Mate is a word with a very long history in English. It comes to us from Middle Low German where it was a shortened form of the Middle High German gamazze which breaks down into a suffex g- meaning ‘in company with’ and maze meaning ‘meat’, or food generally. A mate was a person that you shared your meal with.
Read MoreMallee is a term used for any of various eucalypts which have a distinctive habit of growth – the branches all shoot from close to the ground springing from a common base called a lignotuber. It is as if the tree keeps its trunk underground where it swells, forming a supply of starch to the foliage above ground.
Read MoreThe idea of the inland sea took hold when, in 1817-18, Oxley discovered that rivers on the inland side of the Blue Mountains flowed westward. Since rivers have to flow into a large body of water, it was suggested that there was an inland sea filling the centre of Australian into which the rivers emptied.
Read MoreWe all know the basic meaning of grub. It is the larva of an insect, most commonly a beetle, but it can be used generally for anything of that nature such as a caterpillar or a maggot. We can even perhaps use it for a worm although that would be a mistake.
Read MoreThe forest in Australian English is in very general terms a large stand of trees. It can be open forest in which the trees are spaced apart with open terrain between them, or dense forest in which they are close together with thick underbrush between them, the most extreme form of this being rainforest. Whatever it is, for farming purposes it has always needed to be cleared.
Read MoreThis is the bird which, in more recent years, we have been encouraged to call a raven. The Australian raven is the name of a species of bird (with two subspecies) that inhabits the southern and north-eastern parts of Australia. We have a crow, a genuine crow, in northern Australia that we share with PNG.
Read MoreIn British English, the basic idea of a creek is that it is that it is a small fold or curve in the bank of a body of water. It is a small inlet, often with some run-off from a fold in the land entering the water at that point.
Read MoreIf you were to mention these days that someone had the convict taint, you would be met with blank looks, but the label aroused passionate debate from the 1840s on in Australia.
Read MoreWe observe the world around us and then we draw useful comparisons between animal behaviour and human stereotypes. A child is a little monkey when they are mischievous. An adult is a parrot or a birdbrain when they are noisy and stupid.
Read MoreThe casuarina was named by Linnaeus who had seen an image of a tree from Indonesia. Its green growth drooped like the feathers of a cassowary and so the genus name Casuarina was created.
Read MoreWhoever thought the history of gangs in Australia would begin with a hat! That is to say, the cabbage-tree hat, commonly worn in the early days of the colony at Sydney Cove and still popular until the end of the century.
Read MoreThe word bush was borrowed from the Dutch bosch meaning ‘woodland’. In the Dutch colony in South Africa it was applied to any tract of land in its natural state, but the word turned up early in America also (first citation 1657) and it is from the Americans that we gained both bush and bushranger.
Read MoreIt is astonishing the zeal with which the European settlers set to work to give a detailed description of the Aboriginal mythological creature that lived in the swamps and lagoons. The small setback of never having seen one didn’t seem to trouble them.
Read MoreThe thieving bowerbird has led me to the thieving magpie. As was often the way in the naming of Australian flora and fauna, the magpie was given that name because it bore a slight resemblance to the European magpie, a bird of the crow family, both being predominantly black and white.
Read MoreThe bowerbird was an intriguing discovery to the European settlers with its habit of decorating its bower with small blue objects, such as shells, leaves, bright feathers, little bones, and occasionally a shiny article stolen from a camp or dwelling.
Read MoreThe story of this word goes back to British English in the 1500s. The British borrowed the French word bouffle meaning ‘a buffalo’ and extended its meaning to cover ‘an idiot’. In particular they had in mind a musclebound idiot resembling the buffalo, big, solid, shaggy and stupid.
Read MoreThe word bombora is possibly from the Dharug language, the language which was spoken around Sydney Cove. It may have been the Aboriginal name of the particular bombora off Dobroyd Head, just inside Sydney Harbour in a direct line from the heads. The term has generalised to refer to any such submerged reef or rock shelf with associated wave formation of which there are a number off the coast of Australia.
Read MoreFor the early settlers bushfires at regular intervals produced many blackened stumps of trees left on the landscape which quickly came to be used as markers in the terrain.
Read MoreThe word billabong comes to us from the Wiradjuri language spoken in the area near the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan Rivers. The first element billa means ‘water’ but no one is quite sure what the second element is. One theory is that bang/bong means ‘dead’.
Read MoreIn everyone else’s English a battler is simply someone who does battle. A warrior or a fighter. But in colonial Australia the prototype of the battler was someone who, having few resources and many difficulties in life, nevertheless worked hard and struggled on to make a living. Typically this was in the bush where they had managed to secure a small selection on land that was probably not especially good, the best land having been taken by the squatters.
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