Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) writes of collecting words for The Australian National Dictionary: ‘I have found that the books I read and the quotations I collect are increasingly speaking not only to the climate crisis but also to climate grief.’ Among her recent reading was Living with the Anthropocene, which she describes as a ‘powerful collection’ that ‘threw up a number of quotations that might add to AND’s story about our changing environment’.
One of these, taken from Saskia Beudel’s contribution, is for the term greenie, an Australianism applied to, in the words of the dictionary, “any of a number of several predominantly green birds or animals”. She conveys a haunting sense of loss: “Most unnerving is the absence of small native birds once common here: the silvereyes and small honeyeaters called greenies.”
– Amanda Laugeson, ‘“The awful sense of loss”: The language of climate grief’, Australian Book Review, May 2021