Quotations and Literature Forum

It's not exactly profound, but a colleague just asserted that "I'll see you when I see you" showed up first in the movie Galipoli, and speculated that it originated in Australia. Anybody know about this one?

I took a stab at it and could not verify that Australia had any sort of "ownership" to the expression. Of course it's possible; I just couldn't find a link to it.

Each time it appears that the two [Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Mel Gibson)] will be parting ways, they repeat their joking good-bye lines, "I'll see you when I see you mate." The stock reply is "not if I see you first."
~from a review of the movie "Gallipoli"
http://www.epinions.com/content_60182531716

"Hail Jack! See you when I see you."
~from Australian Network TEN's mini-series, My Brother Jack, based on the award-winning novel by George Johnston
http://www.planetpapers.com/Assets/4603.php

"You're growing up to be a real bloody little wowser," he would say with an angry contempt, and I would blush to the roots of my hair, for in Jack's bawdy and colourful lexicon "wowser" was the most despicable form of human or animal life. He deplored the puritanical views I held about smoking and drinking, but it was on the question of girls that he most resented me... That must have been the only time in my life I ever came to hate my brother Jack.
~from My Brother Jack by George Johnston, Publisher: HarperCollins