Definition of "skite"

When Carey told on Skin-the-Goat / O'Donnell caught him on the boat / He wished he'd never been afloat / The dirty skite.

1958, George Desmond Hodnett (lyrics and music), “Monto (Take Her Up to Monto)”

I needed alcohol to stop my nerves rattling. This felt like the longest period I'd been without my drug of choice for at least three years. I needed to go on a skite.

2008, Tony Black, Paying for It, London: Preface, page 214

[T]he Rooster was one of those fine, upstanding, bumptious skites who love to talk all day, in the heartiest manner, to total strangers while their wives do the washing.

1918, Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, page 74

You boast and skite from morn to night / And think you're very brave, / But the men who really did the job / Are dead and in their graves.

a. 1918, “The Ragtime Army” [World War I Australian Army song], cited in Graham Seal, “The Singing Soldiers”, in Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (UQP Australian Studies), St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press in association with the API Network, Australia Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7022-3447-7, page 53

He still had bumfluff on his cheeks, he was that young. About once a month he used to shave it off, and come skiting about it. I smiled at the memory of him all lathered up, grinning at me through the mirror as he went to work on the bumfluff.

1983, John Carroll, Token Soldiers, Boronia, Vic.: Wildgrass Books, page 247

That Smasher, he said, and forced laugh. My word he can spin a yarn! She glanced towards him, her face halved by the lamplight. Just skiting, you reckon?

2005, Kate Grenville, The Secret River, Melbourne, Vic.: Text Publishing, page 159

"England is mine," Henry says over a pint […]. "I hope that's not skiting." / "That's not skiting, sport. Edward Garnett reckons you're the best new thing in the Empire, and so do I. Good on you, mate, nothing on earth can stop you now! Here's mud in your eye."

2006, Pip Wilson, Faces in the Street: Louisa and Henry Lawson and the Castlereagh Street Push, 2nd edition, Coffs Harbour, N.S.W.: Pip Wilson, page 405

Without wishing to skite, the only other accurate prediction on 2015 was penned here by your columnist last January when we accurately forecast that all the forecasts would be inaccurate.

2016 January 4, Ian Verrender, “The crystal ball gazers got it all wrong in 2015 – don't expect better this year”, in Australian Broadcasting Corporation‎, archived from the original on 20 June 2016

There is no need of wiping ones taile (said Gargantua), but when it is foule; foule it cannot be unlesse one have been a skiting; skite then we must before we wipe our tailes.

1653, François Rabelais; Thomas Urquhart, transl., “How Gargantua's Wonderful Understanding Became Known to His Father Grangousier, by the Invention of a Torchecul or Wipebreech”, in The First Book of the Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, […], London: Printed [by Thomas Ratcliffe and Edward Mottershead] for Richard Baddeley, within the middle Temple-gate, OCLC 606994702; republished as The Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, […], volume I, London: Privately printed for the Navarre Society Limited, 23 New Oxford Street, W.C., OCLC 39370427, page 45