battler

In everyone else’s English a battler is simply someone who does battle. A warrior or a fighter.  But in colonial Australia the prototype of the battler was someone who, having few resources and many difficulties in life, nevertheless worked hard and struggled on to make a living. Typically this was in the bush where they had managed to secure a small selection on land that was probably not especially good, the best land having been taken by the squatters.  They were battling for a living. On our Selection by Steele Rudd (pub. 1899) is based on the experiences of the author’s father who was a quintessential battler from the bush of this colonial period.  Some of these people made good in the end but it took a lot of hard word to get there.

It is also the case that in this period battler had the meaning ‘prostitute’. Behind this lies the idea that the woman is battling for cash. She is also described as being on the battle.

At this point  also battler was a synonym for an itinerant, a swagman, a sundowner, a tea-and-sugar bushranger, a toe-ragger. The latter were so poor that, not having shoes, they wrapped their feet in rags.

The battler we think of today was forged in the Depression when many people took to wandering the country in search of a job.  They lived off the land, bush tucker being supplemented by the occasional stolen sheep, to get by.

People like this are the central characters in The Battlers (1941) by Kylie Tennant.  The following description, given by John O’Grady in Aussie English (1965), sums up the essential qualitites of the battler.

Then there's the bloke who's known to be `just a battler'. He has plenty of friends too, because he's honest, genuine, a hard worker, and it's not his fault that he never seems to get anywhere. But he's always 'good for a quid' if you're in trouble yourself.

Women can also be described as battlers, their pride, courage and determination showing itself in slightly different ways. Women were often battlers on the domestic front, somehow making a meal out of nothing and fending for themselves and their children when their menfolk were off finding a job, as Kylie Tennant makes clear in The Battlers:

She was a battler, Snow admitted,; impudent, hardy, cool, and she could take a ‘knock-back’ as though it didn’t matter, and come up to meet the next blow.

It is possible but not common to apply the label battler to things rather than people.  A motorcar that keeps going despite its many shortcomings is a battler.  Trees that survive in desperate environments are battlers.

In sport battler seems to be the term for a team that is not completely hopeless, not the wooden spooner, but never wins.  Nevertheless they keep on trying with their love of the sport undiminished.

Battler has from the early 1900s been the term for someone who will fight for a cause. The Battlers of Kelly’s Bush, dismissed initially as middleclass housewives, formed an alliance with the BLF to stop a housing development on their local piece of bushland in Hunter’s Hill, Sydney. This was the first Green Ban.

Battler is still the word that comes to mind to describe someone who is fighting an illness.

The little Aussie battler was an expression coined in the 1970s when battling was more about working class struggles in the cities than survival in the bush.  Ernie Sigley was often described a little Aussie battler, presumably because his father was a boilermaker who supported a large family in Footscray, a working class suburb of Melbourne.

It is in the1990s that the term battler ceased to have real significance and became a political slogan.  As Patsy Adam-Smith said in Goodbye Girlie (1994):

Being a ‘battler’ is to Australians, akin to having some kind of courageous martyrdom swathed around you while you, the battler, beat your arms like wings to escape the invisible, cobweb chains that bind you.

John Howard, when he was elected in 1996, claimed to be representing the battlers.  He managed to equate the traditional battler striving to put food on the table with his middle-class battlers saving for a swimming pool. This broadened his appeal.

From that point on the term has been somewhat discredited, which is often the way once politics twists and turns the meaning of a word. Like fair dinkum, true blue, and un-Australian, battler has been devalued by its use in political rhetoric.