Bush Chooks, Barbed Wire and Vaginal Backwash: The Language of Australian Beer

Traditionally, Australians are famous for their beer drinking prowess, and in a hot and largely dry land, this makes sense. Many are the tomes devoted to the Australian love of beer, and these usually will have a section explaining some of the intricacies of beer ordering in Australian pubs. In fact, the vocabulary around beer consumption in Australia, for the most part slangy in nature or origin, is a highly complex and varied, and hence requires many dictionary entries. Not only that, as times change, and technologies change, and beers change, and drinking habits change, the lexis of Aussie beer lore continues to evolve. However, for the most part, it would seem that Australia’s slang dictionaries have not been keeping pace with the growth and development of beer vocabulary. Most of the beer-related entries recently added to GDoS represent the first time these boozy yet hallowed words and expressions have ever been included in any dictionary, standard or slang.