Needs the follow-up:
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OK, we use septic tanks. I’m no expert, but it’s presumably something to do with the economics of running sewer lines over the great distances of a country as spread out as we are. Or something. But if anything, Oz has even less population density. So do y’all seriously not have any septic tanks over there? Wouldn’t it make sense to do so? Are y’all so prideful that your sewer infrastructure is super robust, economics be damned? Why is a particular sewage solution more appealing and another so damnable to the Australian way of thinking, anyway? I know you are not the designated Aussie ambassador or anything, but I just don’t get it.
I scoffed at first, but the article was very compelling! An excellent denouement, too.
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Indirect rhyming slang, based in a seventy year old insult. Not used with any malice these days.
Seppo = Septic Tank = Yank, as you figured. Originally intended with a stinky implication.
It dates from WWII, when American soldiers weren’t particularly popular with Australian men (Brisbane was a major R&R stop for American soldiers; the US soldiers were paid substantially more than the local troops, arousing jealousy; and soldiers on leave in wartime behave like soldiers in wartime, with predictable consequences).
To a 1940’s Australian, all Americans were “Yanks”. The “Yankee = Northerner” bit hadn’t penetrated the local culture.
It’s certainly nothing to do with pride in local sanitation. Using the newspaper bog roll to knock the redbacks off the seat of the pit toilet is an archetypal Australian experience.
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it is clear to me, finally. thank you. the rhyming thing has been explained to me as a UK Cockney culture thing, but of course those folks probably populated some percentage of your nation, so there you go. A coded, convoluted, less-swear-y way of calling us “shitty” when we were acting shitty, I guess.
My family has a somewhat similar story, actually. My maternal grandma’s pop and a whole mess of aunts and uncles were English by birth but came to North America as young people to work Canadian farms. In WW1, the men (boys, really) fought in Europe wearing Canadian uniforms. Great-grandpa got leave one night over there and wandered into a bar, I think this was in France. He opens the door and it’s packed with American GIs; no fellow Canucks, no other Allied troops. It wasn’t long before he was suffering a lot of drunken jeers and things seemed to be coming to a head. As my great-grandpa was trying to grin and bear it until he could get out of there, a unit of Aussie troops came through the door. They quickly assessed the scenario and one of them claps great-grandpa on the shoulder “What’s the matter, Canada? Yanks giving you trouble?” whereupon a donnybrook consumed the entire bar.
It seems obvious that all parties (except maybe great-grandpa) were already spoiling for a fight, but he was the vector. As fate would have it, he and a lot of the family moved to the Detroit area after the war for work, and now we’re Yanks 
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I don’t think there’s the connection you’re suggesting. Cajun patois is quite different from more general Southernisms. My understanding is that the antebellum South the upper class was descended from English aristocracy and the lower classes (besides slaves, of course) were largely a mix of Borderers (Scotland, Northern England) and Germans.
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