Aussie Slang for Work: The Dated History

Work words with a paper trail

Australians have plenty of words for working hard, for helping out and for dodging a shift, and many of them can be dated. Using the evidence in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, this guide follows Australian work slang from the 1840s to the 1950s.

A caution first. The earliest recorded example only shows what someone wrote down first, so treat each date as “no later than”, not “invented in”.

Hard work: yakka and yacker

Yakka means exhausting work, and Green’s tags it Australian. Its earliest example is in The Boomerang in 1888, about Brisbane wharf labourers “so accustomed to hard yacker”. Green’s says it probably comes from the Jagara word yaga, meaning work.

The verb yacker, to work hard, goes back further. Green’s quotes J.D. Lang’s Cooksland (1847), where “yacca” is described as a word from the Moreton Bay Aboriginal dialect. Green’s doesn’t mark that book’s region, and the first cite it tags as Australian is the Sydney Bulletin of 19 November 1892. A yacker-man, a hard worker, appears in a Perth paper in 1908.

Knock off, to stop work, is a good counter-example. Green’s has no region tag for it, its earliest cite is from 1649, and its first Australian example is from 1851. It is an English phrase that Australians use all the time, not an Australian coinage.

Bush jobs and helpers: jackaroo, offsider and smoko

Jackaroo is tagged Aus./N.Z. in Green’s. Its first sense, a white man living beyond the bounds of “civilization”, appears in Bell’s Life in Sydney in 1845 and is said to come from the Jagara dhugai-tu, “a wandering white man”. The sense we know best, a newcomer from Britain learning the bush, first appears in the Brisbane Courier in 1864, and Green’s calls its origin uncertain. The “young hired hand” sense has a first cite from 1891 in a Canterbury (NZ) paper.

Offsider, an assistant or helper, is tagged Aus./N.Z. It comes from the standard English “off-sider”, an animal on the off side of a team, and its first example is the Melbourne Weekly Times of 8 April 1871.

Smoko, a rest break (and the tea or food that goes with it), is tagged Aus./N.Z. in Green’s, and its first example is in a Melbourne magazine in 1865.

The work-shy words: bludger, bludge, dolie and sickie

Bludger started somewhere much nastier than it is now. Green’s traces it to the standard English word bludgeoner and gives its first sense as a thief who works with a prostitute and adds violence to the theft, with a first example in a British paper in 1851. The sense of a general term of abuse for someone living off others appears in the Kalgoorlie Western Argus in 1897, and “pimp” in the Bulletin in 1898.

The milder meanings came later. A white-collar worker, as seen by a manual labourer who thinks the job is idling, appears in Sydney’s Truth in 1910, an idler in the Longreach Leader in 1931, and a term of affection in 1985.

The verb bludge is a back-formation from bludger. Its first example (to shirk) is from Truth in 1899, and loafing about is from 1909. To scrounge or cadge appears in Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers in 1941, and “on the bludge” in “Nino Culotta’s” Gone Fishin’ in 1963.

Dolie (also doley), someone drawing unemployment benefit, is tagged “originally Australian” and shows up in Tennant’s The Battlers in 1941 (“Do you belong to the doley-oh mob?”).

Sickie, a day of sick leave, is tagged Aus., NZ, UK, Scots and US in Green’s, and its earliest example is Australian: T.A.G. Hungerford’s Riverslake in 1953. Green’s earliest cite for the phrase “throw a sickie” is a 1997 Guardian job-pages article, which shows how thin the written record for spoken phrases can be.

What the dates tell us

The oldest words, such as yacker, jackaroo and offsider, belong to the colonial bush and the labour that went with it, and Green’s traces yakka, yacker and jackaroo to Aboriginal languages. The work-shy words are mostly later, from the 1890s to the 1950s, and most are first recorded in newspapers and novels.

The most surprising thing is how much bludger has changed. It began with violent theft and the sex trade and is now, in the right tone, even a term of affection.

Want to test yourself? In Aussie-fy, our daily game, you spot the genuine Aussie slang for an everyday word, and the archive has every past round. We have also traced the dates for food slang, money slang and words for being drunk.

Sources

All dates and region tags come from Green’s Dictionary of Slang: yakka, yacker, knock off, jackaroo, offsider, smoko, bludger, bludge, dolie, sickie.