Australian Language Evolution, Expressions.

“Storyteller words”

At the present time, Australian English is famous for its air of novelty, is something of a living museum, preserving several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regional words from Cornwall, Wessex, the Midlands, East Anglia, Northumbria, Scotland and Ireland.

To take just a few examples, words like corker, dust-up, purler and tootsy all came to Australia from Ireland via the cotton mills of Lancashire.  Billy comes from the Scottish bally, meaning 'a milk pail.'

Australians get larrikin from Worcestershire and Warwickshire, where the word originally meant 'a mischievous youth'.

' A typical Australianism like fossick, meaning 'to search unsystematically', is a Cornish word, showing the influence of the Cornish miners who settled in Southern Australia.

 Cobber almost certainly came from the Suffolk verb to cob, 'to take a liking to someone.' and Tucker, widely used for 'food,' had various English origins.

(Robert McCrum;  The Story of English. Viking, 1986)