The Penguin Book of Australian Slang scales the heights - and plumbs the depths - of the Australian language. For twenty years Lenie Johansen has been tuning in to and recording what Australians really say on the streets, in the pubs and to their family and mates. In this remarkable collection of classic and current colloquialisms she displays for readers all the inventiveness with words and the love of colourful expressions that have made Oz English unique.

What Australian say – and what they really mean. Australia has given the world thousands of colouful words and expressions. From the back of Bourke to the rough end of the pineapple, it's all here. Aussie Slang is the phrase book for visitors to Oz. It's ideal reading for local blokes and sheilas, too.

This dictionary brings together a colourful collection of colloquialisms from Down Under, including humorous rhyming slang, inventive insults and comical curses. Celebrating a distinctive and often irreverent language, Australian Slangis a ripper of a read that will delight visitors from OS, as well as true-blue Aussie blokes and sheilas. Read this book to discover the meaning behind perplexing Australian discourses such as this one- G'day mate! How've ya been, you old bastard? Take a butchers at that galah playing aerial ping-pong on the telly. He's about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition. The drongo'll get the spear if he doesn't pull his socks up.

GIFT OF SYDNEY is an epic novel of the struggle to forge the multicultural, world-class city of Sydney, Australia. It is the second in the series of novels about the history of the city and Australia. In 1903, the wealthy and powerful Armstrongs are concerned about their "convict stain." The Fongs rail against the White Australia Policy that is driving Chinese out of Australia and preventing their relatives from immigrating. The Hudsons suffer under government programs that manage them as part of the vexing "Aboriginal problem." The country is rich from wool and gold but insecure. Its principal protector and trading partner, Britain, is 15,000 miles away. The three families all suffer in the world wars and the Great Depression, but experience a profound change when the racist White Australia Policy is finally rejected and a humanitarian policy opens the doors to accept the desperate Vietnamese boat people. Once again, Richards's storytelling is impeccably researched, fast paced, action-adventure driven, and full of family saga emotion and drama. His two extraordinary novels together have the authenticity and authority of the finest historical fiction that strike a resounding chord of hope for all humanity.

The proposition that there is a correlation between language and culture or culture-specific ways of thinking can be traced back to the views of Herder and von Humboldt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is generally accepted today that a language, especially its lexicon, influences its speakers' cultural patterns of thought and perception in various ways, for example through a culture-specific segmentation of the extralinguistic reality, the frequency of occurrence of particular lexical items, or the existence of keywords or key word combinations revealing core cultural values. The aim of this volume is to explore the cultural dimension of a wide range of preconstructed or semi-preconstructed word combinations in English. The 17 papers of the volume are divided into four sections, focusing on particular lexemes (e.g. enjoy and its collocates), types of word combinations (e.g. proverbs and similes), use-related varieties (such as the language of tourism or answering-machine messages), and user-related varieties (such as Aboriginal English or African English). The sections are preceded by a prologue, tracing the development of the study of formulaic language, and followed by an epilogue, which draws together the threads laid out in the various papers. The relation between language and culture in general has been explored in a number of important works over the past ten years. However, the study of the relation between English phraseology and culture in particular has been largely neglected. This volume is the first book-length publication devoted entirely to this topic.

In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character—espcially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.