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IN HIS RECENT, BLEAK DETECTIVE NOVEL, THE BROKEN STONE, Peter Temple relies heavily on dialogue, both profane and laconic, and on the vocabulary and speech patterns of working-class and underclass Australians on the south coast.1 In order to make the book more accessible to a wider readership and to have a bit of fun. the author appends "A Glossary of Australian Terms" to the North American edition. As the first entry illustrates, this establishes a distance, if such were needed, between the writer and his characters, and the class and ethnicity -conscious biases of the latter: "Abo. Abbreviation of Aboriginal. The usage is derogatory or racist except in Aboriginal English" (351). Political correctness allows some to have it both ways. Temple is admittedly not without personal bias, as when his entry for "footy," Australian rules football, also includes the judgment "the world's finest ball game" (353).
In an entry for another word that also bespeaks the colonial era, he is more expansive and sets up as amateur etymologist. But first the word in context in The Broken Shore. After an attempted arrest that has gone badly wrong and resulted in a death, one of the police officers is speculating why a young Aboriginal man named Ericsen may have been carrying a gun when he got out of a "ute," - SUV in American parlance:
"My understanding," said Villani, "is that Ericsen's in an accident, he gets out, sees two civilians jump out of an unmarked car and come at him. Could be mad hoons. Three years ago four such animals did exactly the same thing, beat two black kids to pulp, the one's in a wheelchair for life. Also in this town a year ago a black kid walking home was chased down by a car. He tried to run away and the car mounted the pavement and collected him. Dead on arrival. (92)
Now to Temple's glossary entry:
Hoon. Once, a procurer of prostitutes, but now any badly behaved person, usually a young male. Irresponsible drivers are hoons who go for a hoon in their cars. Mark Twain uses the expression as drunk as hoons in Sketches Old and New, where it presumably derives from "Huns." (354)
The reader might infer that Temple proposes...