How to call someone a liar ... and other weird Australian slang

Two weeks ago I was visiting a dairy in the Yarra Valley, which is just outside Melbourne in Australia. Australians mostly speak English but they have some expressions all their own.

When one member of our group asked if I'd "brought my swimmers" I thought perhaps she'd mistaken me for an Olympic swimming coach.

Later I discovered that "swimmers" are what we might call a "cozzie" — something you wear in the sea. Similarly, a "ute" is a bakkie, an "esky" is a cooler box and a "bogan" is a person of questionable hygiene without any discernible work ethic.

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Getting back to the valley, however, in Australian slang, "yarra" means "crazy" — as in "the noise those goats are making is driving me yarra" — but that is not how the river got its name. In Aboriginal Australian a yarra is a red gum tree — but that is also not how the river got its name.

The legend of how the river got its name runs along another course altogether.

According to Melbourne Water, a body keeping tabs on the vital fluid in all its forms, the Yarra River was named by British explorer John Wedge, who misheard the indigenous inhabitants when they said of the cascading rapids "yarro, yarro", meaning, "it flows".

Thus goes the story of the naming of the Yarra, although some Australians suspect this might be a Furphy.

The Furphy's roots are possibly just as questionable.

Outside the Yarra Valley Dairy, where the goats were working on their harmonies, one of our hosts pointed to an ancient water tank set upon the grass.

"That," he said, "is a Furphy. Spelt like Murphy but with an F."

How curious. We all know Murphy, the Irish imp who made the law about things being bound to go wrong if they possibly could. (Murphy's second cousin Muphry, who quite frequently interferes with the smooth workings of this column, tabled another law stating that whenever you write something in which you find fault with someone else's writing, there is bound to be a mistake in what you have written.)

So much for Murphy and Muphry. Furphy was not a name I had heard before, but right there on the side of the old water tank was engraved "Furphy & Sons, Shepparton".

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I haven't been able to find out where the Furphy name originally came from. Perhaps the first Furphy was a particularly hairy son of Murphy who came to be known as Furphy because of his thick eyebrows... or perhaps a member of the Murphy clan moved to a place of glacial cold and became so attached to his warm furry hat that he was nicknamed Furphy.

Either way, the Furphys have been a family engineering firm since 1864. Their water tanks were taken to Gallipoli along with Australian forces in 1915.

According to our host, between skirmishes the soldiers would gather around the tanks to receive their rations, and in the long tradition of water-cooler conversation would begin to swap tales of battle.

As happens, particularly when any beverage is involved, these yarns became more and more exaggerated. Somewhere along the line the name of the water tank became synonymous with the spinning of a tall story.

So a Furphy is a story or statement in which the truth has been somewhat stretched. You have to admit it's a much nicer way of calling someone a liar than accusing them of dealing in post-truth, fake news or alternative facts.