If 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.
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We 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.
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The 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.
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Whoever 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.
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The 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.
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It 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.
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The 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.
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The 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.
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The 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.
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The 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.
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For 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.
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The 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’.
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In 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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The bilby gets its name from the Yuwaalaray language of northern New South Wales. It used to be plentiful in most parts of Australia west of the Great Dividing Range, and had adapted to a wide range of environments from grasslands to desert, covering %70 of Australia.
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My interest is in the very Australian way in which artist is used ironically to denote someone who behaves in a certain specified way, as in a booze artist, a con artist, a bullshit artist. But to talk about that we need to go back into the history of the word in British English.
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I love collecting stones although it is a habit I have to curb if I am not to fill up the house and garden with things that have caught my eye. I still have the two large pebbles from a Danish beach on my bedside table because I love their look and texture, and they remind me of the beach which was so different from our Australian beaches.
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