“Never Hitherto Seen Outside of a Zoo or a Menagerie”: The Language of Australian Politics

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, "linguistic" and "cultural" influences have shaped the study of history and the broader social sciences worldwide. In Australia these influences have developed more slowly than in comparable countries such as Great Britain or the United States. Yet the colourful language and "culture wars" of Australian politics have long been key ingredients of political history's appeal in and outside of the academy. Many practitioners perceive that the so-called "turns" constitute a threat to the study of political history. This article contends that, on the contrary, they have enlivened historiographical concerns.

The construction of a ‘narrative’ in Australian federal budget speeches, 1996–2013

“…In these studies of Australian political discourse, there has been only minimal penetration of concepts from the 'rhetorical turn' (Dyrenfurth 2010;Finlayson 2004). Analysis has largely consisted of attention to lexical choices, either simply as relative frequencies and machine-generated collocational patterns (e.g., Dann 2008) or with regard to some particular category of words, such as Walter and Uhr (2013), who use the notion of 'evaluative-descriptive' lexical items from Skinner (2002).…”

“…Relevant works includeDann (2008),Dowding et al (2012),Dyrenfurth (2010), Fenton-Smith(2008),Grube (2010Grube ( , 2011,Kabanoff et al (2001),Kane and Patapan (2010),Uhr and Walter (2014),Walter and Uhr (2013) andWalter (2014).…”

The enigma of the bogan and its significance to class in Australia: A socio-historical analysis

“…The political influence of the labour movement during the 1890s, and the egalitarian ethos that it cultivated, was strongly infused with working-class sentiment that had popular and electoral appeal in the early years of the 20th century (Dyrenfurth, 2010). The traits associated with Ward's 'Legend' invoked specific kinds of working-class experience, some of which can be traced to contemporary stereotypes of 'bogans', including its associations with masculinity (Pini and Previte, 2014).…”