Forty years ago, we finally had a dictionary to call our own. But the Macquarie was a lot more than a collection of Australian slang, as author Thomas Keneally found out when he browsed through it.
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on September 24, 1981
Dictionary puts bluetongues, dipthongs in their place
English gentlemen arriving in Australia in the first 40 years of its European occupation remarked on the physical appearance and the speech of the Australian-born currency children.
The first generation of native-born European Australians spoke a barbarous argot taken partly from their experience of Australia and partly from the flash talk of transported criminals. Their vowels assaulted the civilised ear. In their debased hands, the civilised English language was a hostage.
Most Australian children - except perhaps migrant children, who have different battles to fight - have grown up bearing the stigma of the currency children.
Herald staff member Val Hopwood with a copy of The Macquarie Dictionary on September 23, 1981Credit:Gerrit Fokkema
Teachers, commentators, visitors to Australia - all of them told the Australian child that its English was debased, that it had been born in the wrong garden, that it suffered from linguistic original sin.
We could make only two responses to this attitude - one, to become defiant and to speak a more outrageous Australian still; the other, to attempt to pick up something like a South British pronunciation, an effort which - because of our fallen origins - could not hope to bring convincing success in any case.
In language, the life of all us currency children of the 40s, 50s, even the 60s, was a matter of fragments. In our reading, we encountered for the most part English idiom and usage - to an extent which always seemed to distance the characters from us.
On Saturday afternoons we paid our ninepence and, in darkened picture houses, spent three hours with the American language.
Television increased the time we spent in alien idioms, but it did not entirely free us from our rugged and unregenerate attachment to our own language.
Last Saturday at a Sydney football ground, I saw two boys of about 10 kicking a football to each other. After catching a punt, one of them said to the other, “Hang on, I want to go the dunny.”
It was like being at Pratten Park or Kogarah Oval in the 40s. Not all those weekly hours of watching MASH and The Brady Bunch had taught the child to say, “Hold it, I have to go to the john.”
The time has come for the child - both in his idiom, his vowels, his dipthongs - to be honoured for his linguistic impenitence. This week, an Australian dictionary appeared.
If at first hearing this does not sound like a significant event, let me be quick to say that The Macquarie Dictionary - as it is called - will, for the first time, declare that Australian English is not a bastard convict but a legitimate heir.
As the linguists who prepared it claim, it is the first reference dictionary in which “all the pronunciations, all the spellings, and all the definitions of meaning are taken from the use of English in Australia, and in which Australian English becomes the basis of comparison with other national varieties of English.”
It is not merely a dictionary of Australian slang - the Bondi tram, which shoots through in the idiom of most people over 35, is there, but it shares the same page as bonne femme, a French cooking term in currency among the cuisine-crazed middle class. The Macquarie is in fact an attempt to show the way English is used in Australia, in all the complexities of Australian society, in politics, newspapers, science, the arts.
For the first time in our history - the linguists at Macquarie University claim - we will be able to use a dictionary without having to edit it in our minds to fit Australian usage.
Arthur Delbridge, the editor-in-chief, says in an introduction to the dictionary that while many English words in world-wide use have constant meanings, there are others which have Australian usages not catered for by the great dictionaries of the English-speaking world, the Oxfords and the Websters.
He mentions station, yard, track, house, terrace, flat.
“This dictionary,” he says, “tries to do justice to the distinctiveness of Australian usage.”
Cartoon by staff.Credit:SMH Archives
To a dictionary user of no specialist training - to writers that is, and journalists and students - the range of this work will be the first thing to impress. From alternative cultures We have the flowerchild and the Jesus freak, both included despite the fact that Delbridge admits they may be “ephemeral manifestations.” Similarly the rugger-bugger gets a guernsey as an identifiable species in the life of Sydney and Brisbane, and the Ocker has a place, though his derivation is uncertain.
The trades, some of them with distinctive Australian meanings, are included, and peripherally but more importantly, the Australian cuts of meat, which have never appeared comprehensively or exactly in any other dictionary.
Words which had meaning earlier in Australian history - assignment system, brickfielder, budgeree, croppy, emancipist, are defined, as well as words which have changed in usage - bludge, cove, creek, galah, hot, mulga, muster, run and selection.
Australian plants and animals, so sketchily covered in other English dictionaries, inhabit the pages. The blueberry ash, for example, and the messmate, entirely missing from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), are exactly defined.
The bluetongue, so common in Australian backyards but absent from the SOED, infests the same page of The Macquarie Dictionary as the bluenose, the blue-ringed octopus, the blue swimmer and bluey, a Queensland soubriquet for the rainbow lorikeet.
In the SOED, a bluenose is a purplish potato grown in Nova Scotia, a nickname for a Nova Scotian, or a kind of clam fish shell.
In The Macquarie it is a fish common in southern Australian and Tasmanian waters which grows to a length of 50 centimetres.
Bluenose, therefore, illustrates perfectly the need for an Australian dictionary. Imagine a city-dweller listening to Eden fishermen discussing the catch, hearing the term used, and going home to his SOED to find out that the pros on the jetty had been discussing potatoes.
The Macquarie is just as extensive in its definitions of Aboriginal words which have entered Australian English and been modified in the mouths of European Australians.
Mulga, for example, is not found in the SOED, either in its botanical sense or in the usage “up the mulga,” meaning “in the bush.”
In fact page 1142, the page on which mulga is defined in four senses as a noun and one as an adjective, is a good illustration of the comprehensive nature of The Macquarie.
On this page you will find mulga wire, a colloquialism for bush telegraph. You will also find such as esoterics as mullenise, to clear scrubland by pushing back the undergrowth with a roller, a verb transitive deriving from Mullens, an Irish settler near Adelaide.
But you discover as well mulligan stew, a US term, and - from the East Indies mulligatawny, along with the most respectable of universal Latinate adjectives, such as multicoil, multidentate, multifarious, multifid, multilaminate, multilingual, multilobular.
The way from column one to column two, however, is salted with delightful words of peculiarly Australian usage. Mullock, for example, which is in the SOED in the sense of mine refuse but not in the sense of poking mullock at someone, of ridiculing.
Advertisement for the Macquarie Dictionary, September 30, 1981.Credit:SMH Archives
And in front of multicellular, we find that old friend of our schooldays, that grateful visitor to the batting crease, the mully-grubber. But perhaps just as usefully as the word and Australian words, The Macquarie provides some 1,000 distinctively New Zealand words and usages.
The Macquarie is revolutionary also in that it legitimises not only the mullygrubber but Australian pronunciation as well.
The linguist J. R. L. Bernard says that except in one case - the vowel “i” as in hill - Australian pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs is distinctive not only among speakers of what he calls Broad and General Australian, but with speakers of Cultivated Australian as well.
Our induced self-consciousness about the way we speak has meant that many of us try during our lifetimes to move away from Broad Australian towards whale we think of as superior diphthongs of South British English.
Some of us have achieved Modified Australian, which Bernard defines as “more cultivated that Cultivated.” You will also find all the varieties not only in most social groups but even in the one family and, at various stages of his or her life, in the one Australian.
Generally, it seems, that with greater national maturity and - for some at least - affluence, we have been engaged in a flight from Broad.
But the struggle has not been entirely successful. “All the varieties,” says Bernard, “show characteristically Australian intonation, rhythm and stress patterns.”
The other fascinating aspect of Australian speech is that there are no truly regional differences of pronunciation in Australia, so that the pronunciations given in The Macquarie are universal national pronunciations, capable of interpretation by speakers of all grades of Australian language, either in Cooktown, Burnie, Esperance, or anywhere else.
They are nationally universal pronunciations in a way that the pronunciations in the Oxford and Webster’s dictionaries could never hope to be. For in Britain and the US, regional class differences make for a Babel of pronunciation.
Manning Clark deftly contributes to the introduction of The Macquarie and speaks about the change, which has been progressing in Australia in the twentieth century, from a European-centred to an Australian-centred way of looking at the world.
He says that The Macquarie will be not only an important landmark but a tool in this progress.
When we have got over the almost improper and self-conscious thrill of seeing such lusty idiomatic Australianisms as drongo given floor space in a scholarly lexicon, then this dictionary is sure to become, in its successive editions, a cultural resource.
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