Eshays and Adlays: Australia’s answer to London’s Roadmen

Eshays and Adlays: the latest bunch of Pig-Latin-speaking, Nike-wearing young bogans (Australian and New Zealand term for working-class people) to cause massive moral panic in Australia.

A few years ago, my nephew, who lives in the Perth Hills in Western Australia, warned me that the new skate park the council was building near his home is “going to bring all the eshays there”.

Now that totally confused me: what’s an eshay? I’d never heard of this Aussie term before. Is this a term the local kids just say or something more widespread?

Well, the Australian National Dictionary defines an eshay or adlay (both terms are can be used interchangeably, but the former is more in usage) as:

“a young man who is part of a group associated with anti-social behaviour and characterised by the wearing of certain brand label clothing”.

I’m sure that’s how they see themselves.

I consulted some of my other Aussie English experts and other friends to find out what they had to say. At the time, many of them had never heard of the term (OK, they’re old fogeys like me!) or they had caught mention of it here and there but weren’t really familiar with its meaning.

Many Aussies first heard of the term in 2022 with the return of the Australian high school drama Heartbreak High, where one of the characters – named Ca$h, deals drugs, steals cars and wears distinctive brand label clothes including Adidas and Nike polo shirts – the main teenage viewing demographic immediately knew he was an eshay.

Whenever I need to test out how understood any Aussie term is, I start dropping that term into everyday conversation with Australians. So I did that with eshays in Perth. The result was that not only had many people, young and old, knew who they were but most had some choice words to say about them.

Eshays/adlays usually:

• come from poor, working-class backgrounds, but not exclusively
• are made out to be universally poorly educated
• often hang out in gangs at public spaces such as shopping centres, parks, bus and train stations, etc.
• are attributed to violence and petty crime, with aspirations to be part of bigger action, though more often are wannabes with more bark than bite
• are identifiable by the wearing of brand-name, sometimes stolen, uniform items such as Nike TNs, striped t-shirts or polo shirts (Nautica in particular), Nike or Adidas trackie daks (tracksuit bottoms) or shorts, baseball caps, and a bumbag (what are called fanny packs in North America) across the chest
• sport mullets (seriously guys?!)
• are associated with drug use
• have their own argot, which is based on Pig Latin, and use such slang terms as gronk (“idiot”).
• are subject to much derision and contempt by others, often fueled by constant tabloid reporting

And it’s that last point where eshays/adlays have gained most of their notoriety. If it wasn’t for (tabloid) media constantly targeting them, most Aussies would not know anything about them.

So where did the terms eshay and adlay come from?

Despite their relative recent awareness in the minds of the general Australian public, eshays and adlays as a teenage subculture have actually existed for decades. The term eshay itself was coined in the late 1980s in western Sydney from the Pig Latin for “seshie”, Aussie slang for someone who does a “session” i.e. a drug use session. Adlay is Pig Latin for “lad” (“young guy”, just like in UK English).

Use of these terms to describe these lads (as they almost always are) have waxed and waned over the decades in Sydney. It’s only since the early 2020s that this specific subculture, and terms to go with it, have spread to the rest of Australia.

But eshays and adlays are far from unique to Australia. The description of them can apply to a whole range of youth subcultures around the world. Going through the list above, the likes of Roadmen in England, gopniks in the former USSR, dizelaši in 1990s Serbia or gaseri in ex-Yugoslavia pretty much tick each box too.

Need to sort your eshays from the adlays? Contact me at info@nicknasev.com to find out more about Australian English.

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Photo credit: Photo by Oskar Smethurst: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-white-red-and-black-striped-shirt-sitting-on-the-edge-of-a-building-looking-over-city-6036193/