and graces. It is the laconic ‘Diggerspeak’ that binds Australian… pic.twitter.com/1Y3liHg7LU
