Where did Australians get their own language?

There is room for a very interesting dictionary of  Australianisms. But I have no time to collect such a list.

Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, 1883.

Well, 143 years on, Twopeny's wish is granted. There are three Australian forms of English: this work just had to await the arrival on the scene of an experienced researcher who speaks all three.

Australian English took less than forty years after the white invasion to start showing up and then begin to puzzle those that we later called New Chums (a term that dates back to at least 1827, but I wonder when the Opposition {see below} show the phrase turning up?).

Now then: when did those terms, those new words, enter the language? The receptacle called a billy, the thing that we used to make tea in probably started in the 1820s, but its accepted name only emerged in the 1850s. Like sly grog, it seems to have started in Tasmania.

There are several reference works that purport to give us 'earliest' dates for words, but to be blunt, they don't fill the bill. Gerry Wilkes says 'Apple Isle', a name for Tasmania, dates from 1963, but I found it being used in 1903. Joan Hughes says 'ant caps' dates from 1955, I have it in use in 1896. Hughes has 'Aussie Rules' from 1941, Bruce Moore has it from 1926, Wilkes has it from 1963: I found it in use in 1907! That is just totally sloppy!

The authors cited above are apparently all literary academics, and I suspect that they relied on amateurs and summer vac undergrads, reading books and providing slips of paper. I am a trained scientist with loads of cunning, and I delved into old newspapers.

Here is a pro tip for lexicographers: hiring undergrads to read books is a poor option, even if that method sort-of worked for the first edition of the OED.  Novels do not usually initiate the entry of new terms and phrases: new language is coined in the verbal world, then it spreads by word of mouth and sneaks into newspapers and journals far earlier than it reaches the books. Just two examples: bail up (by a bushranger) was around in newspapers 43 years before its earliest use (that I have found so far) in a novel. Equally, red ned was in the newspapers seven years before Ruth Park used it.

Any fiction writer wanting to avoid anachronisms would be wise to follow me, not Hughes or Moore or Wilkes, and you can do this for the price of a cup of coffee, and for that you get an ebook. I chose that medium because you can search it, it is far cheaper, and I was able to slip in about 200 colour illustrations. There are 271,000 words, links to all of the online sources, and if any errors emerge (as is likely), they can be fixed.

Now consider this quote: mine is not a new idea, after all.

So: who should get this reference work?

1. Writers of Australian historical fiction who hate anachronisms;

2. Academics wanting reliable information on the Oz language;

3. Foreigners trying to understand Australian fiction; or

4. People like me who just glory in the richness of our own tongue.

Here is the link to my lexicon again: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0GR9B1JFV

By the by, I put DRM in play, with this work: if you really need a clean and unprotected PDF version for free (or a source file in Word), friends can have it by emailing me, scholars can make their case by way of a comment. I am not doing this to get rich, but I have had my fill of pirates.