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Larrikins: A History
Melissa Bellanta's latest book,
available now from UQP
From the true-blue Crocodile Hunter to the blue humour of Stiffy and Mo, from the Beaconsfield miners to The Sentimental Bloke, Australia has often been said to possess a ‘larrikin streak’.
Today, being a larrikin has positive connotations and we think of it as the key to unlocking the Australian identity: a bloke who refuses to stand on ceremony and is a bit of scally wag. When it first emerged around 1870, however, larrikin was a term of abuse, used to describe teenage, working-class hell-raisers who populated dance halls and cheap theatres. Crucially, the early larrikins were female as well as male.
Larrikins: A History takes a trip through the street-based youth subculture known as larrikinism between 1870 and 1920. Swerving through the streets of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, it offers a glimpse into the lives of Australia’s first larrikins, including bare knuckle-fighting, football-barracking, and knicker-flashing teenage girls. Along the way, it reveals much that is unexpected about the development of Australia’s larrikin streak to present fascinating historical perspectives on hot ‘youth issues’ today, including gang violence, racist riots, and raunch culture among adolescent girls.
Voting for fun
9 AprThe latest issue of M/C is out now, an online journal of media and culture. It looks at voting and citizenship, and has an article by yours truly called ‘Voting for Pleasure, Or, The View From a Victorian Theatre Gallery’.
I wrote the article in response to claims that various forms of voting-for-entertainment represent a coming epoch of direct democracy in Western culture… that old everything-is-democratic-is-good chestnut that still seems to count for so much in media and cultural studies. Actually, voting-for-entertainment isn’t all that new. As I show in the article, popular theatrical audiences regularly experienced the thrill of evicting performers or cheering for the ones they liked in rowdy Victorian theatres. Those forms of de facto voting hardly won them political gains or other freedoms outside theatre galleries. So what makes new media commentators like John Hartley so convinced that current forms of voting-for-fun (like Idol, or online polls) are so emancipatory now?
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