Over many years I’ve written and thought a lot about “mateship”, its supposedly special place in Australian national identity and what it might really mean to be “a good mate”. But last week got me thinking about how readily the word “mate” is bandied around here when often it’s weaponised to mean the exact opposite of its true meaning of intended amity and affection.
For this latest contemplative outbreak I’ve got to thank the late Australian novelist Kenneth Cook and another of my favourite writers, Martin Amis, who died in May. And there was a road-rage altercation in my orbit (there are too many in my inner-city neighbourhood) where “mate” featured prominently.
Sometimes a whole lot of things coalesce to send your brain off on such a tangent. That’s what happened to me. I’d just finished rereading Amis’s The Information, a dazzling novel about literary envy, as a sort of personal act of remembrance to him. Next, I again read Cook’s unsettling novel about Australia’s malevolent interior (physical, emotional and spiritual) Wake in Fright.
Amis’s struggling literary novelist Richard Tull is on a sun lounge in Miami when an attendant demands he pay “three bucks” for the privilege. He doesn’t have any money.
“Sorry sir,” the attendant says.
The authorial voice muses: “It was a nice idea the Americans calling everyone sir, addressing everyone – waiters, cabbies, toilet attendants, serial murders – as sir. The consequence was, though, that they made sir sound like mac or bub or scumbag.”
Yes sir, I thought – kind of the equivalent of our mate.
As John Grant, Cook’s protagonist in Wake in Fright, descends into an outback bedlam-cum-stupor of beer, male toxicity (before this was a named thing), emotional chaos and general malevolence, every person who doesn’t know him at all calls him “mate” – too often with a tone of menace. This is especially so when it comes to ritualised beer drinking.
“Peculiar trait of the western people [of the fictional Bundanyabba], thought Grant, that you could sleep with their wives, despoil their daughters, sponge on them, defraud them, do almost anything that would mean at least ostracism in normal society, and they would barely seem to notice it. But refuse to drink with them and you immediately became a mortal enemy.”
If Amis’s sir could sound like mac or bub or scumbag, the Australian mate can, besides being a genuine term of endearment, often sound like dickhead or dunce or arsehole or wanker or – (insert preferred expletive here).
So, dickhead: “Whaddaya think you’re doing, mate?”
Dunce: “Maaaaate – next time you want me to catch a bloody brick, at least tell me you’re gonna chuck it.”
Wanker: “Think you’re shit-hot, don’t ya, eh mate?”
Arsehole: “Step outside, mate.”
Of course, mate can be a wonderful term of endearment too when genuine friends say it with heart.
Such as, “So, how are you, mate? Really?”
I love hearing women addressing others as mate, staking a rightful claim to a designation that should evoke warmth and friendship but which too often seems misappropriated as a testosterone-charged pejorative.
And, so, to a dog walk on a still, clear morning. Rush-hour traffic clogged the streets. A small green sedan was U-turning to get away from it. A bloke in a dark purple twin-cab ute was momentarily delayed. He leaned on the horn, probably with undue impatience. Green sedan man, halfway through his turn, wound down his window and gave ute bloke the finger, along with a very loud, clear memo that he ought to disappear (and by another word) self-sex “yourself MAYTE”.
There went the serenity.
Ute bloke: “What did you just say, mate?”
Green sedan man: “What are you, deaf, mate?”
Ute bloke: “I heard what you just said, mate.”
Green sedan man: “Then why’d you ask what I said? You stupid or what, mate?”
By now the traffic was halted in both directions. Ute bloke turned off his vehicle and started to get out. At which point green sedan man appeared to panic. He hastily finished his turn and yelled out the window – “You’re a fucking lunatic, mate” – (full points here to green sedan man!) before speeding off. Vindicating green sedan man, ute bloke bellowed, “I’m gonna fuck you up now, mate,” before himself doing a U-turn and chasing his new “mate”.
I don’t know how this ended. Badly, I suspect.
But, sometimes, that’s Australian mateship for you.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
