Inner-city elites once mocked the battlers who clipped vowels and stumbled over grammar. The blue-collar types who said things like “youse lot ain’t got none,” “me and him went down the pub,” or “them ones is better than this.” Drop an s off a verb or mangle a plural and you were marked uneducated, uncouth, destined for the wrong side of the tracks. Yet the same elites now beam with pride as they do exactly the same thing — but under the protective cloak of cultural solidarity.
No farmer today would ever say “the land speak to us.” His mother would have told him the land can’t speak at all — and if it could, it would be “the land speaks to us,” not “speak to us.”
But if a western-suburbs elite breathes the same words into a microphone at a regen conference, the hall falls into reverent silence. “We are part of Waterways,” delivered without the definite article, is treated as profound. “We gather on Country” — always with a capital C — apparently signals enlightenment, even if some sceptics in the audience wonder which country is being referred to. “Ancestors still here with us,” minus the verb, is hailed as wisdom — when anywhere else it would just be bad grammar.
The irony is rich. The battling classes once scolded for “talking wrong” now watch elites drop verbs and articles like climate catastrophe claims at a Greens rally, all dressed up as solidarity with Indigenous culture.
What was once derided as the speech of the unwashed — “he don’t,” “ain’t got none,” “done it meself,” “could of went” — has been elevated to the high church of progressive virtue. The ruling class hasn’t transcended its colonial shame; it has simply recycled working-class errors and repackaged them as their own way of showing moral superiority.
Today, if you want to know whether a farming conference is worth your time, just listen to the speakers. If the talk is all “always was, always will be” and “caring for Country,” you can be sure they’re not much interested in the carbon sequencing of GM crops. While they dwell on how “the land speak to us,” the real world is focused on speaking plain English about how to make the land yield more for us.
