Words & TermsWork, bush and rural life
hard yakka
Also: yakka, yakker, yacker, do the hard yakka, put in hard yakka
Hard physical work.
In a sentence
Restoring the old stone wall was hard yakka.
Where it came from
Yakka comes from yaga, meaning work in Yagara, the language of the Brisbane region. It entered nineteenth-century Australian pidgin and then general Australian English; the verb is recorded from the 1840s.
- First recorded
- 1840s
- Initial era
- 1800–1849
- Where used
- Australia-wide