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" The bush" is a term mostly used in the English vernacular of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, where it is largely synonymous with or . The fauna and flora contained within the bush is typically native to the region, although exotic species may also be present.
The expression has been in use in Australia from the earliest years of British settlement, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 10 June 1804, p. 4 and it has inspired many derivative Australian English terms, such as bush tucker, bush mechanic, bush ballad and bushranger. The term is also widely used in Canada and the American state of Alaska to refer to the large, forested portions of their landscapes.
In reference to the landscape, "bush" refers to any sparsely inhabited region, regardless of vegetation. "The bush" in this sense was something that was uniquely Australian and very different from the green European landscapes familiar to many new immigrants. The term "Outback" is also used, but usually in association with the more arid inland areas of Australia. "The bush" also refers to any populated region outside of the major metropolitan areas, including mining and agricultural areas. Consequently, it is not unusual to have a mining town in the desert such as Port Hedland (population 14,000) referred to as "the bush".
Indigenous Australians lived a nomadic life in remote areas of the bush for thousands of years, and during that time developed ways of utilising natural resources for survival skills, mainly with bush tucker and the spiritual healing of bush medicine. For more than a century after the first British settlement in 1788 onwards, land grant or sold to settlers, resulting in many generally small but permanent in vast tracts of bush. Closer settlement in Australia has often resulted in fragmentation of the bush, and bushfires, an ever-present hazard in many areas in summer months, have also increased with increasing Suburbanization of the Australian population.
Bush ballad such as Henry Lawson (1867–1922) and Banjo Paterson (1864–1942) revered the bush as a source of national ideals, as did contemporaneous painters in the Heidelberg School such as Tom Roberts (1856–1931), Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) and Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917). Romanticising the bush in this way through folklore was a big step forward for 19th-century Australians in developing a distinct self-identity.
Australians and New Zealanders attach the term "bush" to any number of other entities or activities to describe their rural, country or folk nature through terms such as "bush telegraph", an informal human network through which news is passed on; "bush carpenter", a rough-and-ready builder; "to go bush", to escape from your usual haunts; "bush cricket", "bush music" (Australian folk music); "bush doof"; and , 19th-century criminals mainly in the eastern colonies who hid in the bush to escape from authorities.
Areas with bush (i.e. native forest) are found in both the North Island and the South Island, some of it bordering towns and cities, but the majority of bush is found in large national parks. Examples of predominantly bush clad areas are Whanganui National Park, on Taranaki volcano, on which the bush extends in a uniformly circular shape to the surrounding farmland, and Fiordland in the South Island. Much of Stewart Island/Rakiura is bush-covered. In the North Island, the largest areas of bush cover the main ranges stretching north-northeast from Wellington towards East Cape, notably including the Te Urewera, and the catchment of the Whanganui River. Significant stands remain in Northland and the ranges running south from the Coromandel Peninsula towards Ruapehu, and isolated remnants cap various volcanoes in Taranaki, the Waikato, the Bay of Plenty and the Hauraki Gulf.
From the word comes many phrases including:
The verb to bushwhack has two meanings. One is to cut through heavy brush and other vegetation to pass through tangled country: "We had to do quite a bit of bushwhacking today to clear the new trail." The other meaning is to hide in such areas and then attack unsuspecting passers-by: "We were bushwhacked by the bandits as we passed through their territory and they took all of our money and supplies."
The Bushwhackers were also a New Zealand professional wrestling tag team that was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2015.
In New Zealand, "The Bush" is a nickname for the Wairarapa Bush provincial rugby team. The team was formed by an amalgamation of two earlier teams, Wairarapa and Bush. The latter team had represented an area on the boundaries of the Wairarapa and Hawke's Bay which was in former times known as Bush due to its dense vegetation cover.
In the United States, minor league baseball, which is typically played in smaller cities, is sometimes derisively called " bush league baseball".
In Australia, "Sydney or the bush" equates with such terms as "Hollywood or bust" to mean staking total success or failure on one high-risk event. This usage appears in several Peanuts cartoons, causing Charlie Brown much confusion.
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