AUSTRALIA 1

The speech of London neighbouring counties like Essex and Middlesex was sent into a remote exile when England’s petty criminals were shipped as convicts to the penal colony of New South Wales.

Old unseaworthy ships, often dismasted, were moored in the rivers and estatuaries and became floating prisons for people sentenced to transportation. They housed the petty criminals of industrial England before the long sea voyage to the penal colonies of Australia.

They were many English voices on board but the predominant one was from London area. In fact, Cockneys accounted for more than one third of the original generation of Australians.

The first penal settlements in Australia were in Sydney and near Hobart in Tasmania.

The convicts’ new home was strange and exotic. Like the first settlers in America, they borrowed words from the native Aborigines to describe things they’d never seen before. Like the coolibah tree and the boomerang, billabong, a waterhole, and corroboree, a gathering and place names like Wogawoga, Woolamaloo and Woomera.

The convicts also adopted Aborigine words like kangaroo, wallaby, bandicoot, budgerigar, wombat, koala and dingo.

Convicts and Aborigines meeting for the first time communicated in Pidgin English. The Australianism walkabout is an early example of Pidgin English Down Under. Among the convicts the first visitors to Australia noticed the dominating tones of London English.

Australian Linguist, Professor John Bernard: “The greatest number came from London and the counties immediately around London. So, naturally there is a big influence into Australian English from London forms of speech. This is most evident in the pronunciation. You have the broad “a” sound, which probably belongs in both dialects and you do have some words and some word patterns like rhyming slang.”

The first Australians invented their own rhyming slang: ducks and geese for police, and a Captain Cook for a look.

“Manifestos of the First Fleet showed that convicts came from every county of England and Scotland and Ireland and so many of the words which Australians think are Australian are in fact county words from Great Britain, words like cobber and wowser. Wowser meaning a killjoy came from the rural north; Cobber meaning a friend, came from Suffolk; larrikin, a youth –from Warwickshire; Billy as in billycan, from Scotland; and barracking, rowdy encouragement and a corker, a very good thing, from Ireland.

The bulk of the early Europeans in Australia were, of course, convicts and they brought with them the so called “flash language”, which was a highly developed jargon which the criminals classes used and which I suppose the people who were not quite criminal, but had been convicted, learnt on the ships. And the consequence was that there was an early complaint from the magistrates that they couldn’t understand what was being said in their own courts. And Flash Jim Vaux, who managed to get himself transported three times, in 1812, wrote a short vocabulary of the Flash Language ostensibly to help the magistrates.