The Feel of a Word: the bush

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.  It is interesting that South African English shares with us a number of bush terms and expressions including the phrase ‘to go bush’ but they did not develop the sense of ‘the bush’ as the rural community distinct from ‘the city’.

The first colonists viewed bush terrain with alarm as dangerous and unattractive, as can be seen in this comment in 1814:

The bush is exceedingly thick and bad travelling on account of the sharp rocks.

But by the end of the 1800s they had begun to think of it as wilderness with all the romantic associations that that had.

Bush balladists spoke of its beauty and told stories of bush life.  Banjo Paterson says in one such poem:

Our tales are told where campfires blaze

At midnight, when the solemn hush

Of that vast wonderland, the Bush,

Hath laid on every heart its spell.

Even at this point the greater number of Australians were living in the cities and imagining a bush culture. But quite soon, by the 1930s, there were some who began to sense that the wilderness was disappearing as settlement advanced and trees were cut down.  William Gray, a Presbyterian missionary from South Australia, wrote in his book Days and Nights in the Bush:

The ‘bush’ is the country in its natural state – as it was before men cut down the trees and disturbed its flora and ousted the kangaroo, wallaby, and emu and annihilated the birds that keep our trees healthy.

There is a sense of loss and sadness here that is remarkable for 1935.

This was followed by a rediscovery of the bush in the activity of ‘bushwalking’ which combined an aesthetic appreciation with a respect for the skills of colonial bushmen. Paddy Palin was a well-known retailer of camping gear in Sydney.  He said:

If you have never walked in the bush you have never really seen it. If you have not tramped along ferny tracks by some quiet stream or scrambled over rocky ridges with the wind (yes, and maybe the rain) in your hair, you have never enjoyed the bush.

By the 1960s there was a split between those who loved the bush in this way and those city dwellers who created an identity for themselves from a bush culture while seeking material success in city terms and pervading fashions.  Robin Boyd in The Australian Ugliness says:

… the bush atmosphere is prized chauvinistically by people who would not dream of going beyond the suburbs except in a Jaguar. Much vicarious enjoyment is to be had savouring the beery swashbuckling legends of the bushland, and contrasting imagined down-to-earth ways and manners with the effeteness of the English or the pampered artificiality of Americans.

By the end of the century there was an anxiety to preserve what was left of a natural wonder that was increasingly fragmented, threatened, and invaded by introduced pests and predators. At the same time the bush acquired almost mystical powers, the appreciation of which was entwined with a greater mainstream awareness of the significance of the bush in Indigenous culture.  You just had to stand in the bush to feel spiritually restored.  It would do your psychic powers a great deal of good as well.

So our feeling about the bush is that it has moved from threatening physicality through a romantic aesthetic to a consoling spirituality.