Oi, Ron, the Aussies are using your chant

By DANIEL JACKSON and NZPA

Ron Knox always admired the "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi" chant as he watched the Sydney Olympics.

It took him back to his days with a Victorian rugby club.

But the Whangarei courier driver never expected to be named as one of the people responsible for the chant in its original form - "oggie, oggie, oggie, oi, oi, oi."

The Australian newspaper set out to discover the origins of the chant, which boomed out with boring regularity every time an Australian won a medal or even looked like winning.

It has named Mr Knox as one of the prime suspects for introducing it.

"To think that I could be responsible for something the Aussies have done," a stunned Mr Knox said yesterday. "I wonder if they will send me a gold medal."

The first he knew of his contribution to history was when a mate rang to tell him he was in an Australian paper.

"I said, 'What's happened? Have the debt collectors finally got me?' And he said, 'Nah, it's this Aussie, Aussie, Aussie thing. They've put it down to you'."

Since then Mr Knox has been interviewed by Australian newspapers and has gone on Melbourne talkback radio with cricketer Dean Jones and Australian Rules coach Tony Shaw.

The link to Mr Knox runs from English soccer chants to a Melbourne rugby club and over the Tasman to Whangarei.

Mr Knox, who emigrated from England to Australia and then New Zealand, introduced the chant while playing for the Box Hill Rugby Club in Melbourne in the late 1960s to pep up the traditional 'hip hooray' at the end of matches.

A former Box Hill player, now a Darwin lawyer, told the Australian that Mr Knox would regularly get the club going with the chant.

Mr Knox recalls; "They looked at me like I was from another planet but, boy, did it catch on.

"The club adopted it and then the state under-18s adopted it and the state under-20s adopted it ...

"We used to go along to the MCG and half the boys would do the 'oggie, oggie, oggie' and the other half would do the 'oi'."

Mr Knox said that the years had clouded his memory and he was not sure how he first learned the chant.

"I think it's an old English soccer saying. My parents are Poms and I can remember Mum winding us up with it as a joke."

Mr Knox came to New Zealand in 1972 for six months, married and has been here ever since.

An applied linguist at Auckland University, Jackie Greenwood, said the origins of such a saying were hard to trace.

The term "oggie" could refer to hogs and the chant could have evolved as a call by farmers when feeding pigs.

The Australian's David Nason had other theories. One was that it began in Wales with Welsh folk singer Max Boyce, who would rev up rugby crowds in the 1970s with "Oogie, oogie, oogie, oi, oi, oi."

Another theory had it originating in Cornwall, where "oogie" (slang for a pastie), combined with "oi", would announce tucker time at tin mines.

Diehard Australian Football League fanatic David Norman reckoned the origins were all Aussie and dated back to the early 70s at the Richmond club.

"We started it when Michael Roach was our full-forward," said Norman. "We used to say, 'Roachey, Roachey, Roachey, goal, goal, goal'. In the off-season, we'd go to the cricket and when Rodney Hogg was bowling [for Australia] we'd go, 'Hoggy, Hoggy, Hoggy, oink, oink, oink'. After a while the Bay 13 mob changed it into 'Aussie, Aussie Aussie, oi, oi, oi' and it's been going since then."

But just maybe, amid all the hoopla of the Australians at the Olympics, there was a little bit of Whangarei.