Delis
In South Australia, if you decide to pop around the corner to get some bread or some milk or some fags, you go to a deli. In the rest of the country, general stores are called milk bars.Really, both nomenclatures have their shortcomings. I think we would all be better served if these particular kinds of commercial establishments were referred to as corner shops, as they are in England. Although milk bars invariably stock dairy products, they by no means specialise in dairy products. And delis, the term an abbreviation of the word delicatessen, do not supply the more exotic European foodstuffs offered by their unabbreviated namesakes.
The question then is what do delicatessens call themselves in a state that has misappropriated the word deli to describe your average corner shop? Perhaps fortunately, South Australia is the most Anglo-Saxon state in the country, and the locals are less inclined to want to eat the sort of wog food that real delicatessens provide. And there is always the appellation ‘gourmet’, which is used largely indiscriminately to justify charging an extra twenty cents for a sausage roll. In South Australia, presumably, an actual delicatessen is referred to as a ‘gourmet deli’. [CG]
Deregulation
In the South Australian context, the word “deregulation” is used to substitute for the much longer phrase “Bought out by Eastern State based congolmerates and dumbed down to match their business plans”.Cases in point.
The Australian dairy industry was deregulated. The remaining local dairy cooperative “could not compete” and was sold off to an Eastern States based monolith. We lost local yoghurt and cream production. “Eve” became “Ski”, flavoured milks became “Oak” and they still couldn’t do a decent Iced Coffee to compete with Farmers Union Iced Coffee (part of National Foods, another Eastern States company).
The Australian electricity industry was deregulated (or more accurately opened to competition/privatised). We end up paying an Eastern States company for our electricity and paying a lot more for it, while if you want any wiring work to your house done you contact ETSA Utilities on a 13 number—that is now answered in Melbourne, which is also the location of the PO box where you send the cheque to pay for the work.
The banking industry was deregulated, and…No, wait, that stuffed up the whole country—not just SA. [CL]
Devil’s elbow
This was, without a doubt, the most notorious and most evocatively named bend in any South Australian road. As a child, when we drove up into the Hills, I remember asking at each curve, ‘Is this Devil’s Elbow?’ until we finally reached that impossibly sharp hairpin bend. The Hills-dwellers who had to negotiate the road every day and witness the 200 accidents a year probably found the novelty wore off very quickly.Eventually government funding came through, and a straight tunnel took the place of the hairpin bend as part of the not-very-evocatively-named Adelaide-Crafers Highway Project. The boast is that what used to be the worst road entry to any capital city in Australia is now the best.
But the horror stretch has just been moved. Now it’s the bit that goes past the inexplicable modern sculpture—the forest of giant fossilised cigars balanced on their ends. [HV]
Diversity, geographical
Having revealed one’s South Australian origin to an outlander, the listener will typically reply:‘You’re from Adelaide? You must know…’
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, some seventy-three percent of South Australians were permanently residing within the Adelaide Statistical Division on the night of the 2001 census. Which means that slightly more than a quarter of South Australians live elsewhere in a state which, by the way, is slightly larger than Texas. Which is to say that’s it’s a bloody great big bloody place.
There are literally dozens of crappy little towns all over South Australia for ex-pats to have escaped from. To presume that all expatriated South Australians came from the urban centre of Adelaide is to diminish the achievement of the more geographically disadvantaged who have also managed to leave. [CG]