The Default Country: A lexical cartography of twentieth century Australia

By JM Arthur, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, 216 pages, paperback, $39.95. Reviewed by Laurie Duggan in the October 2003 issue.

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A friend told me a story about driving in western New South Wales. Ahead of him a car towing a large speedboat appeared hesitant for several miles as though looking for directional signs. Suddenly it turned off the main road accelerating into the distance. The signpost at the intersection read 'Lake Mungo'. Like many Australian physical features this 'lake', a depression filled mainly with saltbush and emus, is a gesture towards the geography of another country. My friend's story may be apocryphal yet it contains the faint echo of another tale: that of Charles Sturt's party, towing a whaleboat along a 'drought' stricken track, constantly readying it for launching.

JM Arthur's book is 'a study of Australia, or, more accurately, the several sometimes mutually inconsistent Australias, found in the language of its non-indigenous inhabitants'. Arthur, a lexicographer who has worked for ten years at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, has compiled from her research a patient and invaluable volume that should have significant reverberations. Various authors, like Paul Carter, have explored the disjunctions between observation and the official record and we are all aware to some extent of the ironies embedded in our place-names, the 'lakes', 'rivers' and 'mountains' comprising our geography. Yet, as Arthur argues, this vocabulary often ends up determining our practice: 'drought' is assumed to be an extreme condition, an 'event' rather than an actual 'season'. Other words need constant qualification like 'good rain' or an 'intermittent watercourse' while the normal is constantly categorised as a 'disaster'.

The vernacular, as John Forbes suggested of Les Murray's 'vernacular republic', implies a 'kingdom of proper usage' elsewhere. A language that constantly operates with an implied reference to a 'default country' (usually England) places its users at a distance from what they could be expected to observe closely. The result of this distorts both apprehension and activity (much in the way that early cinema criticism, couched in the language of theatre, in turn influenced the practice of cinema itself). The presence of such a 'default' vocabulary has also meant that the physical 'occupation' of Australia by Europeans has long preceded any imaginative identification. The continent's continual failure to 'measure up' meant that the newly-arrived visual artists (unlike their American counterparts) clung until the mid twentieth century to the cities and their hinterlands (non-indigenous art referring to the 'centre' or even the 'outback' was rare until the 1930s).

The Default Country contains much to be heeded concerning sound ecological practices and their uphill battle against notions of reality enshrined in the language. Innocent terms like 'scrub' (something which needs to be removed) lead to the innocent practices of 'clearing' and 'improvement'. The practice of pastoralists was for a long time described as 'opening up' the land, while areas were 'released' for agriculture. These terms and others imply that unused resources represent a moral laxness. The word 'lake' has been used both to describe a feature that should have been there (like Mungo) and to naturalise an artificial feature like a reservoir (Eucumbene). Describing the land as 'thirsty' makes irrigation the fulfilment of 'the land's dream'.

Perhaps the book's most subversive suggestion lies in the area of 'frontier' history. 'Colonial knowing', Arthur suggests, 'begins by unknowing, by denying indigenous knowledge'. It is a language of 'firsts', of a 'discovered' Terra Incognita. Tourist literature of the 1990s still suggests that we should 'explore the unknown'. Within this lexicon the terms 'pioneers' and 'settlers' carry an uneasy freight. 'Pioneers', originally a military term, is used strictly with reference to Europeans (Aboriginal people are never 'pioneers'). A Western Australian migrants' handbook of 1925 exemplifies this quasi-military usage noting that '(f)orced into the vanguard of civilisation . . . the pastoralist . . . has been the pioneer of pioneers -- pushing into the primeval wilderness, occupying and proving the country'. Terms like 'settlement' and 'settlers' carry within them senses of pacification and the introduction of order. If its etymological sense is taken into account 'settlement' (and one thinks chillingly of the use of the term in the West Bank) is always a euphemism.

Through word maps Arthur tracks usages, pinpointing connections and displacements. Even current ecological debates harbour the shadows of prior usage. Opponents of the reintroduction of 'natives', for example, may view this as a form of 'political correctness' (or indeed as a kind of 'ethnic cleansing'). Introduced plants and animals may have their origins disguised. They are (unlike those who 'transported' them) 'aliens'. Faunal 'exotics' may be shot, while the 'natives' are preserved behind fences. Through all this official language of ecology runs 'an attempt to dissociate the colonist from land degradation and exotic invasions, by first associating degradation with excess (note here the use of terms like 'over-stocking'), and by locating blame with the exotic life forms'. Yet the very idea of an 'undisturbed' environment followed by a 'disturbed' one may be a restatement of the notion of terra nullius.

This is not a book that will be welcomed by revisionist historians like Keith Windschuttle. The very language we use contains its own secret clues. Lexicography, like a DNA map preserves a record of the misapprehensions of our colonial past within the present of the new right's own 'political correctness'. It will be a hard task for John Howard's apologists to work their way around evidence like this.

Citation

• Laurie Duggan. 'Review: The Default Country: A lexical cartography of twentieth century Australia by JM Arthur' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 06 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• Embedded in Australian English are the descriptive norms of another entirely different country - a place 'narrow, hilly and green', our 'default country'. Australia by contrast is 'the wide brown land'. The nation's common term for what is a normal Australian season is thus a word for an exceptional climatic event: drought.
  
  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', JM Arthur explores the relations between language and landscape.
  
  JM Arthur's thought-provoking work investigates typical descriptions of Australia - and their implications. 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 persistent colonising 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?

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