G’day, Mate.
One of the most widely-held stereotypes about Australia—along with the convictions that kids ride kangaroos to school and that the country is seething with venomous beasts—is that everyone addresses everyone else as ‘Mate.’ But unlike the twaddle about poisonous beasts and domesticated marsupials, there’s actually some truth to the ‘Mate’ thing. Last month in this column I mentioned that my family and I were on our way to spend a few weeks in Australia, where my parents and siblings still live. It had been several years since our previous trip and I’d forgotten all sorts of things that I love about Australian culture. One of my favorites is the fact that you can address virtually anyone as ‘Mate’ without raising the suspicion that you have in fact forgotten their name.
In Australia addressing someone as ‘Mate’ is acceptable in just about any social situation, and during our holiday I enjoyed being ‘mate’-ed by flight attendants, hotel desk clerks, shopkeepers, waiters, taxi drivers, friends, strangers, old ladies, small boys, and my own mother—who isn’t even Australian. I don’t know if anyone called Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, ‘Mate’ during her visit to Australia last year but it doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility. It’s great: convenient, meritocratic, and probably a reflection of Australians’ reflexive loathing of any kind of class distinction. But the best thing about being able to call everyone ‘Mate’ will be immediately apparent to readers who, like me, are hopeless at remembering people’s names. I was reminded of it early in our visit, when my father and I went down to his golf club to hit a few balls. “G’day Mate!,” shouted the golf pro to Dad as we walked up to sign in. As they talked—about the weather, the state of the greens, Dad’s new five-iron and so on—the pro continued to address him as ‘Mate,’ notwithstanding the fact that my father is a respectable, tie-wearing, silver-haired medical professional probably forty years his senior. And a client. Dad has been a member at this club for fifteen years, during which time he has taken several lessons from this same pro. As I listened to their exchange though, it dawned on me that the pro had no idea what my father’s name was. But armed as he was with this universally acceptable form of address, this man could chatter away, securely insured against the awkwardness that the situation would have elicited in most other cultures.
So far as I can tell, this is unique to the Great Southern Land. If anyone knows of another culture that has one universal salutation you can deploy regardless of age or status, gender or social station I’d like to know it. America just doesn’t seem to have an equivalent. Oh, there are some things that work regionally. ‘Dude’ is fine in Southern California but don’t try it here. In Acadiana ‘Cher’ might do in a pinch so long as you have the accent to back it up. There’s always ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’—fine for the vaguely familiar customer who you run into in the grocery store checkout line, but no good at all when you’re suddenly stuck for the name of your own brother-in-law. ‘Man’ or ‘Buddy’ don’t work well in business situations, and the less said about ‘Hombre’ or ‘Bro’ the better. And what to do when addressing members of the opposite sex whose names are a mystery? Only the boldest or best-insured souls should roll out ‘Dear,’ ‘Sugar,’ ‘Sweetie,’ ‘Baby,’ or ‘Honey-Buns’ in any but the most clearly defined circumstances. There’s nothing, because for something like ‘Mate’ to work you need to have culture-wide buy-in and as we are reminded in an election year, consensus is hard to come by. Even now after seventeen years in Louisiana, when a name eludes me I confess I still fall back on ‘Mate’ from time to time, which I suppose I can get away with while the last vestige of my Australian accent holds up. Without it the best we poor name-forgetting souls can do when confronted by a familiar but mysteriously named acquaintance is to make a kind of inarticulate noise in the back of our throats (sounds like ‘Mwurr,’) and hope for someone else to walk up and introduce himself. So if you go to Australia and find yourself being addressed as ‘Mate,’ you can proceed secure in the knowledge that you are welcomed as a friend and an equal.
Either that, or your interlocutor has forgotten your name.
