The Default Country: a Lexical Cartography of 20th Century Australia

English was shaped by a damp green land in the far north and became the language of a wide brown land, Australia. How does that affect people’s response to the land they love? How does our use of language reveal the nature of our relation to this country? In this highly original book, JM Arthur makes ‘word maps’ of Australia, and through her process of ‘lexical cartography’ explores the relations between language and landscape.

English was shaped by a damp green land in the far north and became the language of a wide brown land, Australia. How does that affect people’s response to the land they love? How does our use of language reveal the nature our relation to this place Australia? Over 200 years after it arrived, English is still struggling to talk about Australia.

In this highly original book, JM Arthur makes ‘word maps’ of Australia. Drawing from a rich and diverse range of twentieth-century sources, she uses these ‘word maps’ to interpret the relationship between Australian English and the country. Through her process of ‘lexical cartography’ Arthur explores the relations between language and landscape.

Dr Arthur’s thought-provoking work investigates typical descriptions of Australia – and the implications of these descriptions. Her narrative plots the discrepancies between the words we use and the intrinsic nature of Australia. Our common daily language, she argues, directs our thinking about normal features of Australia into exception and anomaly. This language use also betrays a persisting colonizing relationship to landscape and much more. Thus, 200 years on, still we describe the climate as ‘unreliable, unpredictable and unexpected’. We talk of inland regions as ‘endless, limitless, featureless’. Are we still in the process of discovering where we are – and where we are not?

The Default Country is a story of people, language and place – Australia and the English language.