'Larkin Was a Larrikin'

At age ten or so I had a pen pal, a girl from New South Wales, Australia. We both wrote in pencil on lined paper, and we met through our respective newspapers in Cleveland and Sydney. The correspondence lasted for a year or so and I don’t remember what either of us ever said to the other except that I once asked if she had a duck-billed platypus. I don’t remember her answer. As a letter writer she was more prolific and prompt, and my handwriting was sloppier. I was already lazy, a dedicated lout, so it soon petered out. I do remember she occasionally used Australian dialect words that stood out like Serbo-Croatian to this monolingual American. 

So does Damian Balassone, an Australian poet who exploits his country’s dialect in “Larkin Was a Larrikin” in the Summer/Fall 2023 issue of Light:

 

“Larkin was a larrikin;

Larkin was a toad.

He liked to take his lady friends

to Cemetery Road

and share a pot of English tea,

way back in nineteen sixty-three.

 

“Larkin was a larrikin;

Larkin was a hoot.

He boogied with librarians

behind the library chute.

He shimmied like a giant squid,

he did not mean to, but he did.”

 

Philip Larkin’s admirers will enjoy the allusions to his poems. Larrikin sounds like the poet’s surname stuttered. Its place of origin is the West Midlands of England but the word took root in Australia. There’s even a book titled Larrikins: A History. The OED gives four definitions, one of which, if stretched a bit, fits Larkin: “a mischievous or boisterous person; one characterized by good-natured irreverence and a disregard for convention.” In addition to exotic words, Australia is the land that gave us Christina Stead, Les Murray, Clive James, Stephen Edgar and Men at Work.

 

[The same issue of Light includes poems by A.M. Juster, A.E. Stallings and Gail White.]