A few years back now, I leafed through City of Shadows, Peter Doyle’s bestselling collection of Sydney police photographs, with a kind of uneasy fascination. Dating from 1912 to 1948, the photographs depict crime scenes in lucent sepia, their period fittings and unnatural stillness making them uncomfortably like an artwork rather than a documentation of bloody violence and death.

Doyle is just about to release a new collection, Crooks Like Us, which focuses much more on the mugshots taken by Sydney police in the same era: more shots of the razor-slashing prostitutes of the 1920-30s, more louche con-men and hard cases. These mugshots have the same sense about them as the crime scenes – that of hovering between retro artwork and gritty historical record, with touches of fashion photography thrown in: a horrible but beautiful and thus woozily fetishistic mix.

Many of the photographs used in City of Shadows and Crooks Like Us come from an archive held by the Justice and Police Museum in Circular Quay, housed in a sandstone building down by Sydney harbour which was once the Water Police Court. More such mugshots may now be seen in the Museum’s latest exhibition, Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal.

As exhibitions go, Femme Fatale is a small affair, comprising only two rooms. One of these is devoted to female abortionists convicted after botched jobs back in the day, which I walked through hastily, eyes only half on the walls. The other room alone is worth a trip to see, however: that is, if one is in Sydney, as I currently happen to be. Its eclectic exhibits include clay pipes used by convict women, trashy 1950s book covers, features on the underworld queens Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, the leather dildo used by ‘the man/woman murderer’, Eugenia Falleni, and trailers from 1940s films starring – yes, femmes fatales.

The most compelling exhibit by far, however, is the series of mugshots of women imprisoned in the State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay (Sydney), taken predominantly in the 1920s. Every one of these photographs is immanent with imaginative suggestion. They were taken, I gather, when the women were first apprehended by police. Each includes a front-on shot, an oblique shot, and a full-length shot of the woman in question, standing against a curtain in her come-as-you-are street clothes.

Here is 19 year-old Annie Gunderson looking sullenly at the camera, for example, dressed in a rather luxuriant fur coat. One reads that she was imprisoned for stealing a fur coat from a department store – could it possibly have been the same one?! Here, too, is 20 year-old Jean Wilson, also committed for larceny. With her lovely dark eyes, fur stole and long white dress, she could be attending a studio photography session – until you remind yourself that she was probably hauled out of a police wagon only a short time ago.

As the inclusion of the fur coat and stole suggests, the State Reformatory photographs are a record (among other things) of low and flash female fashion in 1920s Sydney. There are plenty of cloche hats, high-heeled Mary Janes and drop-waist dresses a la Angelina Jolie in Changeling; plenty of bobs and hair done up with pins. The resemblance to a period film stops there, however, because there are other details which would not occur to current-day costumiers and make-up artists, and less still to Hollywood casting agents. Most of the women’s hair is dishevelled or badly cut. Most, too, look years older than their years. And the clothes, though in most cases making more than a stab at glamour, are almost all crushed and untidy. 19 year old Vera Purcell is dressed in a shiny coat which falls to her knees, for example – but the satiny material is greatly crumpled, almost ridiculously so. Others have high-heeled shoes with busted straps and dresses with wonky hems. Even the dark-eyed Jean Wilson, with her curled bob and fur stole, wears a dress that looks vaguely boxy, evidently inexpertly home-made.

The final note of Femme Fatale is struck by a notice containing contemporary statistics on female prisoners in New South Wales. While women make up only 7% of the state’s prison population, the number of female prisoners has apparently increased by 82% in the past ten years, with an average age of 33. Not only that: a full 50% of these women have a mental illness. That sombre and not at all glamorous fact is more uneasy to contemplate, perhaps, than all of the exhibition’s images combined.

You can see Femme Fatale at the Justice and Police Museum, cnr Albert and Phillip Sts, Circular Quay, Sydney, until 18 April 2010 (open 10am to 5pm on weekends only, and daily during Jan/school holidays). Peter Doyle’s Crooks Like Us will be launched at Gleebooks Katoomba in early August 2009.

With the ushering in of winter comes conference season in Oz. Thus, I have been at Carole Ferrier’s Women Writers/Artists and Travelling Modernisms conference at UQ, and the University of Newcastle School of Drama’s A World of Popular Entertainments, this past week and more. Both were small, with no parallel sessions: by far the best sort of conference so far as conviviality and intellectual engagement is concerned.

At the World of Popular Entertainments conference in particular, we were taken by bus to the University campus, some distance from the clapped-out boarded-up civic centre of Newcastle, and everyone there spent two long days toegther, as if on a ship cut off from land, with Victor Emiljanow and the lovely circus historian, Gillian Arrighi, at the helm. It is a discipline, to listen to each other speak at such long stretches. But in this case, I think, something special emerged by the end of it, which is, of course – the possibility of that happening – why one subjects oneself to the discipline at all.

I collected a swag of emails from people to follow up, and whose work I hope to read more of in future. Among them were Kath Leahy, whose book on high and low performance styles on the Australian stage across most of the 19th and 20th centuries (aptly called Lords and Larrikins), is soon to appear with Currency Press. Also John Bennett, from Liverpool Hope University in the UK, who gave a  quietly inspirational paper on the hopeful political project in which he thinks popular theatre should be engaged. And Kirsten Wright, a Melbourne-based independent researcher, who gave a paper on the ‘tattooed Greek prince’, Captain Costentenus, who was shown in freak shows around America and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century (you can read more about him@ The Human Marvels, if so inclined).

I am still trying to get my land legs now, having returned from that time at sea.

I’ve been going back to plenty of the classic Australian urban histories lately, to oldies-but-goodies such as Shirley Fitzgerald’s Rising Damp, Andrew Brown May’s Melbourne Street Life, Ronald Lawson’s Brisbane in the 1890s, & Graeme Davison’s voluminous back catalogue. It put me in mind to visit Julia Shiels’ Melbourne art-blog City Traces again.

Each of the natty yet poignant treats in the discarded series on this blog sums up what it means to be interested in urban history with a concision that never fails to please:

the city and its strangers#7 (Elizabeth St, Melbourne)

the city and its strangers#15 (Little Collins Street, Melbourne)

the city and its strangers#9 (Tattersalls Lane, Melbourne)

On Punt Road Hill

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.

To merely step into the auditorium of the Old Vic Theatre in Southwark, London, got up at present for Anna Mackmin’s production of Dancing at Lughnasa, is to experience a kind of dusky thrill. Once the home for blood-and-thunder melodrama and reviled by West End critics for its crude sensationalism, the theatre is now a great, airy, elegant space, its elaborately-decorated Victorian tiers and boxes kept discreet in shades of cream and pale green. There is no stage, but rather a flat space in the middle in which the actors perform in the round.

The set for Dancing at Lughnasa is a simple kitchen arranged as if outdoors, with the bare boughs of a tree overhanging the room, and grass and rocks beneath the feet of those in the front rows. With the plain rusticity of the set and all that space beneath the great dome of the auditorium, taking one’s seat felt like stepping into a clear still evening, in the near-night of an entirely different place. This feeling of muted enchantment which came before Dancing at Lughnasa began lasted to its end. I am still of two minds, however, as to whether this was a good thing or not.

Written by Brian Friel, perhaps Ireland’s most esteemed playwright, Dancing at Lughnasa is set in rural Donegal during the Great Depression, during a week of festivities for the Celtic harvest-god, Lugh. It tells the story of five sisters, the Mundys, all living together and unmarried, who are collectively bringing up the illegitimate son of one of them: Michael, son of Chris (played by Andrea Corr, of The Corrs, here making an impressive theatrical debut).

Really, the play is all about loss or the presentiment of it: the coming loss of the pagan rituals of old Ireland and the Catholic faith of its austere rural communities in the 1930s, loss of the enchanted greenness of one’s childhood and more specifically, of the fierce intimacy shared by the sisters at the centre of the play. But the whole thing is told with such a beautiful modesty and with a hushed almost-detachment that one feels at one remove from the sadness throughout. This was a difficult and ambivalent experience, to be honest, and I am still wondering about it.

I think one of the reasons one feels this almost-numbness during the play is because it is presented as a series of memories by Michael, the illegitimate son. The action is framed by Michael’s narration of events taking place in his childhood, a week in which his uncle Jack, a disgraced priest, returns from years in a Ugandan leper mission. Occasionally, the adult Michael steps in to tell us things about his memories of Jack’s return and his family’s reactions to him. But we never see him as a child himself in those memories. He is always either hiding in nearby bushes or else represented as an invisible presence – the characters, if speaking to directly to him, address a mere space in the air.

The rest of the time, Michael is merely standing to one side of the set, looking on passively at his mother and aunts’ complex relationships, just as we do in the audience. Through this means one is thus made to inhabit his own semi-aloofness, and to feel at best his restrained nostalgia for people and hopes and customs now long gone.

Another reason for my hard-to-place reaction to this play comes, I think, from the fact that Friel writes in such a delicately-wrought and yet humble way. There is no aggressive tilting for dramatic effect here  (although occasionally one or two of the actors overstepped themselves, including the crucial scene  in which the sisters dance together at a supposedly artless juncture, shrieking and leaping with what I thought was an overdone gaiety). The script is instead written with an unassuming lyricism and its multi-layered events are quietly woven together, like a plain but dense circlet of leaves. Because of this, I keep finding myself returning to it now, touching its unglossed surfaces in jet lag-induced moments like this one, feeling a slow ache rising from it like a deep-set bruise.

The ultra-commercial end of the carnivalesque market. That’s the variety-show, La Clique, currently playing at the London Hippodrome. It’s very much the queer people doing their thing for the straights. No one in the audience dressed up for the show, and it was punctuated by inducements to the patrons to buy programs and overpriced drinks at the bar. Let not that deter you, though: with a sense of the feel-good as well as the freakish, it still makes for a happily rollicking night out.

Fancy watching a double-jointed ‘rubber man’ push his body through the frame of a tennis racket a mere ten inches in diameter, squeezing it painfully over protuberant nipple rings? Listening to a mountainous black drag queen singing Radiohead’s ‘I’m a Creep’, her voice vibrating somewhere between Shirley Bassey and Antony & the Johnsons? Clapping as a girl burns off her pasties and the front of her g-string with a cigarette bummed from the crowd? Well ladies and gentlemen, well fellow tourists and suburbanites, La Clique is the walk on the wild-side we’ve waiting for. Prepare to laugh and groan and sing Queen lyrics during proceedings, and to applaud a lot at the end.

What struck me most during La Clique was how little removed this kind of show is from the variety theatre or music halls of the late-Victorian years. Certainly, the knowing queerness of some of its acts gives La Clique an inflection that variety theatre did not possess back in the day of the portly queen. But still, the similarities are striking enough. There’s the same emphasis on physical oddity, the same exhibition of bodily virtuosity, a similar instance of cross-dressing and the encouragement of participation from the crowd. Even the hard sell with the drinks, I gather, is pretty much the same. Then of course there’s the tendency to blue humour: Laura Ormiston Chant surely turns in her grave when La Clique begins of a night.

Seeing La Clique at the London Hippodrome, in the heart of the West End’s Theatreland, emphasised these historical connections for me. As a consequence, the whole night was full of the ghosts of variety-acts, adding an agreeably spectral dimension to its boisterous display.