Australia 40

Listen to Australia 40, a 60-year-old man from Mount Barker, Western Australia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject. 

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 60

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 29/05/1963

PLACE OF BIRTH: Mount Barker, West Australia

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Australian/White (mostly English)

OCCUPATION: invasive-species manager and former miner

EDUCATION: up to year 11 of high school

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

The subject has never lived outside Western Australia. (He has lived around rural Western Australia, including Kalgoorlie and Kirkalocka Station. At the time of this recording, he was living in York.)

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject has worked in Kalgoorlie area mines with New Zealanders so much that people often mistake him for one from his accent.

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:

… Mount Barker: there ’til I was 18. After I left, left Mount Barker, I moved to Bridgetown, where I was sharing for a while, met a girl, and got married. I come up here for a little while, and, uh, then I went to Kalgoorlie and, uh, started working the mining sector. I have a little bit of a Kiwi accent, apparently, ’cause I’ve worked with so many New Zealanders. …

Uh, it [Mount Barker] was a war service area. Um, we did have some very — people with very strong English accents, um, Joneses, uh, not far from us. They were in Australia for 50 years and never lost the strong Yorkshire twang. Um, my mother was English, so there’s probably a little bit of that, that influence. I mean, the guy down the road was German. [Subject laughs.] You get a bit of that. We had a fair collection from around Australia living in that area just because of the war service farms. I’ve got some very, uh, very strong English-accented relations, but I had — didn’t have much exposure to them, from Yorkshire …

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 subject shows some of the New Zealand short, front vowel shift, as well as very rounded PRICE vowel and an excellent example of the broad MOUTH vowel found in the area.

In the phrase “I come up here for a little while,” the speaker is using the past-participle form of the verb as the simple past, a common grammatical feature in rural WA.

COMMENTARY BY: Rhea Dowden

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

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.

• 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.