The Australian Female

In reading more of Great Aussie Insults, as previously posted, I ran across this bit of interesting drivel printed in The Drum by Sidney J. Baker in 1959. It's a good thing I have a sense of humor. Interestingly enough, I have run across several Aussie women who would fit this bill. Not all, but enough to make me do a double-take.

"Since Australian females lack practice in conversational exchanges with the opposite sex they, too, are frequently shy. Even at their best, verbal offerings are often shallow and repititious. They are poor conversational entertainers. They are almost totally lacking in a self-critical sense of humor. Their thinking tends to be of a non-sequitur variety that would send all but the most complaisant male up the wall. And because of these things, they are usually tense, wary and given to private dreams about knights in shining armour which males rightly scorn. So, because of shyness on both sides, there is little verbal ease between our males and females. And this takes us near to the heart of the problem. Here is a situation that grew out of male diffidence, was sancitified by frontierland courtesy, became static because of female inexperience, and, with nothing to modify it, became fixed into a tradition. If, as a consequence, the Australian male is prepared to wash his hands of the whole affair and confine its corrections to manoeuvres on the couch, one can hardly blame him."

And one more, from a report in Nation Review in 1976 concerning dinners at the Australian country home of Rupert Murdoch.
"...conversation during dinner tends, out of necessity, to invlove the women to a greater extent. The fact that they are seated alternately with the men makes it very difficult to ignore them. Perhaps it is due to their greater involvement in the conversation that it becomes noticeably more banal."

I actually snorted, I laughed so hard!