Plus it's a genuine bit of Aussie slang to call your friends bastards, rough and ready type frontier humor and all that. We ex-colonists have to stick together. I just wish our germs hadn't decided to buddy up. Of course, there are readers who love that sort of thing, I'm sure. And it must be cathartic, and good, for the writers to spill it all onto the bandwidth for anyone to read and maybe comment on.
Feedback is all, to some people.
But I do wonder how many of those kinds of diarists ever learn to write. Maybe I am wandering down the wrong path here. I'm guessing the majority of them want to have an impact on an unseen readership. It's an ambiguous area. Certainly, there are diarists who don't put much writerly quality into their entries but still manage to be engaging.