Word.ws English Dictionary

bunyip aristocracy

bunyip aristocracy noun: a peerage (hypothetical or proposed) in Australia; the new (in the colonial era) landed rich aspiring to aristocracy; snobbish Australian conservatives.

Noun

bunyip aristocracy (uncountable)

  1. (Australia, derogatory) A peerage (hypothetical or proposed) in Australia; the new (in the colonial era) landed rich aspiring to aristocracy; snobbish Australian conservatives.
    • Here we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy.1853, Daniel Deniehy, A heritage befitting the dignity of free men, speech at the Victoria Theatre in Pitt St, Sydney, 15 August 1853, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald the following day...
    • In any case, no one held exclusive rights on ambition or greed. It was William Charles Wentworth, the Emancipists′ trumpet, who in 1852, came round to lobby with James Macarthur for the creation of a hereditary colonial noblesse, the "bunyip aristocracy," which, fortunately, the Crown saw no reason...1987, Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, published 2010, page 331

Origin of bunyip aristocracy

Compound of bunyip (“mythical Australian monster; impostor”) + aristocracy. Coined by Australian journalist and politician Daniel Deniehy in 1853 satirising a proposal of William Wentworth for a hereditary peerage in the then colony of New South Wales. At the time, bunyip was Sydney underworld slang for an impostor or con-man, a sense Deniehy may have been aware of, but which was “obviously” unknown to Wentworth.

Questions about bunyip aristocracy

What does bunyip aristocracy mean?
Bunyip aristocracy means a peerage (hypothetical or proposed) in Australia; the new (in the colonial era) landed rich aspiring to aristocracy; snobbish Australian conservatives.
What part of speech is bunyip aristocracy?
Bunyip aristocracy is a noun.

Words near bunyip aristocracy in the dictionary

  1. bunyas
  2. bunyaviral
  3. bunyavirus
  4. bunyaviruses
  5. bunyip
  6. bunyip aristocracy
  7. bunyip bird
  8. bunyip birds
  9. Bunyip North
  10. bunyips
  11. bunyon

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bunyip aristocracy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 bunyip aristocracy.ogg.

Cite this entry: “bunyip aristocracy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bunyip_aristocracy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.