A VERY AUSTRALIAN DICTIONARY
It was 27 years ago that a large, square, thick green-and-gold book landed with a thump on our desks – giving us our own real dictionary for the first time.
The story leading up to this eventual arrival of The Macquarie Dictionary in 1981 is an interesting one.
Australia got into the dictionary-making racket very early in the piece. The first (appropriately enough) was a dictionary of slang, written (also appropriately enough) by convict James Hardy Vaux.
By his own description a serial “swindler and pickpocket”, Vaux was first transported to Sydney in 1801 for stealing a handkerchief. He spent much of that sentence hauling coal carts by day in the mines of Newcastle, north of Sydney, and his evenings composing A Vocabulary of the Flash Language – a small dictionary of the slang used by his fellow convicts. He wrote it in 1812 and it was published in London in 1819.
But the serious business of recording the wider spectrum of Australian English took a little longer. and he supported every word with a list of “citations”, as the lexicographers call them. Us plain folk would call them quotations, or examples, of a word’s usage.
