The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth-Century Australia

English was shaped by a damp green land in the far north and became the language of a wide brown land, Australia. How does that affect people’s response to the land they love? How does our use of language reveal the nature of our relation to this country? In this highly original book, JM Arthur makes ‘word maps’ of Australia, and through her process of ‘lexical cartography’ explores the relations between language and landscape.