This week in our french class, I submitted a video for general discussion. It’s about the gestures that the French do and how I got nearly all of them WRONG. In the video, the host says that in order to learn the French language, you also need to understand the gestures they use.

If you’re interested, it’s well worth a look.

Here’s another interesting post about gestures.

However, after watching this, our homework was to consider what are our Australian gestures and I struggled to think of some.

What Are Australian Gestures?

The first one I thought about was the middle finger which is considered rude and derogatory gesture – an “up you!” that you give to others to tell them that they can go and get stuffed.

There’s a salute and a wink which is what Paul Hogan seems to do a lot but in effect, considered a bit tacky if an Australian does it for real to someone else. I’m hazarding to guess that when they do this gesture, they’re taking the piss.

There’s the gesture where you’re pretending to drink a beer. When you do this, you’re asking someone if they’d like a drink from across a crowded room.

Beyond that, I’m struggling to think of other Australian gestures. Are we THAT devoid of expressive hand gestures??

Meanwhile a search on YouTube revealed that the Aboriginal Indigenous cultures used Hand Talk as a main means of communication between tribes. Watching these videos about Australian Aborigines and then the video about the American Indians, I was struck at how similar the gestures were – especially how they communicated time – through the position of the sun in the sky or the phases of the moon. That in itself tells you that hand signals is the oldest form of communication – and it’s alive and well with the indigenous cultures.

Nowadays, these gestures are modified in sign language for the deaf but in these cultures, hand talk was just a way of communicating with each other.

Now I will need to explain all this in our French Conversation Group on Thursday. Hope they found it as fascinating as I did.

On verra!