Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Amy's lovely accent

After listening to Amy’s new fangled voice recorder on her blog, and appreciating her lively Southern US accent I thought the Poms might appreciate this verse.. I wrote this a while back after a group of us read out stories on the Local ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) and one of the husbands (whose wife is from London) commented that “the best readers in the group were the Poms”.!!!  
The Verdict
The verdict is now in; we can all do our sums,
From Yorkshire and Scotland, or from London slums,
Their musical, modulated enunciation,
Their rich and well-paced pronunciation
And for their accented, articulate, articulation
We stand in awe and absolute adulation,
With wailing and gnashing of teeth for
No matter how correctly they give us their instruction,
The best readers in our group appear to be Poms.

Not like us, us low bred; bred from convict scum,
From a motley lot who don’t know where we came from.
Drawling slow and dreary  - as bleak as a hot Sunday afternoon,
Under brazen open skies our narrowed lips and eyes,
Droning flat our vowels -  flat as the land of our birth,
Or rattling out our words like bullets
So as not to take up someone else’s time –
we’re an unselfish lot we are, that way.
Nah! We’ll never read as good as any Pom.

But stone the crows and starve the lizards,
we’ve got colour in our language.
It sears with sarcasm, hot as tar in February
And a flick of a word from a closed mouth can wound or praise,
Even though you might have to ask for it to be repeated.
Yes, and we’ve learned from the Master -  Paul,
from Bankstown, that a soufflé rising twice
has nothing at all to do with cooking. Thank you Paul.
But nah! We’ll never read as good as any Pom.

Even “Blind Freddie could see that Poms all read so well
And so what if they “have more hide than Jessie”,
and don’t know “whether they’re Arthur or Martha”.
So what if they’ve got “more front than Myers”
And are well known to be shy of water,
But we’re such happy little “Vegemites’
(Or should I call us Dickie Mites, now they’ve sold our National icon,)
We’ll let them read on radio, with their peculiar pacing pronunciations
All sounding vaguely like Judy Dench, God love her  -

That’s the sort of people that we are,
But nah! Still, we’ll never read as good as any Pom.
Therese  

3 comments:

Middle Child said...

Yes but..yes but... yes but... at least 75% of Australians in the 1950's had an Irish Catholic ancestry... and the Nuns from 1900 - today had and have a major influence on our education system...like the "haitch" "aitch" issue here regarding the letter H...Catholics say Haitch pre 1970 Proddies say Aitch... poor bloody Don doesn't know what to sat as his proddie parents sent him to a catholic school to sort him out and he's really a confused ex Presbyterian/ catholic... (but can still catch a penny he drops before it hits the ground...apart from that have a listen to Amy's voice thingie on her blog...she has the most lovely speaking voice...

Middle Child said...

Sorry should proof read ..."Don doesn't know what to say..." not sat

Unknown said...

Okay, so for we Americans, what the heck is a Pom?

I used Audioblogger to do a post on my blog back when it first debuted. Like most of us, I can't stand the sound of my own voice, and when faced with saying something on my blog, found myself completely at a loss for words (no one who knows me would EVER believe that!) But how fun it would be to hear the voices of fellow bloggers from Scotland, Australia, England, and I suppose for you folks from there, for you to hear our various American accents. Mine is distinctly Californian - all fast-talking and "you guys" and whatnot.