I posit that its due to hardship - not to suggest all Australians are super hard off, but it is certainly true that acronyms/shortened words are more common in rural (think high intensity physical labor) or speed-sensitive contexts (think Wall Street, engineering jargon in a engineering context, such as software, or SMS text-messaging).
Given their origins as a prison labor camp, coupled with a legitimately difficult environment (hot, arid, isolated by thousands of miles of ocean, fairly wild/aggressive wildlife such as crocodiles, snakes, kangaroos), their propensity to shortened, almost mono or duo-syllabic words makes plenty of sense in that context.
And finally I've seen the (variation of the) argument usually applied to the Russians, about their slavish nature ("During the Stalin's reign, half of the country was in jail and the other half was the jailers" etc.) leading to the impossibility for them to form a civilized and liberal society, which is usually retorted with an example of the Australians... being applied to the Australians itself.
No, one doesn't need to be of good breed to be freely able to speak multisyllabic words.
> No, one doesn't need to be of good breed to be freely able to speak multisyllabic words.
Eh? Not what I'm saying at all. Breed has nothing to do with it... circumstance has much more to do with word shortenings... not sure what I got downvoted for...
Given their origins as a prison labor camp, coupled with a legitimately difficult environment (hot, arid, isolated by thousands of miles of ocean, fairly wild/aggressive wildlife such as crocodiles, snakes, kangaroos), their propensity to shortened, almost mono or duo-syllabic words makes plenty of sense in that context.