Larrikins: A History – Sydney launch on 26 April

Sorry about the extraordinarily long hiatus, everyone. Pleased to say, though, that one of the reasons for it is now out of the way. The book, Larrikins: A History – my key labour for the past few years – has finally been published by the University of Queensland Press.

The launch is this Thursday evening, 6 for 6.30pm on 26 April, at Gleebooks (49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe) in Sydney. If you live in the area:  I would love it if you came along and said hello.

I asked Mark Dapin, the novelist and recently sacked columnist and writer for the Good Weekend to launch the book. I’ve been a fan of his work for a long time – his maverick humour, always underpinned by a quiet eloquence and genuine smarts - and felt like a nervous schoolgirl emailing him about the launch. This is the man who once edited the bloke’s magazine Ralph and wrote the confronting crime novel King of the Road, and whose sundry articles on the strange quirks of contemporary Australian society and masculinity are always worth returning to.

Lucky for me he said yes.

Mark Dapin

Tags: Larrikins, Mark Dapin

Larrikins: an interview

Last week I talked to Richard Adey on Radio National’s Life Matters about Larrikins: A History, the book due out with the University of Queensland Press early next year. Here is what the program’s website says about it:

For more than a century the term ‘larrikin’ has played into the myth about what it means to be an Australian male.

Melissa Bellanta traces the term larrikin from its derogatory meaning in the late 1800s, through to its positive reinvention in World War 1, to its heyday in 1970s Australian cinema.

But Dr Bellanta, from the University of Queensland, speculates the term may die out with the last of the baby boomers.

Here, too, is a podcast of the interview: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2011/06/lms_2

Tags: Larrikins, Radio National

Knife culture, or Australia’s lack of it

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald today discusses the culture of knife violence in Glasgow.

Endemic to the problem is the fact that so many of those involved valorise the carrying of knives and bearing their scars as a sign of tough masculinity. So too is the fact that gang-fighting has been normalised within certain Glaswegian neighbourhoods: either accepted fatalistically or actively lauded as a way of life.

The degree to which street violence can be seen as ‘cultural’ has long been controversial in debates about gang violence and juvenile delinquency. At worst, it becomes a way to lay all of the blame for the problems associated with street fights on the communities in which it takes place, ignoring the other ‘social’ factors at play (unemployment, badly-resourced schooling, poor public amenities and housing, etc).

From my perspective as an Australian historian who has researched urban youth gang fights in the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, it is striking to note the cultural differences with Glasgow. The most notable of these is that comparatively speaking, knives have played so little role in street violence among Australian youth.

Small numbers of organised criminal gangs fought with razors in late 1920s and 1930s Australian cities, especially Sydney, just as they did in Glasgow. Among the youth gangs called ‘larrikin mobs’ or ‘pushes’, however, many of which skirmished over territory, knives never played a significant role. There was a short-lived spurt of gun-fighting just after the First World War, particularly in the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Carlton and Fitzroy, but it never lasted long enough to become a part of those districts’ culture.

Glasgow’s Community Initiative to Reduce Violence thus seems to be on the money in directing itself chiefly at tackling knife culture before anything else. Its chief aim (apparently) is to not to stamp out youth gangs or turf wars per se, but rather to convince those involved to do away with the knives.

Tags: Glasgow, History of masculinity, Larrikins

Bogan vs Larrikin

The term ‘bogan’ is one we often hear bandied about in Australia these days, not least by websites such as Things Bogans Like, Bogan Bingo and bogan.com.au. For those not familiar with the term, it used to mean something between redneck and suburban hillbilly, referring to uneducated persons of low income and crude opinions dressed in ugg boots and flannelette shirts. Now it used in a looser sense, used as a label for any person deemed to possess vulgar tastes. Among its enumeration of bogan enthusiasms, for example, the Things Bogans Like site includes reality TV, Palazzo Versace Australia, Buddhist statues as home furnishings and Louis Vuitton bags bought in Thailand. The official website for the Kath and Kim TV series adds to this list Gucci Envy Me clutch sprays and tan-in-a-can.

The fact that so many people are being called bogans these days seems to reflect an anxiety about the expansion of credit-fuelled consumption in Australian society. It also springs from people’s desire to prove the superiority of their own tastes by ridiculing other people’s tastes as bogan.

Since the bogan phenomenon is concerned with recent developments, it obviously differs from the idea of the larrikin during the period I discuss in Larrikins: A History, the book I finally finished writing earlier this year – that is, the years between 1870 and 1930. When the word larrikin first came into common Australian parlance in the late 1860s, at any rate, it meant ‘hoodlum’ or ‘street tough’. It was used by journalists and police to refer to young rowdies or street-gang members, or as a defiant way for those young people to refer to themselves. Rather than tapping into anxieties about credit-fuelled consumption or attention-seeking antics among newly cashed-up boors, the term larrikin was thus more concerned with fears of youthful street disorder.

Even though early usage of the word larrikin was initially different to the way that bogan is now used, it is interesting to note that a series of caricatures, theatrical skits and written pieces were published in the Australian press at the turn of the century that poked fun of larrikin youths’ style in a way not too different from bogan jokes today. These caricatures implied that rough larrikins were the epitome of vulgar tastes: whether because of what they wore, or how they talked, or the way they chose to amuse themselves.

Fascinatingly, too, the Australian colloquialism lair, which seems to have come into usage sometime later in the twentieth century, was essentially a combination of the two terms. It referred to someone of rowdy manners and loud dress sense: a hybrid of the word larrikin as it was once understood and bogan as it is understood today. In some ways, then, the bogan name-calling phenomenon isn’t wholly new. It would be interesting to know when exactly lair came into use, and when it  fell out of currency – because in many ways it described colourfully vulgar lifestyle choices not too different from those called bogan today.

Tags: bogan, larrikin

Using WordPress for research

A couple of years ago now I went to a training day about the use of NVivo software as a possible research tool. I wanted something that would allow me to store a big and diverse range of material that would be easy to search and could be stored simultaneously under multiple categories.

Apart from the fact that NVivo is really expensive (I think at the time my Centre would have had to pay about $2000 for me to use it), I soon realised that it was far too clunky and complicated for my purposes. What I’ve done instead is used free WordPress software to create a private research blog. And it works a treat.

Anytime I take notes about material or cut-and-paste from online text, I throw it into a post on my research blog. I then tag it accordingly and put it into multiple research categories as I please. I have the lion’s share of my research for my book on the rowdy late nineteenth-century youth called larrikins (due to be published by the University of Queensland press in Jan 2012) in an easily-accessible online repository.

Does anyone else use blogging software like this? If so, I’d be interested to hear how you find it.

Dead crook and running the rabbit: the larrikin vernacular

Trawling through local Melbourne newspapers from the early 1900s these past few days, I’ve come across a few suggestibve examples of larrikin slang:

Two teenage girls, Ivy Maine and a friend, were arrested for being drunk with a couple of so-called ‘buck larrikins’ in Yarra Park. A constable approaches them and asks if they’ve been drinking. The girls admit to quaffing some shandygaff, and that the boys have been ‘running the rabbit’. What does that mean, the magistrate asks? It means the boys have been bringing the girls beer in a bottle, Your Worship.

A young man called James Newbold comes into the Railway Hotel in Swan Street, Richmond, with a male friend. They’re barred from ordering drinks because Newbold’s friend has previously caused a rumpus in that same pub. ‘What sort of dead crook hotel is this?’ Newbold asks. ‘Come outside in the yard for five minutes, and I will put you in your place’.

Henry Mosley, an illiterate 17 year-old youth, is seen skylarking with a crowd of others his age in Green Street, Richmond, one Sunday night in 1910. A policeman once more approaches. ‘Cold pig to you!’ Mosley calls to him insultingly.

Source

Richmond Guardian (Melbourne), 1 June 1912, 1; 1 April 1910, 2; 16 July 1910, 2.

Tags: Australian slang

Larry Foley, predecessor of ‘The Rock’

Australian bare knuckle-champion-turned-boxer, Larry Foley, was the late Victorian-era equivalent of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, he had a stellar profile as a sporting star. And from time to time, he used this to put in cameo appearances in big theatrical productions in Sydney.

Foley first came to fame in Australia when he fought a gruelling bare knuckle prize match against Sandy Ross on 18 March 1871. He also won the Australian bare knuckle championship against Abe Hicken at Echuca in 1878 – a match he said was brazenly attended by the Ned Kelly while the bushranger was still at large. Soon afterwards, Foley became a key figure in Australia’s transition from bare-knuckle fights to gloved boxing matches, following the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules.

Foley loved the stage as well as the prize-ring. Just as the innate theatricality of professional wrestling and the WWF made it easy for The Rock to segue into bit film-parts today, Foley found it a cinch to appear in big theatrical productions in the late nineteenth century.

In 1880, for example, he appeared as Charles the Wrestler in a production of As You Like It at Queen’s Theatre in Sydney. The production starred a touring American actress, Louise Pomeroy, as Rosalind. The audience who turned up for the opening night were more interested in Foley’s performance, however – or at least it seems so from the review that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald the next day. ’The majority of those present were very noisy’, the Herald reported. ’Besides interfering with the comfort of the remainder, their boisterousness seriously militated against the success of the entertainment’. The paper added that Foley was much to be commended on his appearance, especially for his ‘well-considered fall in the wrestling scene’.

Larry Foley evidently enjoyed playing Charles the Wrestler, because he ended up reprising it in several later Sydney productions of As You Like It, including one starring Ada Ward as Rosalind in 1882 and others starring Lily Dampier in 1886-87. He also made attempts to become a theatre manager for a time, but went back to managing exhibition boxing matches when it proved financially unviable.

Foley is a perfect example of the interconnections between sport and theatre that I have talked about in a previous post. This overlap between theatre and sport was apparent all over the English-speaking Western world, including Australia. It was at its most acute pre-1930 - but of course, it still lives on in the tradition of sporting dramas on the screen and in the person of sporting celebrities-cum-actors such as Dwayne Johnson.

References

Sydney Morning Herald, 4 October 1880, 6; 8 March 1882, 2; 29 October 1886, 2; 29 July 1887, 6.

W. M. Horton, ‘Foley, Laurence (Larry) (1849 – 1917)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, Melbourne University Press, 1972, p. 193.

Image of Laurence (‘Larry’) Foley from www.cyberboxingzone.com.

See my other post on Larry Foley here.

Tags: Boxing, Larry Foley, The Rock