Is it okay to marry a dictionary?
I’d seriously settle for a long honeymoon with the new edition of The Australian National Dictionary in a wood-panelled library that serves Campos coffee and homemade scones.
What a treasure! This two-volume tome will take you on an amazing voyage of discovery and reminiscence.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of tulipwood or met a pumpkin squatter or been cabbage-tree hatted. Or played swapsies, met a ta-ta lizard or bought a stubby of beer with a stubloon.
Maybe you’ll find you like drop bears with your fairy bread, spunk rats in trackie daks, or pizzling on the plans of poddy-dodgers.
Or it could be you’ll marvel, as I did, that anyone manages to learn Strayan (first use 1991) or Strine (first use 1964) at all. Even tracking the meaning of yakka is hard yakka: yacca (from Kaurna yaga) means ‘gum obtained from a type of native pine tree’, a yakka (of unknown origin) is a small marine fish, and yakker (from Yagara yaga) means ‘to work or labour’.
Yikes. At least we’re a hot country so, unlike the Inuit, there’s only one word listed for snow.
Heaps to get your head around
The Australian National Dictionary is like the Oxford English Dictionary in that it describes the full history of a word, starting with its earliest appearance and documenting its use over time.
This includes more than 550 words borrowed from 100 Aboriginal languages and 16,000 Australian terms in total spanning all aspects of our life and culture.
This 2nd Edition also contains 6,000 new terms.
There’s a numbered map of Australia, with each number corresponding to an Aboriginal language—so you can easily find the origin of the word you’re interested in. It’s helpful and educative: so many languages were used in this wide brown land before the First Fleeters muscled in.
My preliminary perusals of the dictionary prompted the preparation of lists.
My first list aimed to contain all the borrowed Indigenous words I didn’t know—and there were scores of them. They included djanga (from Noongar djanga, djina “spirit of a dead person”; in Aboriginal use, white people), bunji, “a mate, a close friend, a kinsman” (from Warlpiri and other languages of the Northern Territory and northern Queensland), yidaki “didgeridoo” (from Yolngu languages yirdaki), coojong “the golden wreath wattle” (from the Noongar language of the Perth area), and (this last is my favourite) wiltja “a shelter, shade or shadow” (from Western Desert language)—shelter in our temperate climate being anything shaded or in shadow, surely? Who needs walls?
In my second list I tried to nail down all the more general words and phrases I’d never come across before—and again there were scads. A few I liked were horse duffer (yep, he steals gee-gees), kipsy (yup, it means a house or shelter) and lizarding (in which you don’t muster lizards but you do muster cattle, riding the boundary).
The third list was for words I’d heard of and used but didn’t really know their meanings or origins. I’m still puzzling over how I’ve had two sets of relatives who’ve lived on battle-axe blocks but never understood that the word reflected the shape of the handle (the driveway) and the axe head (the block of land itself).
How could I not have drunk a Diamantina cocktail (did the suspicion that it contained an emu egg put me off?) or not have known that the magpie was also called a break of day bird? Or not have understood that a duck-shover evades responsibility?
My fourth list aimed to capture all the colourful phrases that have disappeared from our lexicon (at least in city parlance) and that I’m overjoyed the word nerds at Oxford University Press have taken the time and trouble to resurrect. For example, who “dip’s one’s lid” anymore as CJ Dennis made a fella do in The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke in 1915; or when did you last talk about “a hairy goat” (a horse that performs badly); or say a nut-job was “as mad as a gumtree full of galahs”); or exclaim in amazement “strike me pink”?
Blowies and bities
My list making came to an abrupt halt once I realised there were far too many fabulous words to re-categorise. That’s when I felt the urge to acquaint myself with all the birds, insects and plants that get a guernsey. That’s also when I started to wish the dictionary had been printed with colour illustrations—so many creepy crawlies and horticultural hotties to learn about, love or avoid.
One creature I’ll be dodging for sure is the water rat—an amphibious rodent now more commonly referred to in southern Australia as the rakali (from the Ngarrindjeri language). And, yes, I’ll be eating my next rat coffin (meat pie) a tad more gingerly now I’ve read its historical background in which Melbourne’s Herald Sun is cited as saying, “Tucking into a rat coffin suggests Australians adventurous eaters, since the contents of most pies are the leftover bits even a sausage rejects.”
Overstuffed with hairpin banksias, hairy cicadas, hopper ants and harlequin bronzewings, I moved on to try to find everything I’d give a flying fox to SEE (an opossum cloak, a growling grass frog and a forty-spotted pardalote), EAT (a doughboy and a charcoal tart—which are really just versions of damper—but I’d still like to add them to my culinary accomplishments), DO (a scrub-dash or spit chips) or WEAR (giggle pants—and yes, I’d like mine in green).
Next came the words I wanted to argue with or abolish like outbackery (get outta here!), wowserism (great word—but who needs the party-pooper hanging around) and Bondi cigar (again, if one’s hanging around it’s disturbing) and Hansonite (well, you get my drift).
Start drilling down into this dictionary and you’ll strike gold.
You’ll find yourself wondering about how language shapes and is shaped by reality, and also being reminded of how colonialism “works”.
Words and phrases that contain the word “black” run to 16 pages, blackbirding, black hunting and black velvet were a few that chilled my blood. “White” spans 11 pages and whitewash, white blindfold and White Australia Policy were a few that curdled my guts.
There are also oodles of words that relate to thieving.
Interesting that.
You’ll be stoked
Whether you like bowlos, bottle-ohs or boardies, sneezeweeds, southerly busters or stickybeaking, there’s something for everyone. And there should, be I guess, because we kinda helped create this bonzer book. Australian language is a living language that we prod and poke and play with daily. Can we halt its further Americanisation—or are we already bung, done like a dinner? Given that Australianisms are so gritty and colourful, I sincerely hope not.
This dictionary is dinky-di delightful. Such neat descriptions, such concise histories, such bounty to be read and rifled through.
If you’re a bibliophile, buy it. If you’re a struggling lexicographer, skip lunch for six months and purchase it with the brass razoos you’ve saved. If you’re an ordinary Jill or Joe or Mrs Kafoops, badger your library to get it, then visit often to pore over it. Marvel at the worlds within words here. Relish the story of our nation’s journey with language writ large in fine print.
