Foreword to 'Golden Words and A Golden Landscape'

Abstract

There is something endlessly interesting about the way words are tied to places. When human beings are thrown together into small communities and anchored in one landscape they invariably make up words of their own, as well as twisting old words to new purposes. This is partly a Darwinian process - it is about the survival of the fittest. Some words and idioms drop away, or at least they are hollowed out so as to lose their original richness of meaning. Others spring up to fit new circumstances. The convicts had a jargon all their own, a lot of it coming from the backstreets of London but adapted to colonial Australia. The diggers during World War One shaped their language in order to meet the demands or battle, but also to cope with extraordinary trauma and pain. On the other hand, in every situation, including these ones, there has also been something whimsical, surprising and apparently pointless about new words, the outcome of sheer imagination and wit. The Australian goldfields were at least as rich in language as they were in material wealth, and the miners had all sorts of reasons and non-reasons for speaking as they did. In catalogues of words and idioms such as this book contains, it is possible to sense unplumbed layers of motivation among the original speakers. The scholar is tempted to dig down, as if through geological strata, in the hope of finding out how words got started. However, the nuggets - the best intellectual discoveries - go only to the persevering. This book is a result of very long labour indeed, and is extremely rich.