Australian cricketer and commentator Alan McGilvray. An older man speaking into a microphone and gesturing with his hands.
18 July 2022
(8 August 2022: Added 1979 citation from the Canberra Times and amended some of the source notes.)
The catchphrase been there, done that (with got the T-shirt often attached) expresses boredom and a bit of world weariness, a modern I have seen the elephant. The phrase in this form got its start in Australia in the latter half of the twentieth century, although the shorter been there dates to nineteenth-century America.
This shorter form is captured in J. Redding Ware’s 1909 slang dictionary, Passing English of the Victorian Era, which dates it to the 1870s:
Been there (Amer.-Eng., 1870). Had experience; e.g., “That ’ee—no betting; I’ve been there.”
Some reasons why I left off drinking whiskey, by one who has been there.—Paper in Philadelphia, Sat. Ev. Post, 1877.
Been there has remained in current use through to the present. Arthur Bennett’s 1913 play The Great Adventure, for example, has this exchange in which a woman speaks to a man about the advisability of finding a wife through a matrimonial agency:
Besides, I shouldn’t give a baby a razor for a birthday present, and I shouldn’t advise a young girl to go to a matrimonial agency. But I’m not a young girl. If it’s a question of the male sex, I may say that I’ve been there before. You understand me?
Edwin Torres’s 1975 novel Carlito’s Way includes this line:
Money is only an object. I’ll get it. Got it, been there.
And Joseph Wambaugh’s 1978 Black Marble has this:
Philo Skinner's been in this racket thirty years. Philo Skinner's been there, baby!
But the addition of done that is distinctly Australian in origin. Pascal Tréguer has found an Australian citation from a 13 December 1979 column by Ian Warden in the Canberra Times that refers to a song about Alan McGilvray, the Australian cricketer and cricket commentator on the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC):
One had hoped that the ABC’s tasteless promotional ditty “The gam’s [sic] not the same without McGilvray” would, with the effluxion of time, prove to be less distressing.
Alas, the very opposite is proving to be the case and since one is likely to hear it several billion times this summer there seems to be every chance that the trite and embarrassing lyrics and the gauche melody will be indelibly embossed on our brains by the time our cricketing visitors return to their respective homelands in February.
The venerable, admirable and conservative McGilvray (“He’s been there! He’s done that!”) has become so indispensable to the proper, sober, traditional wireless broadcasting of cricket in this country that to exploit him in this way is a lot like producing a jingle which asserts “The Church is not the same without Wojtyla.”
Wojtyla is, of course, a reference to Pope John Paul II, Karel Wojtyla.
A few days later, on 16 December 1979, the Canberra Times published the lyrics to the song, which read in part:
From a lusty cover drive,
The one that brings the crowd alive,
To a gentle push behind square leg,
A ball that takes the middle peg—
He’s been there, he’s done that.
The ditty, which was evidently played frequently on the ABC network, would seem to be the inspiration of the full version of the catchphrase (unless an earlier example is found). But with the insertion of he’s, the ditty’s version is not quite the same as the popular catchphrase. But as the next citation will show, it was floating about Australian speech at the time.
Tréguer also discovered the earliest known use of the form been there, done that in print. From the Canberra Times of 3 February 1980:
A cant and to my mind dreadful phrase of the moment is “Been there, done that”—an indication of experience.
Another early use is from Tharunka, the student newspaper of the University of New South Wales, on 31 August 1981 in an interview with Michael Atkinson, a member of the folk music group Redgum:
Our only form of statement is what we sing. I’ve tried everything else—I’ve handed out leaflets at factory gates—been there done that—the music is all that I can do and it’s all that I can do well.
The following year, an Associated Press article about Lauren Tewes, one of the stars of the American television series The Love Boat, was published on 21 February 1982. Tewes is an American:
Tewes, who has just divorced, says she doesn’t plan to get married at this time. Using an Australian expression, she says, “Been there, done that.”
And on 7 November 1983, the Financial Times ran this article which quotes Phillip Adams, the newly appointed chair of the Australian Film Commission, commenting on the state of that country’s film industry:
“It’s about time they took a critical look at our society,” Adams said. “They are too content to make the Gallipolis and the Breaker Morants. I can’t think of one film that has got up and criticised. And we, as a nation, have not always been terrific.
“We have to eliminate the boring, plagiarised, been-there, done-that films and inject some freshness and originality.”
The T-shirt is added by 1985, as attested to by this, which appeared in New Zealand’s Women’s Studies Journal of 1 April of that year:
What slightly depresses the reader of the 25 years of the debates is that their participants, if they had the chance to look at our arguments of the last 10 years or so could, with some truth, claim they’d already been there, done that, got the T-shirt. (Or the ladylike 1900s equivalent.)
There we have it. A nice example of a catchphrase that has evolved over time as it passed through the slang of various English-speaking countries.
Sources:
Associated Press. “As Cruise Director On ‘Love Boat,’ Actress Gets to See the World.” Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), 21 February 1982, TV Week 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Bennett, Arthur. The Great Adventure. New York: George H. Doran, 1913, 1.2, 46. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Downie, Graham. “A Man for All Matches.” Canberra Times (Australia Capital Territory), 16 December 1979, 7. National Library of Australia: Trove.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. been there, done that, phr.
Macquarie Dictionary, 2022, s.v. been, v.
Mandle, Bill. “An Earthy, Sensitive Sports Writer.” Canberra Times (Australia Capital Territory), 3 February 1980, 13. National Library of Australia: Trove.
Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions May 2001, s.v. there, adv. (adj. and n.)
“Redgum.” Tharunka (Kensington, New South Wales), 31 August 1981, 10. NewspaperArchive.
Roth, Margot. “Editorial.” Women’s Studies Journal (New Zealand), 1 April 1985, 6. ProQuest.
Toms, Maggie. “On the Threshold of a New Era.” Financial Times (London), 7 November 1983, Australia 13. Gale Primary Sources.
Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of the Phrase ‘Been There, Done That (and Got the T-Shirt).’” Wordhistories.net, 12 October 2018.
Warden, Ian. “Wielding Willow With a Bombay Curry Poultice.” Canberra Times (Australia Capital Territory), 14 December 1979, TV-Radio Guide 5. National Library of Australia: Trove.
Ware, J. Redding. Passing English of the Victorian Era. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1909. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Australian Broadcasting Company.