The Vapour Trail

Hopefully, the Bill Henson imbroglio of 2008 is behind us in Australia now (for those who missed it: Australian police shut down the renowned artist’s shows at the rosylnoxley9 gallery last year, claiming that his photographs of teens sans clothes were child pornography).

I don’t have anything to say about that brouhaha that hasn’t already been said elsewhere. But I thought I would note an incident in Sydney in early November 1880, in which police once again stormed an establishment selling art, and in that case charged the dealer with obscenity.

The prosecution was for the exhibition of Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’ La Source, a reproduction of which hung in the window of the dealer’s shop in Pitt Street, Sydney.

The Source (1856)

This painting had a ‘demoralising influence’, the prosecuting constable told the court, because ‘it represented the naked form of a woman’, and because it attracted large crowds of ‘the larrikin class’ – not only boys and young men, but ‘low, abandoned women and girls’ as well - who gathered to gaze at it on the Pitt Street footpath. This was, of course, the nub of the matter so far as he was concerned. The danger in 1880 lay with the inflammatory effects of female nudity on the lower orders, who would allow it to further demoralise themselves.

The charge in this case was roundly dismissed, you may be happy to know. Evidence in support of the dealer was given by a judge in the Art Section of the Sydney International Exhibition, who gave the usual testimony in such circumstances. He declared that ‘the indecency lay more in the mind of the critic’ than the painting itself, and that paintings of as much explicitness were available for view in the Art Gallery any day of the year. In spite of the contemporary panic about paedophilia and the very 1880s one about larrikinism, one is tempted to say, has really all that much changed?

One of the most striking documents I’ve found in my search for 19th-century larrikin girls thus far is a series of interviews with the bawdy inmates of Biloela, the Industrial School for Girls on Cockatoo Island, a site formerly worked by convicts in Sydney harbour.

Ruins of Biloela Industrial School today (taken from Arthur and Jenny’s photographic blog)

The interviews were conducted by a Royal Commission into Public Charities in 1873, and for all sorts of reasons they make for compelling reading. For a start, the girls had rioted just before the interviews took place. Most appeared with bruises and lacerations on their bodies (hips, breasts, faces, back) where they had been beaten by the Biloela superintendent, Mr Lucas – a man whom they had provoked by drawing filthy pictures in which he featured, er, prominently on the wall.

One of the things that struck me among the rest, reading these interviews, was the significance of singing to these girls. The girls ‘are constantly singing’, one of the matrons told the Commission. They used singing for emotional endurance and cultural sustenance; to kill time and entertain themselves. They also used it as a form of rebellion against the despised superintendent and his staff.

During the day, under the watchful eye of their superiors, the Biloela girls sang hymns as they went about their work. They also sang the kind of romantic songs taken up around the piano in family parlours and at concert recitals: songs such as the Scotch ballad, ‘Annie Laurie’, or the puff-piece, ‘Love Among the Roses’ (‘I felt the smart of Cupid’s dart; / Twas love among the roses’).

At night, however, when they were locked up in their dormitories at 6pm, the girls sang the latest songs they knew from the stage. Whenever a new girl came, the others begged her for all the latest hits, and then learned them as best they could. According to a policeman staged on Cockatoo Island, they also sang ‘blackguard verses’ – ‘beastly dirty songs’ which would never have been performed in a late-Victorian theatre. One of the girls’ verses had something in it about ‘lily-white thighs’, he said, and another was ’The Rolling Magazine’.

I haven’t been able to track down the lyrics for ‘The Rolling Magazine’ (if anyone knows them, I would love to know). But there are a number of old English broadsides containing the phrase ‘lily-white thighs’, and stridently unedifying they are too.

I can’t be sure that the song ‘The Cat’ was the one sung at Biloela, whose lyrics I include below. Still, one can well imagine this song (contained in an anon. broadside at the Bodleian Library) being sung by drunken seaman on the wharves near Cockatoo Island, or else in pubs or in brothels around Sydney, and learned by the girls that way:

By the light of a candle I happened to spy

A pretty young couple together did lie

Said Nelly to John if you'll pull up my smock

You'll find a young hen full as good as your cock.

Then Johnny kissed her and pleased her awhile
When he pulled up her smock it made him to smile
Instead of a hen it appeared like a cat
For there was her beard and her rough hairy back. 

Then Nelly she opened her lily-white thighs

John played with the cat till the bristle did rise

He stroked down the hair as black as a coal

She catched his finger right snap in her hole.

...Then Nelly she held him so fast by the back

While she wriggled her ass & cried push it in Jack

He pushed in with courage so stout and so strong

She smiled in his face crying, well done John.

I burst in to laughter and spoiled the fun

But Nelly kept crying push it in John

Then John fell a laughing at Nell on her back

And swore he'd no more be plagued with a cat.

Sources

Annie Laurie, Scotch Ballad: Music (1865): see it on the National Library Australia site here. (There are any no. of advertisements for recitals in 1840-60s Australia in which ‘Annie Laurie’ was performed, appearing in papers such as the Brisbane Courier, the Hobart Mercury, the West Australian, &c).

Love Among the Roses (c. 1871): also on the NLA website.

The Cat, lyrics on http://traditionalmusic.co.uk.

Report of the Royal Commission on Public Charities. Report No. 2, (1873-4) NSW Legislative Assembly.

I came across the above report in Noelene Williamson, ‘”Hymns, songs, and blackguard verses”: Life in the Industrial and Reformatory School for Girls in NSW, Part I, 1867 to 1887′, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 67.4 (1982): 375-87 – an article which unfortunately doesn’t say anything much about the songs, in spite of the promise in its title.

Cathy Preston says that another old English ballad, ‘The Tying of the Garter’ was sometimes called ‘Lily-White Thighs’. The version she gives doesn’t actually contain the phrase, however – although it does refer to a maiden spreading her thighs: see Cathy Lynn Preston, ‘”The Tying of the Garter”: Representations of the female rural laborer in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century English bawdy songs’, Journal of American Folklore 105.417 (Summer 1992: 315-41; Cathy Lynn Preston, ed., Folklore, Literature and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays (Taylor and Francis, 1995), 69-70.

For another song with the phrase ‘lily-white thighs’, see ‘The Monk of Great Renown’ on this folkore site.

More info about NSW State Archives Records on Biloela can be found on the Archives website, here.

I will be adding a fair few titles to my bibliography on larrikinism shortly. This is largely because I have been working my way through a fabulous PhD thesis by Simon Sleight from Monash University, called ‘The Territories of Youth: Young People and Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1901′, a work oozing research leads and suggestions for secondary reading.

‘The Territories of Youth’ looks at the way young people used the outdoor spaces of Melbourne in the late nineteenth century. It has a chapter specifically on larrikins (soon to appear as an article in Australian Historical Studies) called ‘Interstitial acts: urban space and the larrikin repertoire’.

Sleight essentially shows that larrikin used vacant lots, marketplaces and street corners throughout inner Melbourne for the performance of rebellious youthfulness – something that obviously complements my own work on their interaction with theatrical and other performance genres, and the way this played out in turn-of-the-century streets. The article when it appears in Australian Historical Studies will be worth a read. The broader thesis also maps the trajectories of many working-class children through the streets of Melbourne, providing an intimate glimpse into their city at the time.

The reason I came across Simon’s thesis was that I fortuitously met him at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London recently. He is planning future research looking comparatively at Melbourne and Liverpool delinquency at the turn of the twentieth century. And he has also directed me to the fabulous work of Andrew Davies, author of The Gangs of Manchester (the cover image for which appears above) and a soon-to-be-perfomed play on the subject, Angels With Manky Faces. (I’ncidentally, I’d never known until hearing this that the word ‘manky’, which I grew up using to mean ‘wonky’ or ‘wrong’, was an insult to the good citizens of Manchester).

My article on larrikins and blackface minstrelsy has finally appeared in the Journal of Social History. One of my aims in writing it was to provide an Australian perspective on debates about the relationship of blackface minstrelsy to race and class, given that those perspectives are usuallyoffered by American historians. But I was also keen to give a glimpse into male larrikns’ theatrical persona and everyday activities: their interest in performance in the street as well as minstrel performances and Ned Kelly-style melodramas.

Unfortunately, the Journal of Social History’s copyright restrictions say I can’t put it up online for some time, But anyone interested in a copy should feel free to ask for a pdf by email.

Well, I’ve been very slow indeed since I got back from the whistle-stop conference visit to the UK. Am giving two papers over the next couple of days, though – here’s the latest for the University of Queensland’s history seminar later this week:

In Search of the Larrikin Girl: Rough Femininity and Street Subculture in Australia, 1870-1915.

The culture of young street toughs or ‘larrikins’ in turn-of-the-century Australia was unabashedly masculine in character. It revolved around the performance of a flamboyant machismo; around fighting, taunting authority-figures, and bragging about one’s sexual prowess. As with rough youth subcultures elsewhere, this has meant that the girls and young women who participated in the larrikin milieu have either been rendered invisible or else presented as the sexual dupes of men.

In this paper I discuss my search for the larrikin girl in the historical sources, along with my attempt to come to terms with her relevance to scholarship from cultural studies and sociology on girls and street subcultures. I argue particularly for a focus on the theatricality of the larrikin-girl persona, and consider the ways in which this allows us to understand these rough girls and young women as something more than the auxiliaries of larrikin boys.