on 4/5/03 1:28 AM, Jon Corelis at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> where people's accents came from
>etc.
Max Richards at Cooee ruminates:
When hearing my voice on tape, I am reminded of the poet Peter Porter's, a
Queenslander who settled in London aged about 20 in the 1950s. He used to be
told his pentameters were off because Aus speech rhythms were not British.
When he read mine, he thought they were even more off.
Listening (in Melbourne) to the voices from my old Auckland last Sunday
while watching the tv doco on Allen Curnow, I reflected how few sounded
strikingly Kiwi - to my ear.
(My speech therapist wife was in the kitchen or her sharp ear might have
differed on this. Travelling between Auckland and Christchurch a few years
ago, she was sardonic about the fush&chups accent everywhere.)
But then the doco featured the highly educated.
Accents speak of place but also time, and of course - in some parts of the
world - class.
When ABC radio draws on its archives, everybody sounds historic-Australian.
I no longer ask my students to listen to old Robert Frost or T.S.Eliot or
Philip Larkin, so fogeyish do they sound.
Faber have now got Ted Hughes reading Eliot, and Alan Bennett doing Larkin.
My accent was formed in NZ in the 1940s and 50s amongst the children or
grandchildren of migrants from all over the British Isles.
Though my family made no great deal of correct pronunciation, some of my
earliest voice memories include distaste at the way other kids said myilk.
State schools in those days (if my experience is standard) did a little to
promote a standard vowel (how now brown cow). Private schools (money&class)
I think did much more. Do they still?
BBC correctness, reinforced by actors' English...Gielgud, Olivier,
Burton...spoke to a few like me.
(The movie of Pygmalion was potent - and later the musical of it, My Fair
Lady, with Rex Harrison de-cocknefying Audrey Hepburn...)
But American accents, or bland Hollywood versions of them, must have been
reaching NZ too.
Every NZer reviled the Aussie accent in those days, as if there was just
one, Chips Rafferty's. Robert Menzies' mellow imperial statesman's voice was
not felt to be suitable in NZ, and a rising NZ conservative, Keith Holyoake,
was mocked for his version of it.
When young Barry Humphries first did his Edna Everage in Auckland (circa
1960?), I think his female-aussie voice resembled quite a few kiwi voices.
When I heard Allen Curnow read poetry brilliantly in first year English at
Auckland University in 1955, and he explained Hopkins's variations on metre,
I had a model voice to emulate beyond that of Burton and of Dylan Thomas,
whose awe-inspiring LPs circulated amongst us.
James K. Baxter had a potent voice for poetry too.
When I got to Edinburgh in 1963 as a postgrad, my quiet pride in being a
NZer was mixed with a good deal of what Australia had recently defined as a
cultural/colonial cringe. (Back then BBC Scotland used southern voices
almost exclusively.) Looking back recently, I noted (in lame pentameters)
one memory thus:
Perfect English [Edinburgh 1964]
Her name is Priscilla elegant, slim,
Oxbridge, medievalist. We stand
by a railing in the rare sunshine,
exchanging pleasantries. (The moment is
about to occur when I must say Iım
from New Zealand.ı How many times some hearer
has murmured: Ouwh, so far away. I buy
my frozen lamb from there when [smiling]
I canıt afford better.ı Or: Oh, Iım so
glad youıre not Orstralian. I tend to think
theyıre so vulgar, even their tennis-players.ı)
Iım from New Zealandı, I tell Priscilla,
and she: Oh, but you speak perfect English.ı
Of course I do. Havenıt I listened hard
to the BBC from earliest childhood?
recoiling from the way the Taranaki
dairy-farm children say Myilkı? Havenıt I
frowned, all ears, in some Auckland student flat
as his disc revolved of Dylan Thomas
(newly dead) booming out his mellow tones?
practising later in privacy:
and I sang in my chains like the seaı.
So I am flattered. I like her. Iıd so
love to pass as a native in the South.
And I sang in my chains like D.T.
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