Australian Crosswords

Have you ever wondered why more people aren’t enthralled by cryptic crosswords? I don’t just mean younger generations – why is it your friends and family aren’t hanging out each day for the latest cryptic challenge? I bet many of them enjoy “normal” crosswords, so why is it they don’t naturally migrate to cryptics over time? I remember being taught how to solve The Guardian cryptic in the Sun-Herald in year 10 (at 15 years old) by my English teacher – he not only taught us every school week how to solve but questions on cryptics turned up in term tests and the end-of-year exam. There was a big incentive to learn how do them yet a relatively small number of us actually enjoyed this part of his English curriculum. I think the same goes in the population generally: not everyone thinks the right way necessary to crack cryptics, even though they are quite comfortable with all other kinds of word puzzles. I’ve always believed a maths bent helped me embrace and get good at solving, and I think the fact that English was my worst subject (marks-wise) in senior school bears that out. Recently the results of a study by Kathryn Friedlander and Philip Fine from University of Buckingham confirmed that cryptic solvers and solvers of advanced cryptics in particular are more likely to have a science/maths background. Have a look at the study here. I must warn you that it’s academic in nature and not a relaxing read, but the findings are interesting. The researchers used info from questionnaires filled in by solvers sourced through various crossword-related websites. I’m not sure if the numbers tell us about how many people are actually solving crosswords compared to years gone by, but it does tell us quite a lot about the age-groups of current solvers (who are internet-savvy), and their make-up.
I was thinking of running a small anonymous survey on this website about crossword things – who’d like to participate?

While Australia has been solving cryptics for just about as long as anywhere else in the world, we have never really embraced them to the extent that we would say they are part of our culture. Say “have you done the crossword today?” to an English person and they will automatically take that as a reference to a cryptic crossword. It’s not so here. Our crossword history reveals a story of imports and very few crossword heroes. Lack of newspaper publications means not many opportunities for local setters although Fairfax has been faithful in their support of Australian cryptic crosswords. We setters are few, and the same goes for our counterparts in New Zealand. Their crossword history mirrors ours, with just a handful of NZ setters flying the flag at home. A few years ago I met two NZ setters in Wellington, David and Rex, and they kindly showed my wife and I around the city for a day. Rex writes the weekly Kropotkin crossword in the New Zealand Herald (help can be found here), and David writes a weekly cryptic for the NZ Listener (worked answers can be found here). It was David’s treatment of the solution, that includes a specific layout and cryptic comment, that inspired the equivalent on my website. Apart from those two, Jim Greenfield sets cryptics that appear in NZ papers, Barbara Brown sets a weekly cryptic for the Christchurch daily The Press (blog here), and Maya sets for various websites (see his puzzles here).
I can’t talk about NZ setters without mentioning yet another one who lives in Wellington, Paul Henderson, but he’s special because he’s not a Kiwi, but an Englishman living and working in NZ. He sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi and Beelzebub, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. More details can be found here. As far as I know, he doesn’t write crosswords for any NZ publications.
It’s tough going for Oz and NZ setters, and it’s only going to get harder as outlets shrink and the internet reduces the number of crosswords needed to service the solvers, but we plug away, not for the money, but to try and bring a home-grown flavour to a market flooded with foreign influences.

Not long ago I talked about the problems that can occur in cryptic clues if care isn’t taken to avoid potential issues that may cause offence. While a cryptic clue is usually not to be considered as a statement/phrase in its own right (due to the two-part nature of most clues), it may still offend especially if the solver isn’t that familiar with cryptic clues. There’s an exception, of course, in the case of &lits, where the entire clue can be read separately as wordplay and definition. Last week a letter appeared in The Age (“Slipping under radar”) highlighting a clue that caused concern for a reader (and I suspect many others too). The clue for SHINER was Visible punishment for her sin? (6), and it appeared last year in a cryptic in the Herald-Sun which is published in Victoria. The reader had complained to the paper but received no reply, so she wrote a letter to the “opposition” who were only too glad to print her concerns. I can’t confirm, but it seems this cryptic is published in all News Ltd’s mainland dailies, and it replaced The Stickler in The Daily Telegraph. Clearly this is a clue from a bygone era – sad that it would have been deemed acceptable at any time – but it’s age is irrelevant: it just shouldn’t have been published. There’s no excuse either, as the News Ltd cryptic is a syndicated one, which means it’s either created for a publication and then sold to others, or created for an agency that sells it multiple times. Regardless, it must have been checked and approved a dozen times across the world, so a flag must have been raised at some time. I have the sneaking suspicion the whole crossword could be an old recycled one that wasn’t checked with a modern eye as such necessities require subediting work that just isn’t done these days.