In Plain Sight – Transatlantic slavery and Devon

Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery > Collections Stories > In Plain Sight – Transatlantic slavery and Devon

Origins

In 2018, RAMM began planning an exhibition that drew on its collections and local connections to explore the 18th-century transatlantic trade in enslaved people. The content created and approach taken involved museum staff and volunteers and a host of partners who sat on an advisory panel, carried out research and development work, and produced outstanding new art and films. Early in 2020, the team settled on the exhibition title: ‘In Plain Sight: Transatlantic slavery and Devon’. It was chosen to remind us that the stories were not new. They had always been there if you cared to look.

Exhibition

After the easing of Covid-19 restrictions in autumn 2021, work resumed on the project and the exhibition opened its doors to the public in January 2022. Over the course of four months around 40,000 people visited the gallery and attended a lively programme of special events. Evaluation was carried out through questionnaires, debriefing sessions and visitors’ comment cards. Analysis showed the exhibition achieved its intentions: almost everyone who came learned something new about the transatlantic slave trade.

Legacy

Based on feedback, RAMM agreed that the information from ‘In Plain Sight’ should survive beyond the length of the exhibition. On this page, you will find links to the full exhibition text, videos and articles that explore biographies and local stories in more depth. The exhibition research was not comprehensive and, no doubt, many more of the museum’s 19th-century collectors benefitted from profits generated from trading enslaved people. Much work remains to incorporate the knowledge gained from the exhibition into RAMM’s online content and permanent gallery displays.

We would like to warn visitors that the exhibition includes upsetting content and contemporary accounts with language which is offensive and discriminatory. We do not believe it is possible to tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade without including such material.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dafZ5HXLdf4?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Frammcollections.org.ukThe making of ‘In Plain Sight: Transatlantic slavery and Devon’.
This documentary film explores the concept and development of the exhibition with the Advisory Panel who guided and steered RAMM’s approach, and artist Joy Gregory who talks about the ‘The Sweetest Thing’, the textile that she created as part of her commission for the show. Join RAMM’s curators and conservators as they offer a ‘behind the scenes’ look at objects from the collection with links to plantation products, or to stories uncovered by researchers from the Legacies of Devon Slave-ownership Group and Dr Jake Richards.

Explore the exhibition and resources by expanding the sections below.

Meanings and origins of Australian words and idioms

This section contains a selection of Australian words, their meanings, and their etymologies.AllABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

A

acca

Michael Davie in ‘Going from A to Z forever’ (an article on the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary), Age, Saturday Extra, 1 April 1989, writes of his visit to the dictionary section of Oxford University Press:

Before I left, Weiner [one of the two editors of the OED] said he remembered how baffled he had been the first time he heard an Australian talk about the ‘arvo’. Australians used the -o suffix a lot, he reflected. Arvo, smoko, garbo, journo. But not all -o words were Australian, said Simpson [the other of the two editors]: eg ‘aggro’ and ‘cheapo’. I asked if they were familiar with the Oz usage ‘acco’, meaning ‘academic’. They liked that. I hoped, after I left, they would enter it on one of their little slips and add it to their gigantic compost heap – a candidate for admission to the next edition.

We trust that Edmund Weiner and John Simpson did not take a citation, since the Australian abbreviation of academic is not acco but acca (sometimes spelt acker).

The abbreviation first appears in Meanjin (Melbourne, 1977), where Canberra historian Ken Inglis has an article titled ‘Accas and Ockers: Australia’s New Dictionaries’.  The editor of Meanjin, Jim Davidson, adds a footnote: ‘acca (slightly derogatory) 1, noun  An academic rather than an intellectual, particularly adept at manipulating trendiologies, usually with full scholarly apparatus. Hence 2, noun  A particularly sterile piece of academic writing.’ The evidence has become less frequent in recent years.

1993 Age (Melbourne) 24 December: The way such festivals bring together writers, publishers and accas, making them all accountable to the reader – the audience – gives them real value.

acid: to put the acid on

To exert a pressure that is difficult to resist; to exert such pressure on (a person, etc.), to pressure (someone) for a favour etc.; to be successful in the exertion of such pressure. This idiom is derived from acid test which is a test for gold or other precious metal, usually using nitric acid. Acid test is also used figuratively to refer to a severe or conclusive test. The Australian idiom emerged in the early 20th century and is still heard today.

1903 Sydney Stock and Station Journal 9 October: In the class for ponies under 13 hands there was a condition that the riders should be under ten years of age. When the stewards ‘put the acid on’ the riders it was found that only one exhibit in a very big field carried a boy who was not over ten years old.

2015 Australian (Sydney) 6 February: One option would be to skip the spill motion and go directly to a call for candidates for the leadership. It would put the acid on putative challengers and catch them out if they are not ready.

Aerial ping-pong

A jocular (and frequently derisive) name for Australian Rules Football (or Aussie Rules as it is popularly called). The term derives from the fact that the play in this game is characterised by frequent exchanges of long and high kicks.

The term is used largely by people from States in which Rugby League and not Aussie Rules is the major football code. This interstate and code rivalry is often found in evidence for the term, including the early evidence from the 1940s.

1947 West Australian (Perth) 22 April: In 1941 he enlisted in the A.I.F. and joined a unit which fostered rugby football. Renfrey did not join in the &oq;mud bath&cq; and did not play ‘aerial ping-pong’, as the rugby exponents in the army termed the Australian game, until 1946.

1973 J. Dunn, How to Play Football:  Sydneysiders like to call Australian Rules ‘aerial ping-pong’.

A team from Sydney was admitted to the national competition in 1982, and one from Brisbane was admitted in 1987. These teams are based in traditional Rugby League areas, yet have drawn very large crowds, and have been very successful. While the term is perhaps not as common as it once was there is still evidence from more recent years.

2010 Newcastle Herald 23 September: Without a shadow of a doubt the aerial ping pong boys have league beaten when it comes to WAGs. At the Brownlow Medal night the likes of Chris Judd’s fiancee Rebecca Twigley and Gary Ablett’s girlfriend Lauren Phillips certainly scrub up well.

akubra

A shallow-crowned wide-brimmed hat, especially one made from felted rabbit fur. It is a significant feature of rural Australia, of politicians (especially urban-based politicians) travelling in the outback, and of expatriates who wish to emphasis their Australianness. Now a proprietary name, our earliest evidence comes from an advertisement.

1920 Northern Star (Lismore) 4 November: Made in Australia! Yes, the smartest hat that’s made in our own country may be seen in our hat department … The makes include ‘Sovereign’, ‘Vebistra’, ‘Akubra’, ‘Peerless’, ‘Beaucaire’.

ambit

The definition of the limits of an industrial dispute. In later use chiefly as ambit claim. In Australian English an ambit claim is one typically made by employees which sets the boundaries of an industrial dispute. The term is a specific use of ambit meaning ‘extent, compass’. First recorded in the 1920s.

1923 Mercury (Hobart) 21 March: In the Commonwealth Arbitration Court .. Mr Justice Powers to-day delivered judgment on the point. He said that the ambit of the dispute before the Court was confined to constructional work, but that the Court could and would deal with claims for maintenance work.

2006 Bulletin (Sydney) 16 May: Telstra’s ambit claim was for exclusive access on the ground that it was taking all the commercial risk involving the not-inconsiderable expenditure of $3.5bn.

ambo

An ambulance officer. This is an abbreviation that follows a very common Australian pattern of word formation, with –o added to the abbreviated form. Other examples include: arvo (afternoon), Salvo (Salvation army officer), dermo (dermatologist), and gyno (gynaecologist). The -o form is often found at the ending of Australian nicknames, as in Johno, Jacko, and Robbo. Ambo was first recorded in the 1980s.

1986 Sydney Morning Herald 1 February: Even though I was a nurse before I became an ambo, at first I thought, can I handle this?

ant’s pants

Something extremely impressive; the best of its kind. Ant’s pants is an Australian variant of the originally US forms bee’s knees and cat’s whiskers with the same meaning. The term is first recorded in the 1930s. 

1933 Brisbane Courier 12 May: These Men’s Pull-overs of ours. They’re the Ant’s Pants for Value.

2015 T. Parsons Return to Moondilla: ‘Liz is busting to see you’, Pat said. ‘She thinks you’re the ant’s pants.’

Anzac

An Australian soldier. Anzac denotes the virtues of courage and determination displayed by the First World War Australian soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915. Anzac was formed from the initial letters of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Australian soldiers are also called ‘diggers’ because so much of the original Anzacs’ time was spent digging trenches. First recorded 1915.

1915 Camperdown Chronicle 2 December: Lord Kitchener told the ‘Anzacs’ at the Dardanelles how much the King appreciated their splendid services, and added that they had done even better than the King expected.

Anzac biscuit

A sweet biscuit typically containing rolled oats and golden syrup. While variations on this classic recipe exist, its simplicity is its hallmark. The association with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps goes back to 1917 when the recipe was first recorded. The biscuits are also known simply as Anzacs. The following quotations show the evolution of the recipe:

1917 War Chest Cookery Book (Australian Comforts Fund): Anzac Biscuits. 4oz. sugar, 4ozs. butter, 2 eggs, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, 1 cup flour, 1 cup rice flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 teaspoon mixed spice. Beat butter and sugar to cream, add eggs well beaten, lastly flour, rice flour baking powder, cinnamon and spice. Mix to stiff paste, roll and cut into biscuits. Bake a nice light brown in moderate oven. When cold jam together and ice.

1926 Argus (Melbourne) 16 June: ‘Often Helped’ .. asks for a recipe for Anzac biscuits … Two breakfast-cupfuls of John Bull oats, half a cupful sugar, one scant cupful plain flour, half a cupful melted butter. Mix one table-spoonful golden syrup, two table-spoonfuls boiling water, and one teaspoon-ful bicarbonate of soda, until they froth, then add the melted butter. Mix in dry ingredients and drop in spoonfuls on greased tray. Bake in a slow oven.

apples: she’s apples

Everything is fine, all is well. Australian English often uses the feminine pronoun she where standard English would use it. For example, instead of ‘it’ll be right’ Australians say ‘she’ll be right’. She’s apples was originally rhyming slang – apple and spice or apple and rice for ‘nice’. The phrase has now lost all connection with its rhyming slang origin. First recorded in the 1920s the term can still be heard today.

1929 H. MacQuarrie We and Baby: ‘She’ll be apples!’ (Dick’s jargon for ‘all right’.)

2008 West Australian (Perth) 26 April: After a successful tour and a newly released DVD, she’s apples with the ubiquitous Paul Kelly.

arvo

Afternoon, as in see you Saturday arvo. It is often used in the phrase this arvo, which is sometimes shortened to sarvo: meet you after the game, sarvo. Arvo is an example of a special feature of Australian English, the habit of adding -o to an abbreviated word. Other such words are bizzo ‘business’ and journo ‘journalist’. First recorded in the 1920s and still going strong today.

2008 Australian (Sydney) 10 July: Former Baywatch beach decoration and Playboy bunny Pamela Anderson plans to visit a Gold Coast KFC outlet this arvo to protest against the company’s treatment of chooks.

Arthur: not know whether you are Arthur or Martha

To be in a state of confusion, as in this comment in an Australian state parliament—‘The Leader of the Opposition does not know whether he is Arthur or Martha, Hekyll or Jekyll, coming or going’. The phrase was first recorded in the 1940s. In recent years it has also been used with reference to questions of gender identity, and in this sense it has been exported to other countries.

1948 Truth (Sydney) 14 March: Players were all over the place like Brown’s cows, and most didn’t know whether they were Arthur or Martha.

2010 West Australian (Perth) 3 November: Years ago, I teamed my work outfits (Kookai tube skirts, fang-collared blouses) with my dad’s ties, only to be informed by my manager I looked as though I wasn’t sure if I was Arthur or Martha.

Aussie

Australia; Australian. The abbreviation Aussie is a typical example of the way Australians abbreviate words and then add the -ie (or -y) suffix. Other common examples includes budgie (a budgerigar), rellie (a relative), and tradie (a tradesperson). The word is used as a noun to refer to the country and to a person born or residing in the country, and as an adjective denoting something relating to Australia. Aussie is also used as an abbreviation for ‘Australian English’ and the ‘Australian dollar’. The earliest evidence for Aussie occurs in the context of the First World War.

1915 G.F. Moberly Experiences ‘Dinki Di’ R.R.C. Nurse (1933): A farewell dance for the boys going home to ‘Aussie’ tomorrow.

1916 G.F. Moberly Experiences ‘Dinki Di’ R.R.C. Nurse (1933): One of our Aussie officers.

1917 Forbes Advocate 25 September: ‘Hold on Eliza, where did you get that favor?’  ‘From an Aussie!’ 

Australia

Why is Australia called Australia? From the early sixteenth century, European philosophers and mapmakers assumed a great southern continent existed south of Asia. They called this hypothetical place Terra Australis, Latin for ‘southern land’.

The first European contact with Australia was in the early seventeenth century, when Dutch explorers touched on parts of the Australian continent. As a result of their explorations, that part of the mainland lying west of the meridian which passes through Torres Strait was named Nova Hollandia (Latin for ‘New Holland’).

In April 1770 Captain James Cook and the crew of the Endeavour reached the southern land. Cook entered the word Astralia (misspelt thus) in his journal the following August. However he did so only in reference to an earlier seeker of the southern land, the Portuguese-born navigator Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, who in 1606 had named the New Hebrides Austrialis de SpirituSanto. Cook says: The Islands discover’d by Quiros call’d by him Astralia del Espiritu Santo lays in this parallel but how far to the East is hard to say.

Cook himself called the new continent New Holland, a name that acknowledges the early Dutch exploration; the eastern coast he claimed for Britain and called New South Wales. The first written record of Australia (an anglicised form of Terra Australis) as a name for the known continent did not occur until 1794. George Shaw in his Zoology of New Holland refers to:

the vast Island or rather Continent of Australia, Australasia, or New Holland, which has so lately attracted… particular attention.

It was Matthew Flinders, English navigator (and the first person to circumnavigate and map Australia’s coastline), who first expressed a strong preference for the name Australia. He gave his reasons in 1805:

It is necessary, however, to geographical propriety, that the whole body of land should be designated under one general name; on this account, and under the circumstances of the discovery of the different parts, it seems best to refer back to the original Terra Australis, or Australia; which being descriptive of its situation, having antiquity to recommend it, and no reference to either of the two claiming nations, is perhaps the least objectionable that could have been chosen; for it is little to apprehended, that any considerable body of land, in a more southern situation, will be hereafter discovered.

To these geographical, historical and political reasons for preferring the name, he adds in his 1814 account of his voyages that Australia is ‘agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth’.

Australia was championed too by Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales from 1810, who was aware of Flinders’ preference and popularised the name by using it in official dispatches to London. He writes in 1817 of:

the Continent of Australia, which I hope will be the Name given to this country in future, instead of the very erroneous and misapplied name, hitherto given it, of ‘New Holland’, which properly speaking only applies to a part of this immense Continent.

With Macquarie’s kickstart Australia eventually proved to be the popular choice. Although the name New Holland continued alongside it for some time, by 1861 William Westgarth noted that ‘the old term New Holland may now be regarded as supplanted by that happier and fitter one of Australia’.

B

banana bender

A Queenslander. The term derives from the joking notion (as perceived from the southern states of Australia) that Queenslanders spend their time putting bends into bananas. An article from 15 July 1937 in the Queenslander provides a forerunner to the term when a man is asked by the Queen what his occupation is:

“I’m a banana-bender”. Further to enlighten her Majesty he explained that bananas grew straight on the trees, and so just before they ripened, his was the job to mount the ladder, and with a specialised twist of the wrist, put into the fruit the Grecian bend that was half its charm.

The association of bananas with Queensland (‘banana land’) is based on the extensive banana-growing industry in tropical Queensland. The Queensland border has been called the Banana curtain and Brisbane has been called Banana city. Banana bender, in reference to a Queenslander, is first recorded in 1940 and is till commonly heard.

1964 D. Lockwood Up the Track: We are so close to Queensland that I think we should hop over the border. What do you say to a quick look at the banana-benders?

2011 Northern Star (Lismore) 11 July: Should the Matilda’s [sic] have won last night or the Netball Diamonds see off New Zealand, Anna Bligh will doubtless claim it was due to the preponderance of banana benders in the squads or at the very least the result of a Gold Coast holiday during their formative years.

bandicoot

Soon after white settlement in 1788 the word bandicoot (the name for the Indian mammal Bandicota indica) was applied to several Australian mammals having long pointed heads and bearing some resemblance to their Indian namesake. In 1799 David Collins writes of the ‘bones of small animals, such as opossums … and bandicoots’.

From 1830s the word bandicoot has been used in various distinctively Australian phrases as an emblem of deprivation or desolation. In 1837 H. Watson in Lecture on South Australia writes: ‘The land here is generally good; there is a small proportion that is actually good for nothing; to use a colonial phrase, “a bandicoot (an animal between a rat and a rabbit) would starve upon it”.’ Typical examples include:

• as miserable as a bandicoot
• as poor as a bandicoot
• as bald as a bandicoot
• as blind as a bandicoot
• as hungry as a bandicoot

Probably from the perception of the bandicoot’s burrowing habits, a new Australian verb to bandicoot arose towards the end of the nineteenth century. It means ‘to remove potatoes from the ground, leaving the tops undisturbed’. Usually this activity is surreptitious.

1896 Bulletin 12 December: I must ‘bandicoot’ spuds from the cockies – Or go on the track!

1899 Bulletin 2 December: ‘Bandicooting’.. is a well-known term all over Western Vic. potato-land. The bandicooter goes at night to a field of ripe potatoes and carefully extracts the tubers from the roots without disturbing the tops.

bandicoot: miserable as a bandicoot

Extremely unhappy. Bandicoots are small marsupials with long faces, and have been given a role in Australian English in similes that suggest unhappiness or some kind of deprivation (see above). The expression miserable as a bandicoot was first recorded in the 1820s.

1828 Sydney Gazette 11 January: On her arrival here she found him living with another woman by whom he had several children, and from whom he was necessarily obliged to part, not, however, without very candidly forewarning his wife, the present complainant, that he would make her as miserable as a bandicoot.

2005 R. Siemon The Eccentric Mr Wienholt: I am as miserable as a bandicoot having to sneak home like this.

banksia man

The large woody cone of several Banksia species, originally as a character in children’s stories. Banksia is the name of an Australian genus of shrubs and trees with about 60 species. It was named after the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who was on the Endeavour with James Cook on his voyage of discovery in 1770. After flowering, many banksias form thick woody cones, often in strange shapes. It was on such grotesque shapes that May Gibbs modelled her banksia men in Snugglepot and Cuddlepie of 1918: ‘She could see the glistening, wicked eyes of Mrs. Snake and the bushy heads of the bad Banksia men’.

1927 K.S. Prichard Bid me to Love: Louise: .. See what I’ve got in my pocket for you … Bill: (diving into a pocket of her coat and pulling out a banksia cone) A banksia man. Oh Mum!

1979 E. Smith Saddle in the Kitchen: Hell was under the well near the cow paddock, deep and murky and peopled by gnarled and knobby banksia men who lurked there waiting for the unguarded to fall in.

barbecue stopper

A topic of great public interest, especially a political one. The term derives from the notion that a topic is so interesting that it could halt proceedings at a barbecue – and anything that could interrupt an Aussie barbecue would have to be very significant indeed! The term was coined by Australian prime minister John Howard in 2001 in the context of balancing work pressures with family responsibilities. Barbecue stopper is now used in a wide range of contexts. For an earlier discussion of the term see our Word of the Month article from August 2007.

2007 Sun-Herald (Sydney) 11 March: Controlled crying is a guaranteed barbecue stopper among Australian parents, more divisive than the old breast-versus-bottle feeding debate.

2015 Australian Financial Review (Sydney) 1 April: Planning and zoning looms as a barbecue stopper in leafy suburbs, where many residents and traders will defend to the last breath their quiet enjoyment and captive markets.

Barcoo

The name of the Barcoo River in western Queensland has been used since the 1870s as a shorthand reference for the hardships, privations, and living conditions of the outback. Poor diets were common in remote areas, with little access to fresh vegetables or fruit, and as a result diseases caused by dietary deficiencies, such Barcoo rot—a form of scurvy characterised by chronic sores—were common. Katharine Susannah Prichard writes in 1946: ‘They were nothing to the torture he endured when barcoo rot attacked him. The great sores festered on his back, hands and legs: his lips split and were raw and bleeding’. Rachel Henning, in a letter to her sister in 1864, makes fun of her Irish servants’ fear of scurvy, for which they eat pigweed, ‘rather a nasty wild plant, but supposed to be exceedingly wholesome, either chopped up with vinegar or boiled’. Another illness probably caused by poor diet was Barcoo sickness (also called Barcoo vomit, Barcoo spew, or just Barcoo), a condition characterised by vomiting. ‘Barcoo was rife among the kiddies and station-hands; vomiting attacks lasting for days laid each low in turn’.

Happily, Barcoo can also denote more positive aspects of outback life: a makeshift resourcefulness – a Barcoo dog is a rattle for herding sheep, which can be as simple as a tin can and a stick – or rough and ready behaviour: ‘The parrot’s language would have shamed a Barcoo bullocky’. Barcoo can also typify the laconic bush wit. Patsy Adam Smith relates the following story: ‘I see you’ve learnt the Barcoo Salute’, said a Buln Buln Shire Councillor to the Duke of Edinburgh. ‘What’s that?’ said His Royal Highness, waving his hand again to brush the flies off his face. ‘That’s it’, said the man from the bush.

barrack for

To give support or encouragement to (a person, team, etc.), usually by shouting names, slogans or exhortations. Some claim barrack comes from Australian pidgin to poke borak at ‘to deride’, but its origin is probably from Northern Irish barrack ‘to brag; to be boastful’. By itself barrack meant ‘to jeer’ (and still does in British English), but the form barrack for transformed the jeering into cheering in Australian English. First recorded in the 1880s.

1889 Maitland Mercury 24 August: Old dad was in his glory there – it gave the old man joy To fight a passage thro’ the crowd and barrack for his boy.

1971 D. Williamson Don’s Party: I take it you’ll be barracking for Labor tonight?

2011 Gympie Times 28 January: He thought it was about time to take the pledge and officially become Australian as he had barracked for our cricket team since 1955.

barrier rise

The opening of the starting gates to begin a horserace. In horseracing the barrier is a starting gate at the racecourse. The word barrier is found in a number of horseracing terms in Australian English including barrier blanket (a heavy blanket placed over the flanks of a racehorse to calm it when entering a barrier stall at the start of a race), barrier trial (a practice race for young, inexperienced, or resuming racehorses), and barrier rogue (a racehorse that regularly misbehaves when being placed into a starting gate). Barrier rise is first recorded in the 1890s. For a more detailed discussion of this term see our Word of the Month article from October 2010.

1895 Argus (Melbourne) 11 March: Mr W. R. Wilson’s colt Merman, who, like Hova, was comparatively friendless at barrier rise.

2011 Shepparton News 27 June: The talented Norman-trained trotter Tsonga, also driven by Jack, speared across the face of the field at barrier rise from outside the front row in the mobile – and from then was never headed.

battler

The word battler has been in the English language for a long time. The word is a borrowing from French in the Middle English period, and meant, literally, ‘a person who battles or fights’, and figuratively ‘a person who fights against the odds or does not give up easily’. The corresponding English word was feohtan which gives us modern English ‘to fight’. English also borrowed the word war from the French in the twelfth century; it’s the same word as modern French guerre.

But the word battler, at the end of the nineteenth century, starts to acquire some distinctively Australian connotations. For this reason, it gets a guernsey in the Australian National Dictionary.

1. It describes the person with few natural advantages, who works doggedly and with little reward, who struggles for a livelihood (and who displays courage in so doing).

Our first citation for this, not surprisingly, comes from Henry Lawson in While the Billy Boils (1896):  ‘I sat on him pretty hard for his pretensions, and paid him out for all the patronage he’d worked off on me .. and told him never to pretend to me again he was a battler’.

In 1941 Kylie Tennant writes: ‘She was a battler, Snow admitted; impudent, hardy, cool, and she could take a “knock-back” as though it didn’t matter, and come up to meet the next blow’.

In this tradition, K. Smith writes in 1965:  ‘Everybody in Australia has his position. Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this country: the rich, the middle class and the battlers’.

In the 21st century the term has been used in various political contests as this quotation in the Australian from 1 July 2006 demonstrates: ‘The Prime Minister, who has built his success on an appeal to Australia’s battlers, is about to meet thousands more of them in his northern Sydney seat of Bennelong’.

2. It has also been used of an unemployed or irregularly employed person.

a: (in the country): a swagman or itinerant worker.

This sense is first recorded in the Bulletin in 1898: ‘I found patch after patch destroyed. Almost everyone I met blamed the unfortunate “battler”, and I put it down to some of the Sydney “talent” until … I caught two Chows vigorously destroying melon-vines’.

Again in the Bulletin in 1906 we find: ‘They were old, white-bearded, travel-stained battlers of the track’.

The word is not much used in this sense now, but in 1982 Page & Ingpen in Aussie Battlers write: ‘The average Australian’s image of a battler does seem to be that of a Henry Lawson character: a bushie of the colonial era, complete with quart pot and swag, down on his luck but still resourceful and cheerful’.

b: (in an urban context): an unemployed person who lives by opportunism.

Frank Hardy in Tales of Billy Yorker (1965) writes: ‘Any Footscray battler could get a few quid off Murphy, just for the asking’.

S. Weller, Bastards I have met (1976) writes: `He was a battler, into all the lurks about the place and just one jump ahead of the coppers all the time’.

3. A person who frequents racecourses in search of a living, esp. from punting. The word is used in Australia with this sense from the end of the nineteenth century.

Cornelius Crowe in his Australian Slang Dictionary (1895) gives: ‘ Battlers broken-down backers of horses still sticking to the game’.

In 1925 A. Wright in The Boy from Bullarah notes: ‘He betook himself with his few remaining shillings to the home of the battler – Randwick [a racecourse in Sydney]’.

4. A prostitute.

In 1898 we find in the Bulletin: ‘A bludger is about the lowest grade of human thing, and is a brothel bully … A battler is the feminine’.

C.W. Chandler in Darkest Adelaide (c. 1907) writes: ‘Prostitution though most terrible and degrading in any shape or form reaches its most forbidding form when married women are found out battling for cash’. And further: `I told him I would not mind taking on a tart myself – an extra good battler preferred’.

Meanings 2. 3. and 4 have now disappeared from Australian English, and it is meaning 1 which has become enshrined in the language, especially in the phrase little Aussie battler. This is still the person of the Henry Lawson tradition, who, ‘with few natural advantages, works doggedly and with little reward, struggles for a livelihood (and displays courage in so doing)’. But perhaps the battler of contemporary Australia is more likely to be paying down a large mortgage rather than working hard to put food on the table!

berley

Berley is ground-bait scattered by an angler in the water to attract fish to a line or lure. Anglers use a variety of baits for berley, such as bread, or fish heads and guts. Poultry mash and tinned cat food make more unusual berleying material, although this pales beside a Bulletin article in 1936 suggesting ‘a kerosene-tinful of rabbit carcasses boiled to a pulp’ as the best berley for Murray cod. Berley first appears in 1852 as a verb – to berley is to scatter ground-bait. The writer observes that the locals are baiting a fishing spot (‘burley-ing’) with burnt fish. The first evidence for the noun occurs in the 1860s. The origin of the word is unknown.

big note

To display or boast of one’s wealth; to exaggerate one’s own importance, achievements, etc. The term is first recorded in the 1920s. In the 1950s a big note man (later called a big noter) was a person who handled or bet large sums of money – big notes. In pre-decimal currency days the larger the denomination, the bigger the banknote. Big-noting arose from the connection between flashing large sums of money about and showing off.

1941 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 18 February: There was no suggestion that Coates had the revolver for any sinister purpose. He had admitted producing it to ‘big note’ himself in the eyes of the young woman and her parents.

2012 D. Foster Man of Letters: He’s never been one to big-note himself.

bikie

A member of a gang of motorcyclists. Bikie follows a very common pattern in Australian English by incorporating the -ie (or -y) suffix. This suffix works as an informal marker in the language. In early use bikie often referred to any member of a motorcycle (motorbike) gang or club – often associated with youth culture. In more recent times the term is often associated with gangs of motorcylists operating on the fringes of legality. Bikie is first recorded in the 1960s. For a more detailied discussion of the term see our Word of the Month article from March 2014.

1967 Kings Cross Whisper (Sydney) xxxii: Bikie, a member of a gang or a club of people interested in motor bikes.

2015 Northern Territory News (Darwin) 28 May: We need to stop romanticising the notion that bikies are basically good blokes in leather vests. Some bikies procure, distribute and sell drugs through their ‘associates’, who in turn sell them to kids.

bilby

The bilby is either of two Australian bandicoots, especially the rabbit-eared bandicoot Macrotis lagotis, a burrowing marsupial of woodlands and plains of drier parts of mainland Australia. The word is a borrowing from Yuwaalaraay (an Aboriginal language of northern New South Wales) and neighbouring languages. The bilby is also known as dalgyte in Western Australia and pinky in South Australia. Since the early 1990s there have been attempts to replace the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby. At Easter it is now possible to buy chocolate bilbies. Bilby is first recorded in the 1870s. 

1877 Riverine Grazier (Hay) 6 June: There is also all over this part of the country a small animal which burrows in the ground like a rabbit: it is called a bilby, and is found everywhere, almost, up here, in great numbers.

2015 Centralian Advocate (Alice Springs) 10 April: Mining activity can also cause direct and indirect disturbance to sites inhabited by bilbies.

billabong

An arm of a river, made by water flowing from the main stream (usually only in time of flood) to form a backwater, blind creek, anabranch, or, when the water level falls, a pool or lagoon (often of considerable extent); the dry bed of such a formation. Billabongs are often formed when floodwaters recede. The word comes from the south-western New South Wales Aboriginal language Wiradjuri: bila ‘river’ + bang (a suffix probably indicating a continuation in time or space, or functioning as an intensifier), the combination signifying a watercourse that runs only after rain. First recorded in the 1830s.

1861 Burke & Wills Exploring Expedition: At the end of a very long waterhole, it breaks into billibongs, which continue splitting into sandy channels until they are all lost in the earthy soil.

2015 Northern Territory News (Darwin) 13 May: It will soon offer more activities including fishing at a nearby billabong once the area is declared croc-free.

billy

A vessel for the boiling of water, making of tea, etc., over an open fire; a cylindrical container, usually of tin, enamel ware, or aluminium, fitted with a lid and a wire handle. It comes from the Scottish dialect word billy-pot meaning ‘cooking utensil’. Possibly reinforced by bouilli tin (recorded 1858 in Australia and 1852 in New Zealand, with variant bully tin recorded in New Zealand in 1849 but not until 1920 in Australia), an empty tin that had contained preserved boeuf bouilli ‘bully beef’, used as a container for cooking. It is not, as popularly thought, related to the Aboriginal word billabong. Billy is first recorded in the 1840s.

1859 W. Burrows Adventures of a Mounted Trooper in the Australain Constabulary: A ‘billy’ is a tin vessel, something between a saucepan and a kettle, always black outside from being constantly on the fire, and looking brown inside from the quantity of tea that is generally to be seen in it.

2005 Australian (Sydney) 12 November: The green ants, we learn later, are a form of bush medicine that others choose to consume by boiling the nest in a billy and drinking the strained and distilled contents.

billycart

A child’s four-wheeled go-cart. Billycart is a shortened form of the Australian term billy-goat cart which dates back to the 1860s. In earlier times the term applied to a small cart, often two-wheeled, that was pulled by a goat. These billycarts were used for such purposes as home deliveries, and they were also used in races. The term was then applied to any homemade go-cart. Billycart is recorded in the first decade of the 20th century.

1952 J.R. Tyrrell Old Books: As boys, Fred and I delivered books round Sydney in a billycart.

1991 T. Winton Cloudstreet: Bits of busted billycarts and boxes litter the place beneath the sagging clothesline.

bindi-eye

Any of several plants bearing barbed fruits, especially herbs of the widespread genus Calotis; the fruit of these plants. Bindi-eye is oftened shortened to bindi, and can be spelt in several ways including bindy-eye and bindii. The word is from the Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay Aboriginal languages of northern New South Wales. Bindi-eye is usually considered a weed when found in one’s lawn. Many a child’s play has been painfully interrupted by the sharp barbs of the plant which have a habit of sticking into the sole of one’s foot. Bindy-eye is first recorded in the 1890s.

 1894 Queenslander (Brisbane) 11 August: Fancy him after working a mob of sheep through a patch of Bathurst Burr, or doing a day’s work in a paddock where the grass seed was bad and bindy-eyes thick.

2015 Australian (Sydney) 3 January: You know it’s summer when the frangipani flower in their happy colours, when the eucalypt blossom provides a feast for the rosellas – and when the bindi-eyes in your lawn punish you for going barefoot.

bingle

A fight or skirmish; a collision. Bingle is perhaps from Cornish dialect bing ‘a thump or blow’. Most other words derived from Cornish dialect in Australian English were originally related to mining, including fossick. The word is frequently used to refer to a car collision. Bingle is first recorded in the 1940s.

1966 R. Carr Surfie: There was this clang of metal on metal and both cars lurched over to the shoulder and we nearly went for a bingle.

2015 Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 12 April: In fact some of Hughesy and Kate’s listeners are laughing so hard they have to pull over in their cars or risk having a bingle on the way back from work.

bitser

A mongrel. A dog (or other animal) which is made up of a bit of this and a bit of that. This meaning is common today, but when bitser first appeared in the 1920s it referred to any contraption or vehicle that was made of spare parts, or had odd bits and pieces added. Bitser is an abbreviation of ‘bits and pieces’, and in the mongrel sense is first recorded in the early 1930s.

1934 Advertiser (Adelaide) 14 May: ‘Well, what kind of dog is it?’ he asked. The small girl pondered. ‘I think he must be a bit of everything. My friends call him a “bitzer”‘, she replied.

2005 Herald Sun (Melbourne) 27 November: We had lots of cats and dogs. My favourite was a bitser named Sheila.

black stump

The black stump of Australian legend first appears in the late 19th century, and is an imaginary marker at the limits of settlement. Anywhere beyond the black stump is beyond civilisation, deep in the outback, whereas something this side of the black stump belongs to the known world. Although the towns of Blackall, Coolah and Merriwagga each claim to possess the original black stump, a single stump is unlikely to be the origin of this term. It is more probable that the burnt and blackened tree stumps, ubiquitous in the outback, and used as markers when giving directions to travellers is the origin – this sense of black stump is recorded from 1831.

1898 Launceston Examiner 5 November: The mistake in the past has been the piecemeal and patchwork nature of our public works policy. Tracks have been made, commencing nowhere and ending the same, roads have been constructed haphazard, bridges have been built that had no roads leading either to or from them, railways have terminated at the proverbial black stump.

1967 J. Wynnum I’m Jack, all Right: It’s way back o’ Bourke. Beyond the Black Stump. Not shown on the petrol station maps, even.

2003 Sydney Morning Herald 29 July: Our own wine writer, Huon Hooke, doesn’t know the wine but suspects it comes from a region between Bandywallop and the Black Stump.

Blind Freddy

A very unperceptive person; such a person as a type. This term often appears in the phrase even blind Freddy could see that. Although the term may not derive from an actual person, early commentators associate it with a blind Sydney character or characters. Australian lexicographer Sidney Baker wrote in 1966 that ‘Legend has it that there was a blind hawker in Sydney in the 1920s, named Freddy, whose blindness did not prevent his moving freely about the central city area’. Other commentators suggest a character who frequented various Sydney sporting venues in the first decades of the 20th century could be the original Freddy. The term itself is first recorded in 1911.

1911 Sydney Sportsman 19 July: Billy Farnsworth and [Chris] McKivatt seem to suit one another down to the ground as a pair of halves, but then Blind Freddie couldn’t help taking Chris’s passes.

2013 S. Scourfield As the River Runs: Blind Freddie could see Emerald Gorge is a natural dam site.

blood: your blood’s worth bottling

You’re a really valuable person! You’re a loyal friend! This is one of the many Australianisms, along with terms such as ‘digger’, ‘Anzac’ and ‘Aussie’, that arose during or immediately following the First World War. It applied to a person of great heart, who displayed courage, loyalty, and mateship. It is now used in many contexts – ‘Those firefighters—their blood’s worth bottling!’

blouse

To defeat (a competitor) by a very small margin; to win narrowly. This verb derives from the noun blouse meaning ‘the silk jacket worn by a jockey’. As the origin of this word would indicate, much of the evidence is from the sport of horseracing. First recorded in the 1980s. For a detailed discussion of blouse see our Word of the Month article from November 2009.

2001 Herald Sun (Melbourne) 22 June: Four years ago at this ground – Mark Taylor’s last one-day appearance for Australia – England smashed 4-253 to blouse Australia on a typically good batting strip.

2015 Kalgoorlie Miner 2 March: The Meryl Hayley-trained speedster, chasing four wins in a line, was bloused in a thrilling finish by Cut Snake with a further head to third placegetter, Danreign.

bludger

This word is a survival of British slang bludger, meaning ‘a prostitute’s pimp’. The word is ultimately a shortening of bludgeoner.  A bludgeoner (not surprisingly) was a person who carried a bludgeon ‘a short stout stick or club’. It appears in a mid-nineteenth century English slang dictionary as a term for ‘a low thief, who does not hesitate to use violence’.

By the 1880s the ‘prostitute’s pimp’ sense of bludger is found in Australian sources. In the Sydney Slang Dictionary of 1882 bludgers are defined as ‘plunderers in company with prostitutes’. Cornelius Crowe, in his Australian Slang Dictionary (1895), defines a bludger as ‘a thief who will use his bludgeon and lives on the gains of immoral women’.

Thus bludger came to mean ‘one who lives on the earnings of a prostitute’. It retained this meaning until the mid-20th century. Thus Dorothy Hewett in her play Bobbin Up (1959) writes: ‘But what about libel?’ ‘There’s a name for a man who lives off women!’ ‘Can’t you get pinched for calling a man a bludger?’ But this meaning is now obsolete.

From the early twentieth century it moved out to be a more general term of abuse, especially as applied to a person who appears to live off the efforts of others (as a pimp lives on the earnings of a prostitute). It was then used to refer to a person engaged in non-manual labour – a white-collar worker. This sense appears as early as 1910, but its typical use is represented by this passage from D. Whitington’s Treasure Upon Earth (1957): ‘”Bludgers” he dubbed them early, because in his language anyone who did not work with his hands at a laboring job was a bludger’.

And so it came to mean ‘an idler, one who makes little effort’. In the war newspaper Ack Ack News in 1942 we find: ‘Who said our sappers are bludgers?’ By 1950, it could be used of animals which didn’t perform up to standard. J. Cleary in Just let me be writes: ‘Everything I backed ran like a no-hoper. Four certs I had, and the bludgers were so far back the ambulance nearly had to bring ’em home’.

And thence to ‘a person who does not make a fair contribution to a cost, enterprise etc.; a cadger’. D. Niland writes in The Shiralee (1955): ‘Put the nips into me for tea and sugar and tobacco in his usual style. The biggest bludger in the country’. In 1971 J. O’Grady writes: ‘When it comes to your turn, return the “shout”. Otherwise the word will spread that you are a “bludger”, and there is no worse thing to be’.

The term dole bludger (i.e. ‘one who exploits the system of unemployment benefits by avoiding gainful employment’) made its first appearance in 1970s. An early example from the Bulletin encapsulates the derogatory tone: ‘A genuine dole bludger, a particularly literate young man … explained that he wasn’t bothering to look for work any more because he was sick and tired of being treated like a chattel’ (1976). From the following year we have a citation indicating a reaction to the use of the term: Cattleman (Rockhampton) ‘Young people are being forced from their country homes because of a lack of work opportunities and the only response from these so-called political protectors is to label them as dole bludgers’.

Throughout the history of the word, most bludgers appear to have been male. The term bludgeress made a brief appearance in the first decade of this century – ‘Latterly, bludgers, so the police say, are marrying bludgeresses’ (1908 Truth 27 September) – but it was shortlived.

bluey

The word bluey in Australian English has a variety of meanings. The most common is the swag (i.e. the collection of possessions and daily necessaries carried by a person travelling, usually on foot, in the bush) so called because the outer covering of the swag was traditionally a blue blanket (which is also called a bluey). The earliest evidence for bluey as a swag is from 1878 where the bluey is humped as it was by the itinerant bush worker tramping the wallaby track in the works of writers such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson.

This image (an Australian stereotype) is epitomised in the following 1899 quotation for bluey:

There’s the everlasting swaggie with his bluey on his back who is striking out for sunset on the Never-never track. W.T. Goodge, Hits! Skits! and Jingles

The association of the swaggie and his bluey continues in more recent evidence for the term:

A swaggie suddenly appeared out of the bush, unshaven, with wild, haunted eyes, his bluey and billycan on his back. G. Cross, George and Widda-Woman (1981)

That bluey is later transferred to luggage in general, is perhaps not surprising in an urban society which romanticises its ‘bush’ tradition:

Where’s yer bluey? No luggage? J. Duffy, Outside Pub (1963)

In Tasmania, a bluey or Tasmanian bluey is:

a rough overcoat of blue-grey woollen, to be worn by those doing outdoor work during inclement weather. Canberra Times (19 Nov. 1982).

The word has been used to denote another item of clothing – denim working trousers or overalls – but the citation evidence indicates (the last citation being 1950) that this usage is no longer current.

More familiar is the use of bluey to describe a summons, especially for a traffic offence (originally printed on blue paper):

Imagine my shock upon returning to a bluey at the end of the day. Choice (2 April 1986)

Perhaps the most Australian use of bluey is the curious use of it to describe a red-headed person (first recorded in 1906):

1936 A.B. Paterson, Shearer’s Colt: ‘Bluey’, as the crowd called him, had found another winner. (All red-haired men are called ‘Bluey’ in Australia for some reason or other.)

1978 R.H. Conquest, Dusty Distances: I found out later that he was a native of New South Wales, called ‘ Bluey because of his red hair – typical Australian logic.

A more literal use of bluey in Australian English is its application to fauna whose names begin with blue and which is predominantly blue in colour:

1961 Bulletin 31 May:  We call them blue martins…Ornithologists refer to them as some species of wood swallow… They’re all ‘blueys’ to us.

bodgie

There are two senses of the word bodgie in Australian English, both probably deriving from an earlier (now obsolete) word bodger.

The obsolete bodger probably derives from British dialect bodge ‘to work clumsily’. In Australian English in the 1940s and 1950s bodger meant: ‘Something (or occasionally someone) which is fake, false, or worthless’. The noun was also used adjectivally. Typical uses:

1950 F. Hardy, Power without Glory: This entailed the addition of as many more ‘bodger’ votes as possible.

1954 Coast to Coast 1953-54: Well, we stuck together all through the war – we was in under bodger names.

1966 S. Baker, The Australian Language: An earlier underworld and Army use of bodger for something faked, worthless or shoddy. For example, a faked receipt or false name.. is a bodger; so is a shoddy piece of material sold by a door-to-door hawker.

The word bodger was altered to bodgie, and this is now the standard form:

1975 Latch & Hitchings, Mr X: To avoid any suspicions in case they were picked up by the Transport Regulation Board, it was decided.. to take a ‘bodgy’ receipt for the tyres with them.

1978 O. White, Silent Reach: This heap is hot – else why did they give it a one-coat spray job over the original white duco and fix it with bodgie number plates?

1984 Canberra Times 27 August: Allegations .. of branch-stacking and the use of hundreds of ‘bodgie’ members in the electorate.

In the 1950s another sense of bodgie arose. The word was used to describe a male youth, distinguished by his conformity to certain fashions of dress and larrikin behaviour; analogous to the British ‘teddy boy’:

1950 Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) 7 May: The bizarre uniform of the ‘bodgey’ – belted velvet cord jacket, bright blue sports coat without a tie, brown trousers narrowed at the ankle, shaggy Cornel Wilde haircut.

1951 Sydney Morning Herald 1 February: What with ‘bodgies’ growing their hair long and getting around in satin shirts, and ‘weegies’ [see widgie] cutting their hair short and wearing jeans, confusion seems to be be arising about the sex of some Australian adolescents.

This sense of bodgie seems to be an abbreviation of the word bodger with the addition of the -ie(-y) suffix. One explanation for the development of the teenage larrikin sense was offered in the Age (Melbourne) in 1983:

Mr Hewett says his research indicates that the term ‘bodgie’ arose around the Darlinghurst area in Sydney. It was just after the end of World War II and rationing had caused a flourishing black market in American-made cloth. ‘People used to try and pass off inferior cloth as American-made when in fact it was not: so it was called “bodgie”,’ he says. ‘When some of the young guys started talking with American accents to big-note themselves they were called “bodgies”.’

This sense of bodgie belongs primarily to the 1950s, but bodgie in the sense ‘fake, false, inferior, worthless’ is alive and flourishing in Australian English.

bogan

An uncultured and unsophisticated person; a boorish and uncouth person. The early evidence is largely confined to teenage slang.

Some lexicographers have suspected that the term may derive from the Bogan River and district in western New South Wales, but this is far from certain, and it seems more likely to be an unrelated coinage.

The term became widespread after it was used in the late 1980s by the fictitious schoolgirl ‘Kylie Mole’ in the television series The Comedy Company. In the Daily Telegraph (29 November 1988), in an article headed ‘Same name a real bogan’, a genuine schoolgirl named Kylie Mole ‘reckons it really sux’ ” [i.e., finds it horrible] to have the same name as the television character.

In Dolly Magazine, October 1988, ‘The Dictionary According To Kylie [Mole]’ has the following Kyliesque definition: bogan ‘a person that you just don’t bother with. Someone who wears their socks the wrong way or has the same number of holes in both legs of their stockings. A complete loser’.

The earliest evidence we have been able to find for the term is in the surfing magazine Tracks September 1985: ‘So what if I have a mohawk and wear Dr Martens (boots for all you uninformed bogans)?’

In more recent years the term bogan has become more widely used and is often found in contexts that are neither derogatory or negative. The term has also generated a number of other terms including bogan chick, boganhood, and cashed-up bogan (CUB).

2002 Age (Melbourne) 16 July: Campbell, 25, did not grow up as a bogan chick. She had a quiet, middle-class upbringing in Box Hill, attending a private girls’ school.

2006 Canberra Times 9 August: We enjoy drinking, pig-shooting, wear check flannelette shirts and have no common sense or good taste … Our geographic reach is flexible; residents of Taree and like communities, for example, may readily qualify for Boganhood, usually with little or no burdensome paperwork.

2013 Sydney Morning Herald 7 December: Douglas’ volley sparked a semantic debate about the use of ‘bogan’, with Palmer and others claiming the once-pejorative term had become more jocular. Inclusive. Affectionate, even … ‘We’re all bogans. I’m a bogan because I’m overweight.’ His titular party head seconded that, claiming quickly to have ‘spent most of [his] life as a bogan’. ‘All I can say is I like chips’, Mr Palmer demurred. ‘I wear Ugg boots and I go four-wheel-driving.’

2015 Sunday Times (Perth) 25 January: WA’s mining boom has given rise to a new kind of bogan – the CUB, or cashed-up bogan.

For further discussions of bogan see our Word of the Month article from Novemeber 2008, and a 2015 article ‘Bogan: from Obscurity to Australia’s most productive Word’ in our newsletter Ozwords. 

bogey

To swim or bathe. Bogey is a borrowing from the Aboriginal Sydney Language. The earliest records show the term being used in the pidgin English of Aborigines:

1788 Historical Records of New South Wales II: I have bathed, or have been bathing… Bogie d’oway. These were Colby’s words on coming out of the water.

1830 R. Dawson, Present State of Australia: ‘Top bit, massa, bogy,’ (bathe) and he threw himself into the water.

By the 1840s it was naturalised in Australian English:

1841 Historical Records of Australia: I suppose you want your Boat, Sir; Yes, said Mr Dixon; well, said Crabb I suppose we must bogey for it. Yes, said Mr Dixon, any two of ye that can swim.

In Australian English a noun meaning ‘a swim or bathe; a bath’ was formed from the verb:

1847 A. Harris, Settlers and Convicts: In the cool of the evening had a ‘bogie’ (bathe) in the river.

1869 W.M. Howell, Diggings and Bush: Florence was much amused the other evening by her enquiring if she (Flory) was going down to the water to have a ‘bogey’. Flory was much puzzled till she found out that a ‘bogey’, in colonial phraseology, meant a bath.

1924 Bulletin: A boar was discovered by two of us having a bogey in a 16,000-yard tank about five miles from the river.

1981 G. Mackenzie, Aurukun Diary: A bogey is the Queensland outback word for a bath or bathe.

A bogey hole is a ‘swimming or bathing hole’. The verb is rare now in Australian English. For an earlier discussion of bogey see our Word of the Month article from February 2010.

bombora

A wave that forms over a submerged offshore reef or rock, sometimes (in very calm weather or at high tide) merely swelling but in other conditions breaking heavily and producing a dangerous stretch of broken water. The word is now commonly used for the reef or rock itself.

1994 P. Horrobin Guide to Favourite Australian Fish (ed. 7): Like most inshore saltwater predators, Salmon hunt around rocky headlands, offshore islands and bomboras [etc.].

Bombora probably derives from the Aboriginal Sydney Language where it may have referred specifically to the current off Dobroyd Head, Port Jackson. The term is mostly used in New South Wales, where there are numerous bomboras along the coast, often close to cliffs. The term was first recorded in 1871 and is now used frequently in surfing and fishing contexts with its abbreviation bommie and bommy being common: ‘After a day of oily, overhead bommie waves, we decided to head to the pub’ (2001 Tracks August).

Bondi tram: shoot through like a Bondi tram

Used allusively to refer to a hasty departure or speedy action. Bondi is the Sydney suburb renowned worldwide for its surf beach. The phrase (first recorded in 1943) probably derives from the fact that two trams typically left the city for Bondi together, the first an express tram which would ‘shoot through’ from Darlinghurst to Bondi Junction. Trams last ran on the line in 1960, but the phrase has remained a part of Australian English.

2014 Wimmera Mail Times (Horsham) 14 April: The book is aimed at young adults and the young at heart … ‘It took off like a Bondi tram’, she said.

bonzer

Bonzer is an adjective meaning ‘surpassingly good, splendid, great’. The word is also used as a noun meaning ‘something (or someone) that excites admiration by being surpassingly good of its kind’, and as an adverb meaning ‘beautifully, splendidly’. Bonzer is possibly an alteration of the now obsolete Australian word bonster (with the same meaning) which perhaps ultimately derives from British dialect bouncer ‘anything very large of its kind’. Bonzer may also be influenced by French bon ‘good’ and US bonanza. In the early records the spelling bonzer alternates with bonser, bonza, and bonzor. The adjective, noun, and adverb are all recorded from the early years of the 20th century:

(noun) 1903 Morning Post (Cairns) 5 June: The little pony outlaw is wonderfully fast at disposing of his mounts. Yuong Jack Hansen undertook to sit him but failed at every attempt. Jack states he got a ‘bonza on the napper’, at one time when thrown.

(adjective) 1904 Argus (Melbourne) 23 July: The python is shedding his skin … ‘I say, Bill, ain’t his noo skin bonza?’

(adverb) 1914 B. Cable By Blow and Kiss: Came back grinning widely, with the assurance that it [sc. the rain] was coming down ‘Bonzer’.

boofhead

A fool or simpleton; a stupid person; an uncouth person. Boofhead derives from buffle-headed ‘having a head like a buffalo’ (OED) and bufflehead ‘a fool, blockhead, stupid fellow’ (OED). Bufflehead has disappeared from standard English, but survives in its Australian form boofhead. It was popularised by the use of boofhead as the name of a dimwitted comic strip character invented by R.B. Clark and introduced in the Sydney Daily Mail in May 1941. For an earlier discussion of the word see our Word of the Month article from December 2009.

1943 Australian Women’s Weekly (Sydney) 16 January: Many a time when his round head nodded wisely in accord with the sergeant’s explanations, the sergeant was tempted to think: ‘I don’t believe the boof-head knows what I’m talking about.’

2015 Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 23 April: For those who think we should follow the Kiwis in taxation, feel free to move there. We get their boofheads so they can have ours.

boomerang

Boomerang is an Australian word which has moved into International English. The word was borrowed from an Aboriginal language in the early years of European settlement, but the exact language is still uncertain. Early evidence suggests it was borrowed from a language in, or just south of, the Sydney region.  

While the spelling boomerang is now standard, in the early period the word was given a variety of spellings: bomerang, bommerang, bomring, boomereng, boomering, bumerang [etc].

The Australian Aboriginal boomerang is a crescent-shaped wooden implement used as a missile or club, in hunting or warfare, and for recreational purposes. The best-known type of boomerang, used primarily for recreation, can be made to circle in flight and return to the thrower. Although boomerang-like objects were known in other parts of the world, the earliest examples and the greatest diversity of design is found in Australia. A specimen of a preserved boomerang has been found at Wyrie Swamp in South Australia and is dated at 10,000 years old. Boomerangs were not known throughout the entirety of Australia, being absent from the west of South Australia, the north Kimberley region of Western Australia, north-east Arnhem Land, and Tasmania. In some regions boomerangs are decorated with designs that are either painted or cut into the wood.

Very early in Australian English the term boomerang was used in transferred and figurative senses, especially with reference to something which returns to or recoils upon its author. These senses are now part of International English, but it is interesting to look at the earliest Australian evidence for the process of transfer and figurative use:

1846 Boston Daily Advertiser 5 May: Like the strange missile which the Australian throws, Your verbal boomerang slaps you on the nose.

1894 Bulletin (Sydney) 7 July: The argument that there should be profitable industrial prison-labour is a boomerang with a wicked recoil.

1911 Pastoralists’ Review 15 March: Labour-Socialist legislation is boomerang legislation, and it generally comes back and hits those it was not intended for.

By the 1850s boomerang had also developed as a verb in Australian English, meaning ‘to hit (someone or something) with a boomerang; to throw (something) in the manner of a boomerang’. By the 1890s the verbal sense developed another meaning: ‘to return in the manner of a boomerang; to recoil (upon the author); to ricochet’. The earliest evidence for this sense occurs in the Brisbane Worker newspaper from 16 May 1891:

Australia’s a big country
An’ Freedom’s humping bluey
And Freedom’s on the wallaby
Oh don’t you hear her Cooee,
She’s just begun to boomerang
She’ll knock the tyrants silly.

On 13 November 1979 the Canberra Times reported that ‘Greg Chappell’s decision to send England in appeared to have boomeranged’.

These verbal senses of boomerang have also moved into International English. For a further discussion of boomerang see the article ‘Boomerang, Boomerang, Thou Spirit of Australia!’ in our Ozwords newsletter.

bottle: the full bottle

Knowledgeable, an expert—‘Does Robbo know anything about paving? Yeah mate, he’s the full bottle.’ The probable source of the phrase is the 19th century British term no bottle ‘no good’ (which in turn is probably an abbreviation of rhyming slang no bottle and glass ‘no class’). In Australia the full bottle came to mean ‘very good’, and then ‘very good at, knowledgeable about (something)’. It is often used in the negative – not the full bottle means ‘not good (at something)’ or ‘not fully informed’. The phrase is first recorded in the 1940s.

1946 West Australian (Perth) 12 January: The B.M. went to ensure that the provost on duty was a full bottle on the art of saluting full generals.

2005 Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 8 December: Given that her cousins are real-life princesses, Makim should be the full bottle on the art of pouring and drinking tea like a lady.

bottom of the harbour

A tax avoidance scheme. In the late 1970s a large number of bottom of the harbour schemes were operating in corporate Australia. The schemes involved buying a company with a large tax liability, converting the assets to cash, and then ‘hiding’ the company by, for example, selling it to a fictitious buyer. Thus the company (and often its records) vanished completely – figuratively sent to the ‘bottom of the harbour’ (originally Sydney Harbour) – with an unpaid tax bill. The term is usually used attributively.

1983 Sydney Morning Herald 13 August: The Federal Government’s introduction of the Taxation (Unpaid Company Tax) Act last year is expected to recoup about $250 million in unpaid tax from the bottom-of-the-harbour participants.

2006 A. Hyland Diamond Dove: The feller in the dock was some fabulous creature – part lawyer, part farmer – who’d been caught in a bottom-of-the-harbour tax avoidance scheme.

boundary rider

An employee responsible for maintaining the (outer) fences on a station, or a publicly owned vermin-proof fence. This sense of boundary rider is recorded from the 1860s but in more recent years, as a result of changes in technology and modes of transport, this occupation has become relatively rare. Since the 1980s the term has been used of a boundary umpire in Australian Rules Football, a cricketer in a fielding position near the boundary, and a roving reporter at a sporting game. For a more detailed discussion of the original sense of boundary rider and the later sporting senses see our Word of the Month article from December 2010.

1885 Illustrated Australian News (Melbourne) 30 September: The duties of a boundary rider for the most part consist in riding round the fences every day, seeing that they are all in good order, blocking up any panels that may be broken, putting out strangers (that is stock that have strayed on to the run), and, in fact, doing all that may pertain to keeping his master’s stock on his own land, and everybody’s else out of it.

2012 K. McGinnis Tracking North: Mechanisation had finally reached the open-range country. There were no more pumpers or boundary riders.

Bradbury: do a Bradbury

Be the unlikely winner of an event; to win an event coming from well behind. The phrase comes from the name of Steven Bradbury, who won a gold medal in speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics after his opponents fell. For a detailed discussion of this phrase see our archived blog ‘Doing a Bradbury: an Aussie term born in the Winter Olympics’ (which includes a video of Bradbury’s famous win), and our Word of the Month article from August 2008.

2002 Sydney Morning Herald 19 February: Maybe Doing a Bradbury will become a common saying in Australian sport[:] To succeed only because everyone else fell over. The Socceroos need some of that luck.

2014 Herald Sun (Melbourne) 10 July: Someone would one day do a ‘Bradbury’ and finish third or fourth in the Brownlow Medal yet be crowned the winner.