Thanks.ORIGINAL: Neilster
Actually, Australian English is a combination of many influences. A strong one was the 18th Century British military vocabulary, because the various colonies that eventually became Australia were originally penal settlements. Another was the dialects of the convicts, many of whom were Irish or who were from England's big cities where a fast paced, jargon-filled form of English often known as Flash was commonly spoken in the criminal underworld.
By the 1820s (less than 50 years after first settlement) visitors noted that Australians spoke with a distinctive accent. The gold rush of the 1850s bought settlers from all over the world, many of them from North America. Many words from American English (especially mining terms which often owed their origins to Spanish) entered the vocabulary. I've also noticed there are a fair number of German words lurking around almost unnoticed. Germans were the 4th most common immigrants to Australia.
Many words and expressions that were common 50 years ago are now seen as stereotypical and have fallen out of favour (although I often still use them). Talking to old blokes is often a slightly strange experience as a result. My Dad's Dad was born in 1898 and he spoke with a 19th Century Australian accent and vocabulary which is quite different to today's. For example, to say "Go and get the cow (beast) from down by the far creek", he would say "Goin' git bist frum diwn be fur crick". Speaking of which, I recently saw a documentary about Colonia Nueva Australia (New Australia), where 238 adults and children emigrated to Paraguay in 1893 in an attempt to build a utopian Socialist farming community. Not surprisingly it didn't work and many went home but some stayed and their descendants still preserve some Australian stuff like recipes and certain words. One of the old blokes was the son of one of the original settlers and he spoke with a 19th Century Australian accent in a very similar fashion to my grandfather. It was kind of weird to hear it in 2007.
Personally, I speak a mix of "Cultivated Australian English" (spoken by less than 10% of the population now, with many similarities to British Received Pronunciation) and "General Australian English" (spoken by 80% of people here). I'll also speak "Broad Australian English" (Steve Irwin/Paul Hogan style, also known as Ocker or Strine) if I perceive that the listener speaks that way.
Cheers, Neilster
I find it interesting how quickly people will change how they speak once in a new environment (myself in particular). And revert immediately to a known dialect when they encounter someone who speaks it. In Hawaii it is most obvious when a local switches from normal, 'television' English to the local Pidgin dialect. In one of our recent shows a repeated tag line for several scenes was "we go stay".
