The abbreviation first appears in Meanjin (Melbourne, 1977), where Canberra historian Ken Inglis has an article titled 'Accas and Ockers: Australia's New Dictionaries'. We trust that Edmund Weiner and John Simpson did not take a citation, since the Australian abbreviation of academic is not acco but acca (sometimes spelt acker).

I hoped, after I left, they would enter it on one of their little slips and add it to their gigantic compost heap - a candidate for admission to the next edition.

I asked if they were familiar with the Oz usage 'acco', meaning 'academic'. But not all -o words were Australian, said Simpson : eg 'aggro' and 'cheapo'. Australians used the -o suffix a lot, he reflected. 'We are coming off a golden period of growth though through the last 10 or 15 years and we continue to enjoy a standard of living well above the rest of the nation.Michael Davie in 'Going from A to Z forever' (an article on the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary), Age, Saturday Extra, 1 April 1989, writes of his visit to the dictionary section of Oxford University Press:īefore I left, Weiner said he remembered how baffled he had been the first time he heard an Australian talk about the 'arvo'. 'Economic growth has been subdued in Canberra for several years which is no doubt heavily influenced by weak employment and wages growth in our heavily public sector dependent economic base.

' probably not surprising given Federal public service wage negotiations are struggling and perhaps that state governments are doing a little better given better shape of their books thanks to property market stamp duty bonanza in NSW and Victoria,' Mr Phillips said. Private sector wages in the ACT, at 2.1 per cent, managed to keep pace with inflation in the past 12 months, but it is the vital public sector figure that will be worrying local policy makers.Īssociate Professor Ben Phillips, from the Australian National University's National Centre for Social Research and Methods said he was not surprised to see subdued territory and federal wages growth.

Walking Backwards by Greg Humphries