bush party

bush party (plural bush parties)

1. (chiefly Canada) An outdoor social gathering held in a wooded area or a field, especially one attended primarily by young people at which alcohol is drunk.
   • 1961 September 7, John Mathison, quotee, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (Hansard)‎^[1], volume 328, Wellington, New Zealand: R. E. Owen, published 1962, page 2113, column 2:

     Many stories are told over there about the bush parties to which the men go. I saw a one-act play, one might call it, depicting the men enjoying themselves at one of these beer bush parties and the consequences of over-consumption of this terrible stuff manufactured under very primitive and unhygienic conditions. The ladies enacted the bush party, and it seemed to me a wonderful moral lesson to the young people to keep away from beer parties of that nature.

   • 1983, Alcoholism: Strategies for Northern Alberta, Northern Alberta Development Council, page 72:

     Young people were largely allowed to have unsupervised grad bush parties where liquor and drugs were assumed to be freely available. This was not seen as an isolated Spring event, but rather part of the whole fabric of the community.

   • 1990 April, Mark Ginsburg, “Truckin’”, in Vanity Fair‎^[2], volume 53, New York: Condé Nast, retrieved 21 January 2022, page 202:

     Lang has had a certain amount of experience with big vehicles, having put in a stint as the driver of a five-ton grain truck before she became a legendary “progressive country” singer, and having spent her adolescence in a small town on the Alberta prairie, where “bush parties” are part of growing up. Bush parties involve a lot of nighttime drinking around a bonfire somewhere out of town, frequently from the back of a half-ton pickup. “This Chevy would be an asset at a bush party because you could slide open the back window and blast the stereo,” she noted.

   • 2003, Robert A. Wardhaugh, “‘Bush Parties and Booze Cruises’: A Look at Leisure in a Small Town”, in Raymond Blake, Andrew Nurse, editors, The Trajectories of Rural Life: New Perspectives on Rural Canada, Regina, Saskatchewan: Canadian Plains Research Centre, →ISBN, pages 82–83:

     Bush Parties and Booze Cruises were shaped mainly out of the necessity to find a “place to party” but they did represent more than the material practicalities of space. Both activities became symbols of rural identity and as such were proliferated to mark and proclaim that identity. The Bush Party was heralded as a badge of hardiness. In the small town, rural people were closer to nature and partied under the stars, in the great outdoors.

   • 2010, Carrie Tippman, quotee, “Bush Party”, in Ontario Dialects Project‎^[3], Toronto: University of Toronto, retrieved 21 January 2022:

     Well this guy- he lived out on the highway um, near Haileybury. And he had like a huge property and in his backyard he had this bus. Um, and so it was like a bush party but there was a big bus there and people were just going crazy in and on top of the bus and I remember um people being on top of the bus and like shooting fireworks in the air and-stuff

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:bush party.

• keg party, kegger

• “bush party”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “bush party, n.” under “bush, n.¹”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2022.