This week’s Sepia Saturday prompt image is of a small boy with a fish. I invited my husband Greg to write an entry for my online research journal.

Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a small boy and a large fish. The identity of the boy is unknown (and, come to think of it, the precise identity of the fish is also unknown) but the photograph was seemingly taken at the Bon Echo Inn, in the Bon Echo Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada. The photograph forms part of the Flickr Commons Stream of the Cloyne & District Historical Society.
In Australian country towns you used to know your place. We were Upper Lower Middle Class (somewhere, perhaps, on George Orwell‘s mocking scale), which meant for one thing that although Dad worked as a labourer on the railways—transhipping goods from five-foot-three inch gauge Victorian trains to four-foot-eight-and-a-half NSW trains and vice versa—his wages reached Mum on Friday night untaxed by the six-o’clock swill at Ryan’s Hotel. It helped to be Protestant too. We looked down on the Irish Catholic kids next door, whose father, a plasterer’s labourer, weaved from side to side on his way home along Macauley Street.
That made them Lower Lower Middle class, the necessary foundation of our superior status. But when their old man got a skinful of Victoria Bitter and sang Roll out the barrel‘ with his mates in their backyard, they got indulged by their parents, at least at the maudlin sentimental stage of the booze-up, while we could only peer through the paling fence in jealous disapproval.
This principle also applied to the way we spoke. Rough kids had a richer and freer vocabulary, but we knew how to employ the second-person plural personal pronoun correctly and that to use the wrong form marked you as an ignoramus, destined for an early exit from schooling followed by a dismal apprenticeship in panel-beating or something of the sort.
One day my brother and I, fishing in the river, began talking to a boy—we were about 10 or 12 years old—whose smart rod and reel but shabby clothes and worn shoes marked him as the usual product of poverty: combined parental indulgence and neglect. When he got a bite and missed he damned the uncooperative fish as a ‘bloody black Assyrian bastard’.
We were profoundly shocked and delighted. Here was a phrase crying out for use and re-use. It had alliteration, rhythm, a racial slur, and two powerful swearwords fore and aft. The ‘Assyrian‘ bit was a puzzle, but it seemed to imply contempt for foreigners, a good thing, and it sounded Biblical too, so as a bonus it was probably also sacrilegious.
I am grateful to that Lower Lower boy for introducing me to his splendid incantation. Over the years I have found it very useful for opening screw-top jars and starting small petrol engines.
Great post and evocative of the era.
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A play on words and discussion of class distinctions ends with an amusing fishing anecdote. Interesting take on the theme, and good luck with any fishing that you may or may not do on your South Coast holiday!
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Hilarious! I only regret having lived so long without that phrase in my vocabulary. Recently my friends almost attacked me for calling my fellow French
Canadians, frogs. I wonder how they’ll react to ” bloody black Assyrian bastards?”
Thanks for livening up the table.
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Oh my!
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Not an insult I will be using.
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Very funny. Fishing is usually depicted as a quiet restful recreation, when in fact it offers many opportunities for frustration and annoyance. Same for sailing or boating in general. Fisherman and sailors have added lots of useful adjectives to our English Lexicon of invective.
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You take this week’s prize for originality! No politically correct considerations evident then.
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No, not politically correct 😦 but not intended maliciously, mid-century Australian attitudes
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I wonder where that mouthy boy is now!
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