Convict Words: Language in Early Colonial Australia (review)

The first British convict settlement was established in 1788 after the first fleet of convicts had landed at Sydney Harbor. By the time the settlement operation ceased in 1868, a total of 160,000 convicts had been sent to the continent of Australia. In this book, Amanda Laugesen presents the lexicon of these convicts and of convictism in early colonial Australia. She has compiled forms attested in this period, each pertinent to the convict system of the new Australian colonies. Almost all entries include a citation from contemporary documents illustrating the word’s usage. Where relevant, L includes a discussion of the etymology of the word and a look at its evolution into modern-day Australian English.

The introduction (v–xxii) explains in a concise and thorough manner the genesis of the early colonial Australian convict system and chronicles its development throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until its disappearance in the latter part of the nineteenth century. L ends the introduction with a discussion of the impact of convict speech on the language of modern-day Australia and on other English dialects throughout the world. The introduction also incorporates lexical items from the dictionary.

There are some redundancies in the book. For example, in addition to the entry assign ‘to make over the services of a convict to a private individual’, L includes each of the following as separate entries: assignable, assigned, assigned convict, assigned convict servant, assigned servant, assigned service, assignee, assignment, and assignment system. Similar redundancies occur throughout (e.g. flog, flogger, flogging; probation, probationism, probationary, probationer, etc.). It would have been preferable to present the basic form, followed by its derivatives and the phrases in which it commonly occurs.

It is unfortunate that more of the ‘flash’ language is not included. This is the vernacular that was spoken among British criminals, often linked ‘to the continuing immorality of the convicts’ (vi). The paucity of flash words in the book is due to their scarcity throughout the literature of colonial Australia. Therefore the majority of lexical entries are bureaucratic terms and legal jargon, most of which are still present in the English language. For these reasons, I would not recommend this book to anyone who is solely interested in the convicts’ (flash) language. Nevertheless, L’s numerous citations and select bibliography will be of great help to anyone concerned with the history of the early colonial Australian convict system or convictism in general.