Word.ws English Dictionary

go bush

go bush verb: to abandon one's normal surroundings and live in the bush; to flee into the bush; to revert to a feral nature.

Verb

go bush (third-person singular simple present goes bush, present participle going bush, simple past went bush, past participle gone bush)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand) To abandon one's normal surroundings and live in the bush; to flee into the bush; to revert to a feral nature
    • Taika Waititi and Sam Neill talk about going bush in the director’s latest childhood adventure, The Hunt for the Wilderpeople.2016 March 24, The New Zealand Herald
    • Groote riot: Police fear those responsible for deaths may have gone bush and be difficult to locate2015, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, news headline, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-08/groote-riot-police-fear-those-responsible-may-have-gone-bush/6922496

Forms of go bush

third-person singular presentgoes bush
present participlegoing bush
pastwent bush
past participlegone bush

Questions about go bush

What does go bush mean?
Go bush means to abandon one's normal surroundings and live in the bush; to flee into the bush; to revert to a feral nature.
What part of speech is go bush?
Go bush is a verb.
What is the past tense of go bush?
The past tense of go bush is went bush.

Words near go bush in the dictionary

  1. go Bills
  2. go bitchcakes
  3. go bonkers
  4. go both ways
  5. go brrr
  6. go bush
  7. go bust
  8. go by
  9. go by the board
  10. go by the name of
  11. go by the wayside

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: go bush (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 go bush.ogg.

Cite this entry: “go bush.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/go_bush. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.