AUSTRALIA 2

With their ticket of leave, released convicts joined the pioneering free emigrants, drovers, stockmen and grazers in the bush or the outback. With them went flash talk, words like swag and swagman.

The first squatters established huge sheep farms known as stations. Here words like jumbuck for a sheep and tucker for food soon gave a distinctive flavour to Australian English.

George Hawker’s ancestors were army officers who settled n Bungaree, north of Adelaide. Like the majority of Australian settlers, they came out as free colonists but they quickly picked up the convicts’ Australian vocabulary and accent.

There were no convicts here and no convict labour so all the settlers here were free. The originally camped about four miles east of here on what we call the Hut River. The water there is brackish so they cast around looking for fresh water, permanent water, which is what he found here. He actually came and pitched camp here on Christmas day 1841. It was there to be taken they squatted on it. In the 1880s they were running a 1000.000 sheep.

In Australia, unlike England or America, from Perth to Sydney, there is roughly speaking, only one kind of accent. In fact, Australian is the most classless form of English in the world, part Cockney, part Irish, part Standard English. It has a proud and egalitarian toughness.

What’s more, judged by speech alone, workers and bosses, sheep shearers and property owners are all virtually indistinguishable.

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