backblock
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Noun
[edit]backblock (plural backblocks)
- (Australia, New Zealand, usually in the plural) A remote tract of land in the interior; hence (in plural) sparsely populated country far from major cities and lacking conveniences common in urban areas. [from 19th c.]
- Synonyms: backcountry, wop-wops (NZ), boondocks (US)
- Hypernyms: country; land; area; region; place; location
- Coordinate term: frontcountry
- Near-synonyms: upcountry, interior, hinterland
- 1931, New Zealand House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates[1], volume 229, page 281:
- I speak solely for the backblock roads, and I contend that the time has arrived when the Government should turn its attention to the metalling of these roads.
- 1955, Helen Wilson, My First Eighty Years[2], page 185:
- It has happened in other districts that new settlement has turned the old centres into isolated backblocks.
- 1991, Robin Hyde, Gillian Boddy, Jacqueline D. Matthews, Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist, page 225:
- Backblocks hardship is a very real thing, but Mary Scott expresses it somewhat too much in the Victorian ‘There′s a tear on your eye’ mode, little graves on the hillside and old servants, horses and dogs, faithful to the last.
- 2001, Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish, Vintage, published 2016, page 82:
- The weeping man was an emancipist who had a backblock in the next valley & sometimes came over to see his cobber the shepherd, both being Roscommon men.
- (Australia, informal, hyperbolic, usually in the plural) The most distally outlying suburb among a set of suburbs.
- Land behind which fronts on water; land without a permanent watercourse. [from 19th c.]
See also
[edit]- landlocked (of land without a watercourse frontage)