On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 11:00:03AM +1100, Troy Mutton wrote:
> along with "jackaroo", probably a Brisbane word for a pied crow strike,
> one of the country's noisiest birds."
> Does anyone want to have a go at what a "Pied Crow Strike" is?
> I'm thinking it must be magpie-lark
Yep, courtesy google:
Equally fanciful was the Aboriginal etymology offered by Meston for
jackeroo in 1895:
It dates back to 1838, the year the German missionaries arrived
on the Brisbane River, and was the name bestowed upon them by the
aboriginals. The Brisbane blacks spoke a dialect called "Churrabool",
in which the word "jackeroo" or "tchaceroo" was the name of the
pied crow strike, Stripera graculina, one of the noisiest and most
garrulous birds in Australia. The blacks said the white men (the
missionaries) were always talking, a gabbling race, and so they
called them "jackeroo", equivalent to our word "gabblers"
Jackeroo first appeared in 1845 and was used to refer to a white man
living beyond the bounds of close settlement. By 1870 it was used
to describe a young man (usually English and of independent means)
who worked free on sheep or cattle stations to gain experience; later
it acquired the present sense of a young man who works on a sheep or
cattle station to acquire the practical experience and management skills
desirable in a station owner or manager. But there is no evidence to
support Meston's etymology, and there is no evidence of a word
for a bird name like this in any of the languages in the Brisbane
area.
More at:
http://www.oup.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/167252/Speaking_our_Language_-_Chapter_1.pdf
Andrew
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