Australian Crosswords

Over the years I’ve written just about every kind of crossword you can imagine, from the 3-minute, heavily-interlocked quick to the Y2K monster history puzzle that contained at least one clue for each year of the preceding century. Every puzzle type is different in content, style and audience, and a setter must take this into account when putting them together. Content is fairly straightforward, as is style, but catering for a potentially wide audience will always leave a setter with unresolvable issues. No two solvers are alike in solving ability and everyone’s vocab is different. A solver brings to the solving table a lifetime of word experience, some of which may be in a specific field related to study or work, and this will to some extent colour their view and interpretation of clues. For example, recently a solver commented on the equation of Average = Mean in an Australian newspaper crossword, stating that they are two very different terms. Of course, they are right, if you look at them from purely a mathematical or statistical perspective. However, as there is no context given in most clues, all aspects are permissible and a general term is certainly not incorrect. This often won’t stop the avid long-time scientist or biologist from voicing their displeasure, certain that their interpretation of a particular clue is the only one that should be considered. For people who have thought of a word one way their whole life, it’s hard to think of it any other way. Remember, there are countless words that start with a narrow meaning and spread their wings over time, many taking on informal or colloquial aspects. All this is good for the cryptic setter who must exploit these to bring variety to their work.

Solvers of my puzzles will know that I rarely do theme crosswords, however they are almost mandatory for the Christmas and New Year period running up to Australia Day. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) publishes bumper editions where I write large themed cryptics with more than 70 clues. Since my debut in the AFR I’ve written 26 Christmas or New Year themed puzzles, all containing different ideas. As the holiday period approaches, I rack my brains trying to find something new, but some topics have limited scope. After the days of Christmas and the reindeer, there’s really not a lot left for Christmas. Even though it’s a religious festival, a religious theme these days has the tendency to offend people, so I stay away. New Year is even worse – apart from the date change, what else is there? Fireworks? Done. Thankfully the cryptic element of crosswords allows for other possibilities like “New Year” in a clue meaning an anagram of “year”. A few years ago I wrapped a Christmas cake recipe into the crossword that was great fun and very tasty. This year I’ve done the same in the AFR but with a twist. One thing that always surprises me is that something always seems to pop out, even when there appears to be no more ideas to be had. If nothing spectacular comes to mind, there’s always my default gimmick which is to incorporate an appropriate message somewhere in the grid to acknowledge the time of year and my appreciation of solvers.
I find the larger grids offer much more room to incorporate a theme and allow everything to stay normal from a grid design, grid-fill and cluing sense. A standard 15×15 is a tight space to work in and compromise is often needed to squeeze in that extra theme word or make a gimmick work. Nothing worse than leaving yourself a really obscure word or two to clue that obviously don’t fit with the style of rest of the puzzle. These misfits can stand out so much that they push the theme into to background and spoil a lot of hard work.

If you read this blurb regularly you’ll know that I do a weekly search using google.com.au to see if anything is happening with cryptic crosswords in Australia. The actual search I do is “cryptic crosswords -youplay -lovatts”. The search will exclude any results (apart from paid ads) that contain the dash words, -youplay and -lovatts, as these tend to dominate the results and I’m not interested in them. The next step is to use Search Tools in Google to limit the results. Under All I select Country: Australia, then Any Time: Past Week. These results are presented as Sorted by Relevance, and I often change this to Sorted by Date. Nothing much changes from week to week – it’s a matter of sifting through the results looking for a newbie or something a little different possibly in a blog post. A while back I did this and multiple entries appeared containing exactly the same wording about a grid/clues mismatch, all on different regional newspaper websites. It turned out that the same crossword (and clearly the same publishing process) was used in dozens of regional papers owned by the same company, and therefore the same mistake hit them all. It highlighted a number of things for me: almost no-one is employed in sub-editing any more; there are just a few newspaper groups controlling many newspapers; there’s so much shared information that regional papers no longer represent their local community as they used to; and one (cheap) crossword now services a huge area making crossword setters almost redundant.
My weekly search also makes it clear to me that there’s no growth in the solving of cryptic crosswords, if anything there’s a steady decline.