By Susan Wyndham LITERARY EDITOR
AUSTRALIANS no longer season their conversation with expressions such as ''She's got a face like a half-sucked mango'' or ''The things you see when you don't have a gun''. But should we be ashamed of the colourful language of the past or preserve it as part of our national character?
Hugh Lunn, an award-winning journalist and author, has collected Australia's ''lost language'' - the vernacular that is dying with our older generations - in his best-selling book Lost for Words and its sequel, Words Fail Me.
Hugh Lunn ... ‘‘a bee in his bonnet. He misconstrues my book.’’
Now he is preparing to sue the magazine The Monthly for a savage review of the new book by Peter Conrad, an expat Australian writer who left Tasmania in 1968 and teaches at Oxford University.
Lunn, whose childhood memoir Over the Top with Jim has sold 200,000 copies, defends sayings such as ''quit while you're behind'' and ''it's raining dingoes'' against the encroachment of Americanisms (''go figure'', ''in your dreams'') and ''public service gobbledegook''.
''If you lose your language you lose your personality, your character and who you are,'' he said.
Conrad wrote in last month's issue that Lunn, a Queenslander, ''has taken on the persona of a philologic Pauline Hanson'', ''fantasises about an Australia hunched inside its rabbit-proof fence'' and ''is leading a peasants' revolt against multiculturalism and its dilution of Australian integrity''.
He wrote: ''I realised that what delights his fans in the superannuated suburbs is [Lunn's] praise for a time that was blinkered and bigoted, impoverished both economically and linguistically, when Australians spoke their own idiosyncratic language because in their empty, distant continent they were unreachably isolated from the global conversation.''
Lunn and his publisher, ABC Books, wrote to Ben Naparstek, the editor of The Monthly, requesting an apology and removal of the review from the magazine's website. Naparstek refused but has published a letter from Lunn in the latest issue.
Lunn told the Herald ''legal action is in train'' for Conrad's ''defamatory assault''.
''Peter Conrad has a bee in his bonnet without knowing anything about me,'' he said. ''He obviously dislikes Australia and the past a lot, but this is lazy. He thinks I'm a Queenslander writing about the good old days, but he misconstrues my book.''
Lunn said the accusation of racism was hurtful because he was ''the exact opposite''. In the book he laments the disappearance of Aboriginal words from general use and includes words sent in by Australians of diverse ethnic backgrounds.
While Conrad disparages him for being ''a cultural icon'' in Queensland with the Bee Gees, Lunn points out that he has written in the past about how badly his state treated Aborigines and has stood up for West Papuans.
Also defamatory, he said, was Conrad's description of Words Fail Me as a ''copy and paste'' of his fan mail.
Conrad would not comment further to the Herald, saying: ''I'm not interested in helping Lunn to get more publicity for his awful book.''
Brigitta Doyle, the head of ABC Books, said ''the article was unreasonable and inaccurate''.
Naparstek said: ''Most intellectual debate in this country is conducted as timid and polite debate.'' He stood by Conrad's review as ''impeccable and meticulous'' and as a qualified lawyer said: ''There is nothing defamatory about it. They don't have a leg to stand on.''