Australia 39

Listen to Australia 39, a 66-year-old man from Yalgoo, in rural Western Australia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 66

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 10/11/1956

PLACE OF BIRTH: Geraldton, Western Australia

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: White (English/Irish)/Australian

OCCUPATION: pastoralist, invasive-species manager

EDUCATION: completed high school

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject has never lived outside Western Australia. He spent years 7-12 at boarding school in Perth and at the time of this recording was living in South Perth during certain times of the year.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: none

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Debbie Dowden

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/09/2023

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Oh, I was born in Geraldton, WA, and spent my early years or growing up as a family at Malangada Station, Yalgoo, until the age of 20. We, as a family, purchased another property, and, uh, my brother and I moved there. Uh, I was there 42 years, yeah. Well, Malangada was the name of the station, and, uh, I still don’t know honestly what it is, but my dad always used to — it musta meant poison, he reckoned, ’cause there was a lot of poison [plants] grew on that country. That’s what — that was his theory anyway. Woulda been Wajarri [the local language]. …

Oh, childhood was fantastic, um, did, we didn’t have School of the Air in those days, just correspondence school, um, but just the rest of the family and, just living in the bush, and we had Indigenous people with us working on the property and used to, y’know, treat them as friends and part of the group sort of thing, so it was a fantastic upbringing, I thought. …

Nothing sort of comes to mind, but it’s just — it’s probably a slower talk than, than normal sort of everyday people talking, uh, y’know, you sort of greet each other and say “g’day,” and then there’s probably a bit of, bit of silence until someone sort of says, y’know, “what are you doing?” and “how are things?” and “has it rained?” or, or “how’s the weather?” But it’s generally a sort of a slow introduction.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Rhea Dowden

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/09/2023

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The speaker frequently uses the weak form of “the” where one would usually expect a strong form, which is typical of both White and Indigenous speech in this area.

A good example of a common grammatical construction of the area is the phrase “there was a lot of poison grew on that country,” where the clauses aren’t linked by any connecting word such as “that.”

COMMENTARY BY: Rhea Dowden

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 27/09/2023

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.

• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.

• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.