Review of 'Dictionary of Austral English'. Edward E. Morris. Foreword to the Second Impression by H. L. Rogers. Sydney University Press, 1972. Pp. [10], xxiv + 525.

Abstract

'Austral English' was first published by Macmillan and Company in 1898, with the sub-title, 'A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages, with those Aboriginal-Australian and Maori words which have become incorporated in the language and the commoner scientific words that have had their origin in Australasia'. Although it has been out of print for almost three-quarters of a century, it has only now been reprinted, a delay less due to its having been at all superseded than because of the recent rise of interest in the study of language in Australia and New Zealand. The present impression is a facsimile edition, to which there has been added a specially contributed foreword by the Chairman of the Australian Language Research Centre, University of Sydney. This short piece sets the book and its compiler in correct perspective, in view of his education and career, Edward Ellis Morris having been born in Madras, educated at Rugby and Oxford, and holding a Melbourne headmastership 1874-82, and then professorship (1883-1902). There is quoted Ernest Scott's remark on Morris's house, that it was 'a centre of pleasant social life, with a literary tone'.