My father was born and raised in Launceston but moved to work in Melbourne, where he met and married my mother.  As kids we often came down to spend holidays with Dad’s family in Tasmania.  My grandparents lived on Charles Street in Launceston, and to me there was an almost fairytale quality to the grand old houses and Prince’s Square with its beautiful shady trees and the magnificent stone fountain in the dark depths of whose pond could be seen the flash and glimmer of exotic golden fish.  So different from the sprawling postwar eastern suburbs of Melbourne where I grew up. 

Cataract Gorge was a dramatic landscape of rock and water, and the chairlift and the suspension bridge were nothing short of thrilling.  One summer I was sent alone, without my pesky siblings – bliss! – to stay with our Hobart cousins in their shack on Bruny Island, where the wild unpopulated beaches and rockpools full of strange creatures kept us busy and entranced the whole day long.  So unlike the tamed, crowded beaches and flat waters of Port Phillip Bay, and you didn’t have to drive through miles of suburbia in a hot car in the middle of a Melbourne heatwave to get there. (Life was tough in the Olden Days, kids, when cars didn’t have air-con.)

My Tasmanian father never passed on to us any of the mocking stereotypes about Tasmania, and so it was to me always a place of cherished, magical memory, and not a place of backwardness, inbreeding and the convict stain.  Believe it or not, I never heard that joke about the two-headed Tasmanian until I came here as an adult to live, just over thirty years ago. 

One sign of my father’s Tasmanian-ness, although I didn’t know it at the time, was his use of the term ‘cock’.  I had always thought of it as a variant of that universal Australianism ‘mate’: a jaunty form of address that could be applied to anyone close to you or to people whose name you didn’t yet know and might never need to, but soon after my arrival in 1990 I noticed local friends and co-workers using it and it occurred to me that it might be a distinctive Tasmanianism. 

My theory was confirmed when I started talking about language usage on ABC Radio and writing about it for The Hobart Mercury.  Stories flowed in from listeners and readers keen to enlighten me about our shared cultural heritage.  

Writer and poet Pete Hay told me that when he first went to Victoria and greeted strangers in a bar with a cheery ‘g’day cock!’ they wanted to fight him, thinking he’d offered to prove his macho credentials in the time-honoured way.  Other Tassie blokes had similar stories of having to do some fast talking to avoid a knuckle sandwich. 

Years later Todd Brant, one of the trapped Beaconsfield miners, on emerging from his underground ordeal used the word ‘cock’ in greeting or thanking his rescuers and the world at large.  This curious localism was sufficiently unknown outside Tasmania that it was reported in the mainland papers!

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I became a fully-fledged hunter and collector of Tasmanianisms.  The one that struck me foremost was ‘cordial’ for what other Australians know as ‘soft drink’.  It rather took me by surprise, as I’d never heard my father use it, and I regularly enjoyed the following exchange with diehard locals:

Me:        If this fizzy stuff is cordial, what do you call the sweetened, fruit-flavoured liquid concentrate to which water is added to form the kind of drink we had to make do with as kids because our mothers said the fizzy stuff would rot our teeth and anyway it was too expensive?

Local:     Syrup.

Me:        If that’s syrup, what do you call the sweet liquid that canned fruit floats in?

Never did I get a satisfactory answer to that one, so I declared myself the winner of this terminological debate.  Not that I would want to see this charming localism disappear. 

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More and more I hear people saying ‘fizzy cordial’ when they want to distinguish it from the flat stuff, instead of sticking to the old cordial/syrup dichotomy.  Tasmanian brands generally stick to ‘syrup’ for cordial, and see below how non-Tasmanian Bickford’s is getting with the program. Today the cordial industry, tomorrow the world!   

Here we see a Tasmanian brand having a bob each way. It’s a poor image, but the label reads ‘cordial syrup’.

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Is this cultural appropriation? Non-Tasmanian brand Bickfords labelling their blackcurrant cordials syrup!