‘Gloria Soame’: meaning and origin

The colloquial Australian-English expression Gloria Soame, also gloria soame, is the Strine 1 equivalent of glorious home.

1 Imitative of the alleged Australian pronunciation of AustralianStrine:
– as an adjective, means relating to Australian English or to Australians;
– as a mass noun, designates the English language as spoken by Australians;
– as a count noun, designates an Australian.
—Cf. history of ‘Emma Chisit’ and ‘Strine’.

The British author Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) evoked Strine and the expression Gloria Soame in The national ego needs no massage, published in The Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) of Tuesday 26th January 1988 [page 9, column 3]—Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester, Lancashire, a county in northwestern England:

I AM  a Pommie, perhaps even a Pommie bastard, though not, I think, a whingeing Pom. I do not, as a rule, whinge. I make the declaration of nationality (though I’ve lived out of Britain for 20 years) so that Australian readers can take the right defensive stance. But if they expect condescension they’re going to be disappointed. Who am I to condescend to one of the two genuine countries of the future (the other being Canada)?
[…]
I am glad that Australian speech has at last been accorded the respect it deserves: Australian films have exported it to the United States, where, in Australian male mouths, it turns women on. It used to suffer from the condescension of the speakers of London RP (Received Pronunciation), though it can claim as sound a London origin as the clipped patrician of Queen Elizabeth II.
It was once as provincial as my native Lancashire, the speech of the expatriated deprived, but it now has as strong a claim to be respected as the language of a major nation as has Eastern Seaboard American. I was never happy about the comic cult of “Stryne”, with “Emma Chizzit?” and “Eye level arch (plyte of oysters)” and “Gloria Soame” (with wall-to-wall carpeting).

The earliest occurrences that I have found of the expression Gloria Soame, also gloria soame, are as follows, in chronological order:
Preliminary note: Amusingly, Gloria Soames was the name of an estate agent in Sydney, New South Wales, in the 1970s.

1-: From Glossary of the Strine Language, by Afferbeck Lauder 2, published in The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Saturday 2nd January 1965 [No. 39,638, page 7, column 3]:

Gloria Soame: A suburban house of more than 12 squares, containing fridge, wart wall carps, payshow, a kiddie’s rumps room, etc.

2 Afferbeck Lauder (Strine pronunciation of alphabetical order) was the pseudonym of the Australian graphic artist and author Alistair Morrison (1911-1998), who documented Strine.

2-: From Let Stalk Strine: A lexicon on modern Strine usage (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1965), by Afferbeck Lauder—as reprinted in Strine: Let Stalk Strine and Nose Tone Unturned (Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1982) [page 20]:

Gloria Soame: A spurban house of more than fourteen squares, containing fridge, telly, wart wall carps, payshow, and a kiddie’s rumps room.

3-: From Column 8, published in The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Wednesday 6th January 1965 [No. 39,641, page 1, column 10]—I have not found the advertisement in question in any of the issues of The Sydney Morning Herald; it was perhaps never published:

STRINE SETBACK.
The first advertisement in pure Strine reached our “classified” department yesterday. It advertised a “gloria soame” of 14 squares, with amenities like “good study for stewnce,” “wart wall carpets” and “fast spurban trines to Sennral.”
Our clerk, a stickler for Queen’s English, begged the advertiser to translate.

4-: From The Bonynge Affair, by ‘Batman’, published in The Bulletin (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Saturday 24th July 1965 [Vol. 87, No. 4,456, page 33, column 1]:

The Richard Bonynges are living at No. 1 Tintern Avenue, Toorak. It is owned by Peter Lynch […].
His house in Tintern Avenue is a white two-storey building, not very pretentious. It has six bedrooms, large lounge, dining room and, of course, a grand piano. It is in a very well-fed area, but purists would consider it the wrong side of Toorak village, a far martini from the Gloria Soames of Albany Road and Heyington Place.

5-: From an interview of Alistair Morrison, by ‘Batman’, published in The Bulletin (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Saturday 20th November 1965 [Vol. 87, No. 4,473, page 33, column 2]:

It’s true, he did come from a Gloria Soame in South Yarra. His father was a dentist and his father’s cousin was George Ernest “Chinese” Morrison 3.

3 George Ernest Morrison (1862-1920) was an Australian journalist, political adviser to, and representative of, the government of the Republic of China during the First World War.

6-: From an account of a lecture on the Australian way of life, given by the Australian author and historian Geoffrey Dutton (1922-1998) at the Fabian Society, Melbourne—account by Jean Battersby, published in The Canberra Times (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia) of Wednesday 20th April 1966 [Vol. 40, No. 11,447, page 27, column 3]:

Geoffrey Dutton was in fighting form . . . impetuous, persuasive and outrageously selective. Australia, he said, has no sense or national identity because Australians cannot see straight through the drawn Venetians of their Gloria Soames. They will not see modern life as it is; they cling to outmoded and irrelevant British institutions like the monarchy; they have an inferiority complex about Britain, they adore ceremonial forms which many Britons no longer swallow.

7-: From the column One More Week, published in The Bulletin (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Saturday 25th June 1966 [Vol. 88, No. 4,503, page 20, column 2]:

Feggo Mite
RUSSELL BAKER in “The New York Times” this week appears to have filched the substance of a lifetime’s serious study, which Australian scholar Afferbeck Lauder recorded in his book “Let Stalk Strine.” Baker treats the matter as something of a joke, and suggests the compilation of an American phrase-book for Europeans. Sample entries: “Wotz eet’n Duhgawl?” “Owkum yernot baknus uppin Veet Nam?” “Woddayathinkah Elbeejay?” These seem merely to point up the phonetic poverty of American speech compared with the richness of language in the land of Gloria Soames.

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