The Bush in Australian English

Abstract

The Englishes of British settlers in different parts of the world reflect the history and culture of their respective societies. In expanding to distant lands, colonists encountered natural environments very different from those of Britain. As a consequence, the English of British settlers in different countries has changed in response to new landscapes. Individual landscape terms in various languages do not always have exact equivalents in other languages, or even in different varieties of the same language. One example is the term the bush in Australian English. The bush denotes an Australian landscape zone, but the word has developed additional senses related to culture and human geography. This study delineates the semantics of the bush in Australian English in relation to Australian culture. These meanings of the bush are described using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to linguistic analysis. The study finds that the bush is a keyword in Australian culture. Overall the study shows that in Australian English and other settler Englishes the meanings of national landscape terms can shed light on the relationship between settlers’ cultures, and their new environments and ways of life.

Keywords:

• Lexical Semantics
• Australian English
• Landscape Terms
• Language and Culture
• Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka for their many constructive comments and suggestions. Participants at the NSM Seminar, University of New England, 10 December 2009 also contributed valuable feedback. I am also grateful to two Australian Journal of Linguistics reviewers for their helpful comments. Naturally all remaining shortcomings are my own.

Notes

¹Initially the word woods was also employed for this sense. However, once the inadequacy of this English term to refer to the very different Australian landscape was recognized woods was replaced by bush (Ramson 2002: 111). The last citation of this use of woods comes from 1827 and the first citation of the use of bush comes from 1804 (Moore 2008: 28).

²There are, naturally, further meanings of bush and the bush which go beyond the bounds of this study. For example, Australians who live outside the major cities are as a collective called the bush, as in ‘the bush will switch parties this election’. The term bush can be used in phrases with some verbs of motion, as in to take to the

bush, go bush, for example, ‘the convicts took to the bush’. The bush is also sometimes used to refer to a place in which Australian Aboriginal people live in a traditional manner as in ‘Maudie [an Aboriginal domestic servant] … had resigned and gone bush’ (Gunn 1908: Australian National Dictionary).

³Neither New Zealand English nor South African English are homogeneous (Starks & Thompson 2009; Coetzee-Van Rooy & Van Rooy 2005). I am looking at the term within mainstream standard New Zealand English and the historically ascendant British White South African English.

⁴There is too the English term bush in the sense of ‘a medium sized thing growing out of the ground, shrub’. Moore (2008: 29) suggests that this meaning and that of the South African Dutch bosch (‘wood’, ‘forest’) conflated.

⁵The other eight most frequent adjective modifiers are marmalade, prickly, coral, virgin, native, Tasmanian, nearby, and Australian. This wordsketch includes the term bush in all its senses, for example, as an individual plant, as in mulberry bush.

⁶See note (5) for information on other frequent collocates.

⁷A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson famously argued about the merits of ‘the bush’ with another renowned Australian writer, Henry Lawson, in the so-named ‘bush-controversy’ of 1892. Lawson portrayed ‘the bush’ as a harsh place whereas Paterson took a more romantic view (Semmler 1966: 81–86).

⁸One reviewer asks how human beings are excluded in the wording ‘living things’ in explication [B]. In my approach to the study of landscape terms and folk biological terms I am not aiming to reflect the scientific reality of the Earth. I am trying to capture ‘the naïve picture of the world’ or folk concepts (Apresjan 1992: 32–33). I would argue that in everyday colloquial English ‘people’ are not referred to as ‘living things’ or ‘animals’, although clearly they would be in semi-scientific language (see also Goddard 2011: 199–200).

⁹The sample of the bush is taken from a 250-word random sample of the bush in the OzNews subcorpus of Collins Wordbanks. From these data I extracted instances according with the meaning of the bush ₂ .

¹⁰Ward's book The Australian Legend has been criticized on a number of fronts. For example, some commentators observed that cities have also influenced Australia's history. Others took issue with the idea of Australia as a nation of collectivists (McQueen 1970). More recently, the ideas contained therein have been accused of being exclusionary (Nile 2000). Ward defended himself against criticisms by reiterating that his work was ‘an attempt “to trace and explain the development of [the] national mystique”’ rather than a history or accurate representation (Ward 1978: 171).

¹¹In examining this sense, in part, I looked at 60 tokens of the bush ₃ . These examples were taken from a 250-word random sample of bush in the OzNews subcorpus of Collins Wordbanks.

¹²The term country meaning the area outside cities is more usual in Australia than in the United Kingdom. Countryside is more common in UK English.