On the Australian National Dictionary

In his path-breaking book The Australian Language (1945), New Zealand–born lexicographer Sidney Baker wrote that ‘there is no watertight compartment between outback slang and city slang; they had broken their banks and had begun to merge into the vast sea of words which is our language today’. He added: ‘the first term of significance in the bush vernacular was, of course, the word bush itself’. From the Dutch word bosch, it arrived in the Australian colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, via the Cape of Good Hope. The second edition of one of the greatest collective achievements of Australian scholarship, the Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and Their Origins, edited by Bruce Moore (the first, edited by W.S. Ramson, appeared in 1988), has almost 40 pages of references to ‘the bush’, including the headword and its ‘compounds, idioms and derivatives’. The first edition of AND had 10,000 of these, supported by 57,000 citations; the second has 16,000, ‘illustrated by 123,000 citations’. The Select Bibliography for those citations runs to 60 pages.

The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘based on historical principles’, is the exemplar for the AND project. That being so, as the first sentence of Moore’s introduction indicates, ‘it is therefore concerned with the way the words that make up the lexicon of Australian English have evolved through time’. Just as Baker remarked the breaching of an imaginary dam between rural and urban Australian slang, so the AND traces the shifts in the meanings of words across time, as these are refreshed or—in many melancholy instances—vanish from use. The citations record the written usages of words from their earliest printed occurrence, but who now reads, let alone hears of a ‘Lygon Street log’ or a ‘maggot bag’? The former is the second last entry in AND volume one A–L, which closes with ‘lyrebird’. While at first glance indecorous, a ‘Lygon Street log’ refers to trade union claims, by association with the Trades Hall in Lygon Street, Melbourne. For those seeking nourishment, a ‘maggot bag’ can be either a sausage roll or a meat pie.