108 years ago Samuel L. Clemens, aka Mark Twain, visited Australia as part of a voyage described in "Following The Equator: A Journey Around The World" - accessible at www.site-webmaster.com/literature/mark-twain/
following-the-equator/ . His impressions marked by his characteristic dry humour and perceptiveness and still well worth reading.

An extract from his impressions of 1897 Sydney follows.

We entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went oh-ing and ah-ing in admiration up through the crooks and turns of the spacious and beautiful harbor--a harbor which is the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the world. It is not surprising that the people are proud of it, nor that they put their enthusiasm into eloquent words. A returning citizen asked me what I thought of it, and I testified with a cordiality which I judged would be up to the market rate. I said it was beautiful--superbly beautiful. Then by a natural impulse I gave God the praise. The citizen did not seem altogether satisfied. He said:
"It is beautiful, of course it's beautiful--the Harbor; but that isn't all of it, it's only half of it; Sydney's the other half, and it takes both of them together to ring the supremacy-bell. God made the Harbor, and that's all right; but Satan made Sydney."
Of course I made an apology; and asked him to convey it to his friend. He was right about Sydney being half of it. It would be beautiful without Sydney, but not above half as beautiful as it is now, with Sydney added. It is shaped somewhat like an oak-leaf-a roomy sheet of lovely blue water, with narrow off-shoots of water running up into the country on both sides between long fingers of land, high wooden ridges with sides sloped like graves. Handsome villas are perched here and there on these ridges, snuggling amongst the foliage, and one catches alluring glimpses of them as the ship swims by toward the city. The city clothes a cluster of hills and a ruffle of neighboring ridges with its undulating masses of masonry, and out of these masses spring towers and spires and other architectural dignities and grandeurs that break the flowing lines and give picturesqueness to the general effect.
The narrow inlets which I have mentioned go wandering out into the land everywhere and hiding themselves in it, and pleasure-launches are always exploring them with picnic parties on board. It is said by trustworthy people that if you explore them all you will find that you have covered 700 miles of water passage. But there are liars everywhere this year, and they will double that when their works are in good going order. October was close at hand, spring was come. It was really spring --everybody said so; but you could have sold it for summer in Canada, and nobody would have suspected. It was the very weather that makes our home summers the perfection of climatic luxury; I mean, when you are out in the wood or by the sea. But these people said it was cool, now--a person ought to see Sydney in the summer time if he wanted to know what warm weather is; and he ought to go north ten or fifteen hundred miles if he wanted to know what hot weather is. They said that away up there toward the equator the hens laid fried eggs. Sydney is the place to go to get information about other people's climates. It seems to me that the occupation of Unbiased Traveler Seeking Information is the pleasantest and most irresponsible trade there is. The traveler can always find out anything he wants to, merely by asking. He can get at all the facts, and more. Everybody helps him, nobody hinders him. Anybody who has an old fact in stock that is no longer negotiable in the domestic market will let him have it at his own price. An accumulation of such goods is easily and quickly made. They cost almost nothing and they bring par in the foreign market. Travelers who come to America always freight up with the same old nursery tales that their predecessors selected, and they carry them back and always work them off without any trouble in the home market.

If the climates of the world were determined by parallels of latitude, then we could know a place's climate by its position on the map; and so we should know that the climate of Sydney was the counterpart of the climate of Columbia, S. C., and of Little Rock, Arkansas, since Sydney is about the same distance south of the equator that those other towns are north of-it-thirty-four degrees. But no, climate disregards the parallels of latitude. In Arkansas they have a winter; in Sydney they have the name of it, but not the thing itself. I have seen the ice in the Mississippi floating past the mouth of the Arkansas river; and at Memphis, but a little way above, the Mississippi has been frozen over, from bank to bank. But they have never had a cold spell in Sydney which brought the mercury down to freezing point. Once in a mid-winter day there, in the month of July, the mercury went down to 36 deg., and that remains the memorable "cold day" in the history of the town. No doubt Little Rock has seen it below zero. Once, in Sydney, in mid-summer, about New Year's Day, the mercury went up to 106 deg. in the shade, and that is Sydney's memorable hot day. That would about tally with Little Rock's hottest day also, I imagine. My Sydney figures are taken from a government report, and are trustworthy. In the matter of summer weather Arkansas has no advantage over Sydney, perhaps, but when it comes to winter weather, that is another affair. You could cut up an Arkansas winter into a hundred Sydney winters and have enough left for Arkansas and the poor.

That is such an amazing piece of writing - and as you are quoting verbatim from an American I çan skim over the American forms that often rankle.

Of course the harbour is glorious - close to, like waiting for the ferry to Circular Quay today on a classic early summer afternoon; or when glanced down a side street in one of the waterside suburbs, or seen from afar in one of those amazing vistas you get on the road from Bondi to Watsons Bay, or from the Gladesville Bridge. I am lucky enough to drive over that every day, and every day I think "wow".

Not sure which American forms rankle or why, but that can serve as an introduction to an interesting observation by MT. Should we assume from this that American speech, or Australian speech, or both, has changed noticeably in the last 100-odd years?

"The Australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general appearance. There were fleeting and subtle suggestions of their English origin, but these were not pronounced enough, as a rule, to catch one's attention. The people have easy and cordial manners from the beginning --from the moment that the introduction is completed. This is American. To put it in another way, it is English friendliness with the English shyness and self-consciousness left out.

"Now and then--but this is rare--one hears such words as piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from lips whence one would not expect such pronunciations to come. There is a superstition prevalent in Sydney that this pronunciation is an Australianism, but people who have been "home"--as the native reverently and lovingly calls England--know better. It is 'costermonger'. All over Australasia this pronunciation is nearly as common among servants as it is in London among the uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of people. That mislaid 'y' is rather striking when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to enable it to show up. In the hotel in Sydney the chambermaid said, one morning:
'The tyble is set, and here is the piper; and if the lydy is ready I'll tell the wyter to bring up the breakfast.'

what rankles (can't help it!) is the use of the written form "harbor". I know it's a knee-jerk reaction but there you go.

You quote another wonderful piece of writing from MT, but I'm not sure he got it right about the origin of the accent he took to be "Australian". Where are the stats to prove that most immigrants at the end of the 19th century were from London?

If the stats exist - fine - but I was always under the impression that the folk on the First Fleet came from all over, and that those that followed did too.

What think you?

Having grown up in Mark Twain country, that title was bound to catch my eye. I grew up in a small town split in distance between Hannibal of his youth and St. Louis, his big city as young man.

I can't imagine that the two accents would have been so remarkably similar. Especially not simiar to those Twain grew up with in the Midwest. Granted, language has changed and Twain traveled and lived around the world. But this area of the midwest was much more populated, even 108 yrs ago, with German and Italians immigrants more so than Englishman. And Hannibal is and was hardly a town of extraordinary refinement. If this was his American basis of comparison, I can't imagine who it was he met there at the harbo<b>u</b>r.

Many Americans still now can't differentiate between an English (whichever oen of them) and an Australian accent.

fuzzylogic, the irony is that in those days the &quot;-or&quot; spelling form was very common in Australia - hence the Australian Labor Party (formed in the 1890s) and Victor Harbor in South Australia. In fact it was used in some newspapers until at least the mid-20th century. And well before, come to think of it - in the course of researchiung my family history I came across several instances of 'honor' rather than 'honour' in official docs.

I share Clifton's doubts about the similarity of the accents. I'm guessing that New England speech would have been the nearest to the Australian of the day, but you wouldn't be likely to confuse the modern equivalents. Accents certainly change over time (look at New Zealand), but I would have thought that American accents as we know them today would have been pretty well established by the 1890s - and in parts of the country even more pronounced than today?

However, I would have thought that Clemens of all people would have had a pretty good ear. A linguist could probably throw light on all this.

I've never seen any stats on the origin of the first Australian settlers, although they could be extracted in the convicts' case from tickets-of-leave etc. My guess is that London and Irish speech was the dominant influence on the Australian accent - but having said that, none of my 6 convict ancestors, or any of the free-settler ancestors, came from anywhere closer to London than Kent.

I have a recollection that several of the early Governors were frustrated by the government's insistence on sending them hordes of London pickpockets and the like with no useful skills rather than the tradesmen and farmers they desperately needed.

Which reminds me - I also found Twain's funny comments on the office of NSW Governor - I might make a separate post of that.

For any Kiwis who may be reading this, Twain also visited New Zealand. I haven't got to that part yet.

p.s. - Clifton, I'm not surprised that most Americans could confuse Australian and English accents. I don't really blame them - so-called &quot;educated&quot; Australian isn't all that different from SE England. I think most Americans' exposure has been confined to people with &quot;professional Australian&quot; accents like Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin, so they'd expect all Australians to sound that way.

Most of the people I spoke to in the eastern US states thought we were English, although very puzzlingly one lady initially thought I was from Georgia (!) - and for the sake of balance a lad in Charleston thought I was a Yankee.

You're right there, Neil. My wife has gotten guesses ranging from English to various European locations, to Boston to Alabama (she works with the public).

Some, upon learning she's from Australia, have even been so kind as to let her know that she's doing a fine job mastering English.

Oy.