The Evolution of a Distinct Australian Lexis as seen in the Public Discourse of Nineteenth century Bush Ballads and Spoken Verse

Despite being of relative insignificance in terms of the development of standard British English, the nineteenth century was a period in which varieties of it were being exported around the world to lay the foundations for the various World Englishes that now exist. The case of Australian English is of special interest. Today, it is regarded as one of the major international varieties of English but, in the nineteenth century, it was confined to a relatively small – but rapidly growing – community of speakers isolated on a distant, and as regards fauna and indigenous population, largely alien continent. Notwithstanding the fact that the English-speaking community was not particularly homogenous, it is remarkable how as early as 1820, a distinct and largely endocentric (Semenets and Rusetskaya: 1991) variety of English, readily recognisable to outsiders as Australian, was established within the various settlements on the island-continent. What was then called “bush idiom”, became known elsewhere within the English-speaking world, and by 1898 had an academic reference work dedicated to it: Morris’s dictionary. This was due to its diffusion by, among other things, popular spoken verse and “bush ballads” (a compendium of subgenres such as convict songs, bushranger ballads and stockmen’s and drovers’ songs) and derived literature such as poetry, short stories and ballads by writers such as Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson, much of which published in influential magazines such as The Bulletin (1890 – 2008). This paper will attempt to map this evolution in lexis by looking at a corpus of nineteenth century spoken verse and bush ballads (some of which published only later – see Stewart and Keesing 1955) in order to identify patterns in the use of distinctively Australian English terms within it (see Delbridge et al. 1987; Horndadge 1986; McArthur, 1992, 1998, 2003; Ramson 1981). The focus will be firstly on the use of non-English native aboriginal terms (e.g. 'boomerang', ‘budgerigar’); secondly the appropriation of dialect words from principally Britain and Ireland (e.g. 'fossik', ‘larrikin’ or 'bloke'); and finally on the creation of original Australian terms whether adaptations of existing ones (e.g. 'creek', ‘bush’) or of completely new coinage (e.g. 'outback', ‘within cooey’).