Almanac Book Review: ‘Come In Spinner – A History Of Two-Up And Its Language’

 

 

In his recent timely publication Come in Spinner, ANU academic, author and lexicographer Bruce Moore provides an important expository account of Australia’s ‘national game’, two-up.

 

Dr Moore is an English language scholar. He was Director of the ANU’s Australian National Dictionary Centre from 1994 to 2011 and has published several important books including Speaking Our Language which is regarded by many as “the standard account of Australian English”.

 

He is therefore admirably equipped to write about how two-up as a game has had such an abiding – yet unappreciated – connection with many aspects of the Australian language and the Australian psyche.

 

“Most Australians are aware of the link between the phrase come in spinner and the game of two-up but come in spinner is just one of the more than 150 Australian words, meanings and phrases that have been used in two-up. This makes the number of Australianisms associated with two-up greater than for any comparable Australian game or activity.”

 

Reference is made later herein to some of these words. However, perhaps Moore’s finest achievement in this book lies not so much in the detail, important though this is, but in his consolidation for the national record in one volume of pretty much everything anyone could ever want to know about a game that is in danger of sliding its way out of the collective public memory. This is why I use the word ‘timely’ in my opening sentence.

 

“One of these days someone will write a book on the National Game and really do it justice. It should have a ready sale.” (Western Mail, Perth 8 November 1945).

 

“Most adult males in 1945 would have played two-up at some stage in their lives. Over seventy years later, however, the number who have responded to that magic invitation of “come in spinner” has diminished to the point where there is now a need to explain what two-up is and why it used to be seen as the National Game.”

 

With apologies to Jack Dyer, Come in Spinner is a book of two halves. The first consists of six chapters outlining the operation and implements used in the game; the origins of the game and its strong connection with the Anzac tradition where there was “a determination that the game of chance that is two-up must go on in the midst of the larger and grimmer game of chance that is the war.”

 

Further chapters recall its origins in the development of the expression ‘the fair go’; it’s illegality; and its exclusion of women.

 

The second half contains a detailed glossary of the 150 plus words referred to earlier. It lists their meanings and all known recorded instances of their usage. At this point, Moore the Australian English lexicographer leans back and goes into overdrive.

 

We learn of such uniquely two-up references as ‘sleeper catchers’, ‘butterflying’, ‘nob’, ‘bender’, ‘rush the kip’, ‘two bastards on bikes’, ‘grouter’, ‘dook’, cockatoo’ and – your reviewer’s favourite – ‘let the angels see them’, this last reference being a call to the spinner immediately prior to the coins being thrown high in the air.

 

Perhaps the most enduring two-up legacy in the Australian language though is the term ‘fair go’.

 

Many of us simply assume it emerged over time as a self-explanatory expression. However, Moore puts forward valid reasons to suggest it has its peculiarly Australian origins in two-up and the 1890s shearers’ strikes.

 

“The term fair go first surfaces in Australian English just a few years before its appearance in descriptions of the game of two-up. It is initially associated with the radical unionism of the shearers’ strikes, mainly in Queensland, in the early 1890s.”

 

He then refers to a Toowoomba Chronicle report of 26 March 1891 where, after some fairly cursory treatment by local police, one of the arrested union leaders George Taylor asks of the magistrate “Do you call this a fair go Mr Ranking?”

 

In a subsequent court hearing Taylor made “an excited speech to the presiding magistrate demanding in a loud voice that he and his fellow prisoners should ‘have a fair go’.”

 

In fact, ‘fair go’ was the two-up predecessor to ‘come in spinner’. Between the wars it morphed into ‘fair go spinner’ and then ‘fair go, come in spinner’. The ‘fair go’ part later dropped out and ‘come in spinner’ became the standard command.

 

Moore, however, is quite insistent on the importance of its legacy.

 

“While fair go is no longer an important part of the language of two-up, it was the central term in the game for more than 40 years. That former centrality was a factor in enforcing the value-defining role of fair go in the Australian lexicon…few Australians are now aware of the history of the term fair go and its part in the history of two-up. But it seems likely the fair go in two-up played a role in cementing the fair go in the cultural imagination and in Australian values.”

 

But despite the meticulously thorough nature of his research such as all the foregoing – there are 158 primary source references in the first 105 pages alone – Come in Spinner is not an aridly didactic tome. Far from it.

 

Moore the researcher constantly throws the switch to Moore the storyteller. He entertains his readers in a very reader friendly style with a colourful array of vignettes anecdotally plucked from the game’s long history.

 

He tells of how the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) visited the Australian troops in France after the signing of the Armistice to end WW1 and joined a two-up game.

 

“One of them handed him the kip and he was soon set. The first spin was poor. The pennies flew wide and it was then the future King was asked in straight Australian to “let the blanky angels see them!” He did better next time but threw two ones. His third try was tails so we collected his dough”. (Port Macquarie News, 6 September 1919)

 

Moore’s material on women’s participation in two-up largely documents how they have been excluded from the game for many years.

 

However, his impish wit and understated sense of irony come to the fore when he finishes that chapter. Perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek, he concludes it with the following exception to the rule, as it were, from Australian Associated Press more recently on Anzac Day 2004.

 

“On one side stood Trixie; her tattooed arm clutching a schooner, the other a fistful of $20 notes. “Forty on heads” she yelled.

 

Across the floor the bet was accepted by a pot-bellied man in shorts, thongs and an orange T-shirt. “Fair go” said the little bloke in the stockman’s hat and the spinner stepped forward with the kip. The coins arced high through the smoke and noise and fell towards a square of shabby carpet in the centre bar at the Cooper’s Arms in King Street Newtown.

 

“Give us some head,” shouted one of Trixie’s mates and the coins obliged, falling with the crosses facing the floor. With a whoop Trixie and her lesbian mates – gathered beneath a lurid painting of Ned Kelly’s last stand – collected their dough and called for more beer.”

 

Other anecdotes document how police would often attempt to disturb two-up schools.

 

Given the proliferation of gambling advertisements these days promoting a multiplicity of gambling options, it may be difficult for younger readers to appreciate that almost all gambling, including two-up, was illegal for most of our history. “A ticket in Tatts” and registered on-course bookmakers were, for many years, as close as you came to legal gambling.

 

Several humorous references tell us how ‘cockatoos’ would foil police attempts to break up illegal two-up games. The name came from the habits of Australian cockatoos who would always have one of their crackle as the sentinel on the lookout for approaching danger.

 

One such example featured in the Mildura Telegraph on 25 May 1917.

 

“It was this system that baulked the police. If by any means they got past the doorkeeper, alarm bells were immediately rung so when they reached the scene of central operations, they were reluctantly forced to the conclusion that they had merely broken in upon an innocent smoke social. As soon as the alarm was given, the players immediately composed themselves to listen to a light tenor singing to an excellent accompaniment on the piano “Sweet Marie” or one of the other popular melodies of the day. Or perhaps they would see a couple of hefty young fellows pummelling away at one another with boxing gloves. A proprietor who knew his business could turn his gambling school into entertainment as law-abiding as a Sunday school meeting in less time than it takes you to read this sentence.”

 

On this matter of legality, the author reflects rather wistfully,

 

“The law now has little to bother about with two-up. It is not that illegal two-up has been successfully eradicated by the law. Illegal two-up simply no longer exists. Two-up survives only because of the legal two-up played on Anzac Day.”

 

This may well be true in one sense.

 

But thanks to Bruce Moore, this important chunk of Australiana also now survives in the pages of Come in Spinner. Future readers will come to thank him for such a “timely”, thoroughly researched and eminently readable piece of work.

 

 

 

To purchase Bruce’s book you can do so at the publisher’s website Here.

 

 

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