Larrikins, Bush Tales and Other Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  And having found the gloomy gate

  Frank rapped aloud to know his fate

  He louder knocked and louder still

  When the Devil came, pray what’s your will?

  Alas cried the Poet I’ve come to dwell

  With you and share your fate in Hell

  Says Satan that can’t be, I’m sure

  For I detest and hate the poor

  And none shall in my kingdom stand

  Except the grandees of the land.

  But Frank I think you are going astray

  For convicts never come this way

  But soar to Heaven in droves and legions

  A place so called in the upper regions…

  In Hell, Frank finds the overseers, floggers and gaolers of the convict system writhing in perpetual torture for the crimes they committed against poor convicts while alive on earth. Captain Cook, ‘who discovered New South Wales’, is here, along with dukes, mayors and lawyers. They are not alone.

  Here I beheld legions of traitors

  Hangmen gaolers and flagellators

  Commandants, Constables and Spies

  Informers and Overseers likewise

  In flames of brimstone they were toiling

  And lakes of sulphur round them boiling

  Hell did resound with their fierce yelling

  Alas how dismal was their dwelling…

  One unfortunate seems to be suffering special torments so Frank asks:

  Who is that Sir in yonder blaze

  Who on fire and brimstone seems to graze?

  Satan tells him that it is ‘Captain Logan of Moreton Bay’.

  While he witnesses this dreadful scene there is suddenly a great commotion in Hell. Drums are beaten, flags waved:

  And all the inhabitants of Hell

  With one consent rang the great bell

  Which never was heard to sound or ring

  Since Judas sold our Heavenly King

  Drums were beating flags were hoisting

  There never before was such rejoicing

  Dancing singing joy or mirth

  In Heaven above or on the earth

  Straightway to Lucifer I went

  To know what these rejoicings meant…

  Satan is senseless with joy as the chief tormentor of all the convicts in New South Wales—Governor Darling—enters Hell. Satan’s assistants have already chained him and prepared the brimstone in which he will writhe forever. Satisfied to have witnessed this wonderful sight, Frank travels on to ‘that happy place/Where all the woes of mortals cease’. He knocks at the pearly gate and is met by St Peter, who asks him who in heaven he might know. Frank answers by naming bushrangers:

  Well I know Brave Donohue

  Young Troy and Jenkins too

  And many others whom floggers mangled

  And lastly were by Jack Ketch strangled…

  Then,

  Peter, says Jesus, let Frank in

  For he is thoroughly purged from sin

  And although in convict’s habit dressed

  Here he shall be a welcome guest…

  A great celebration is then had by all the hosts in Heaven, ‘Since Frank the Poet has come at last’. The poem ends with the lines:

  Thro’ Heaven’s Concave their rejoicings range

  And hymns of praise to God they sang

  And as they praised his glorious name

  I woke and found ’twas but a dream.

  ‘Make it hours instead of days’

  With a story like this, it is no surprise that Frank the Poet was still remembered into the twentieth century. In 1902, a rural newspaper published a memoir of Frank’s life and times. The historical details are often wrong (Frank never actually met Captain Logan) but the spirit of the story and the respect for Frank’s abilities is clear.

  Francis MacNamara was a man who came out to Botany Bay in the early days for the benefit of his country and the good of himself. He was one of those mixed up in the political intrigues of the ‘Young Ireland Party,’ and for the part he took in such with Smith O’Brien and others he was ‘transported beyond the seas.’ He was well educated, and gifted with a quick perception and ready wit. His aptitude in rhyming gained for him the appellation of ‘Frank the Poet,’ and many stories used to be told by old hands of his smartness in getting out of a difficulty.

  During a time that he was under Captain Logan at Moreton Bay he was frequently in trouble. On one occasion he was called to account for some misdeed, and asked why he should not be imprisoned for fourteen days. He answered promptly—

  ‘Captain Logan, if you plaze,

  Make it hours instead of days.’

  And the Captain did.

  On another occasion he was brought before Logan for inciting the other inmates of his hut to refuse a bullock’s head that was being served to them as rations. Captain Logan, in a severe tone, asked him what he meant by generating a mutinous feeling among his fellows.

  ‘Please, sir. I didn’t,’ said Frank ‘I only advised my mates not to accept it as rations because there was no meat on it.’ ‘Well MacNamara,’ said the Captain, ‘I am determined to check this insubordinate tendency in a way that I hope will be effective. At the same time, I am willing to hear anything you may have to say in defence before passing sentence on you.’

  ‘Sure, Captain,’ said Frank, ‘I know you are just, and merciful as well. Kindly let the head be brought in, and you will see yourself that it is nothing but skin and bone, and ain’t got enough flesh on it to make a feed for one man. I only said we won’t be satisfied with it for our ration.’ The Captain ordered the head to be brought, and when it was placed on the table he turned to Frank and said, ‘There’s the head. Now what about it?’

  Frank advanced to the table, picked up a paper-cutter, and said to the Captain and those with him, ‘Listen, your honours, to the “honey” ring it has,’ and, tapping it with the paper knife, recited in a loud tone the following lines : —

  ‘Oh, bullock, oh, bullock, thou wast brought here,

  After working in a team for many a year,

  Subjected to the lash, foul language and abuse

  And now portioned as food for poor convicts’ use.’

  ‘Get out of my sight, you scoundrel,’ roared Logan, ‘and if you come before me again I’ll send you to the triangle.’ It is needless to say that Frank was quickly out of the room, chuckling to himself at his good luck. Some time after he was assigned to a squatter in New South Wales, and as was his wont, always in hot water. He was at last given a letter to take to the chief constable in the adjoining town.

  Frank suspected the purport of the letter to be a punishment for himself, so he raked his brain in devising a means of escape. Having writing materials, and being an efficient penman, he addressed a couple of envelopes, and, putting them with the one he had received to give the officer, he started. On the outskirts of the town he met a former acquaintance, who was on ‘a ticket of leave,’ and a stranger to the district. Frank had known him elsewhere, and remembered him as a flogger: and on one occasion he had dropped the lash on himself.

  Here was what Frank styled a heaven-sent chance, and it would be a sort of revenge for a past infliction if he succeeded in getting this fellow to deliver the letter. So he sat down and chatted for a while, and pulling out the three envelopes, regretted that they could not have a drink together. If his business was finished, they could; but his master, he said was a Tartar, and it wouldn’t be safe to neglect it. So he would have to deliver the letters first. ‘Perhaps I might be able to help you,’ said the other. ‘Blest if I know,’ answered Frank, ‘it would be all right so long as the cove didn’t find it out.’ ‘Oh, chance it,’ said the other, ‘and we can have another hour together.’

  Frank thought for a while, turning the letters about in his hands, and at last made up his mind to let the other assist him, so handed him the letter addressed to ‘Mr. Snapem, Concordium.’ They went on into town, and Frank, directing the ex-flogger,
turned into a shop. Sneaking on a few minutes after, he heard enough to satisfy him that his surmise was correct, and he left.

  On his return to the station, he was asked by the squatter if he had received any reply to the letter. ‘Oh, yes,’ answered he: ‘a feeling reply, that I am likely to remember.’ While having tea he appeared in such excellent humour that one of his mates asked the cause. ‘Oh, nothing much,’ said Frank, ‘only circumstances to-day enabled me to pay a debt that I have owed for some years: and I am glad about it.’

  Captain of the push

  The newspaper also published another recollection of Frank’s doings, this time in Sydney town with the forerunners of the larrikin ‘pushes’ or gangs who often terrorised the streets later in the nineteenth century: Frank had a great down on a ‘push’ in Sydney known as the ‘Cabbage-Tree Mob’, their symbol being the wearing of a cabbage-tree hat. Well, on one occasion they bailed up poor Frank, and asked him what he had to say that they should not inflict condign punishment on him. ‘Well, boys,’ he said,

  ‘Here’s three cheers for the Cabbage-tree Mob—

  Too lazy to work; too frightened to rob.’

  They made for Frank, but just then came along a policeman known as the ‘Native Dog’; so Frank escaped that time.

  The street gangs of Sydney and Melbourne are almost as old as the cities themselves. In Sydney, the ‘Cabbage-Tree Mob’ was frequently mentioned in negative terms in the local press: ‘There are to be found all round the doors of the Sydney Theatre a sort of loafer known as the Cabbage-Tree Mob. The Cabbage-Tree Mob are always up for a ‘spree’ and some of their pastimes are so rough an order as to deserve to be repaid with bloody coxcombs.’

  Probably not a coherent gang or ‘push’ so much as an occasional assembly of young working-class men, the mob was distinguished by the kind of headgear they favoured, a hat made from cabbage-tree fronds. Whatever their exact nature, the Cabbage-Tree Mob hung around theatres, race grounds and markets and specialised in catcalling and otherwise harassing the respectable middle classes. Some of them were ex-convicts; some were descended from convict stock.

  By the 1870s, groups of this sort were being called ‘larrikins’. Their favoured pastimes were a development of the earlier troublemakers and included disrupting Salvation Army meetings with volleys of rotten vegetables, rocks and the odd dead cat. The larrikins were also noted for dancing with young women friends, events often portrayed by journalists as ‘orgies’. By the 1880s, observers began to speak of larrikin ‘pushes’ or gangs, also sometimes referred to as the ‘talent’. These were usually associated with particular suburbs or areas; in Sydney there were the ‘Haymarket Bummers’, the ‘Rocks push’, the ‘Cow Lane push’ and the ‘Woolloomooloo push’. In Melbourne it was the ‘Fitzroy forties’, the ‘Stephen Street push’ and the surely ironic ‘Flying Angels’, among others. The pushes were mostly male, young and with a strong loyalty ethic, each supporting the others when needed.

  The larrikins revelled in fighting with police and resisting arrest, and there were notable pitched battles between them and large groups of police in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Despite, or because of, their criminality and antisocial behaviour, the crudely colourful larrikins soon became the objects of literary interest. Henry Lawson’s ‘The Captain of the Push’ was an early rendering of the larrikin culture.

  Based loosely on real events, ‘The Captain of the Push’ (also unprintably parodied as ‘The Bastard from the Bush’) begins:

  As the night was falling slowly down on city, town and bush,

  From a slum in Jones’s Alley sloped the Captain of the Push;

  And he scowled towards the North, and he scowled towards the South,

  As he hooked his little finger in the corners of his mouth.

  Then his whistle, loud and shrill, woke the echoes of the ‘Rocks’,

  And a dozen ghouls came sloping round the corners of the blocks.

  The ghouls, called the ‘Gory Bleeders’, ‘spoke the gutter language’ of the slums and brothels and swore fearsomely and fulsomely with every breath. Their ‘captain’ was:

  … bottle-shouldered, pale and thin,

  For he was the beau-ideal of a Sydney larrikin;

  E’en his hat was most suggestive of the city where we live,

  With a gallows-tilt that no one, save a larrikin, can give…

  He wears the larrikin outfit of wide-mouthed trousers, elaborate boots, uncollared shirt and necktie. The gang encounters a stranger in the street, who turns out to be a man from the bush who wants to join the gang. He has read of their exploits in the Weekly Gasbag and, sitting alone in his bush humpy, decides that he

  ‘… longed to share the dangers and the pleasures of the push!

  ‘Gosh! I hate the swells and good ’uns—I could burn ’em in their beds;

  ‘I am with you, if you’ll have me, and I’ll break their blazing heads.’

  The larrikins demand to know if the bushman would match them in perfidy and violence. Would he punish an informer who breaks the code of loyalty?

  ‘Would you lay him out and kick him to a jelly on the ground?’ Would he ‘smash a bleedin’ bobby’, ‘break a swell or Chinkie’ and ‘have a “moll” to keep yer’? To all of which the stranger answers, ‘My kerlonial oath! I would!’ They test him practically by asking him to smash a window. The stranger is sworn in and becomes an exemplary larrikin, if a little over-zealous even for the Gory Bleeders.

  One morning the captain wakes and finds the stranger gone:

  Quickly going through the pockets of his ‘bloomin’ bags,’ he learned

  That the stranger had been through him for the stuff his ‘moll’ had earned;

  And the language that he muttered I should scarcely like to tell.

  (Stars! and notes of exclamation!! blank and dash will do as well).

  The rest of the bleeders soon forget the bloke who briefly joined them and robbed their leader. But the captain ‘Still is laying round in ballast, for the nameless from the bush.’

  Louis Stone’s flawed masterpiece, Jonah, presented a more realistic picture of the Sydney slum lifestyle that produced and nourished the larrikins. Its eponymous hero makes his own fortune by hard work and astute business sense, though forfeits his working-class roots, loses in love and fails as a decent human being in the process.

  Probably taking his lead from this approach, C.J. Dennis began writing the verse that would eventually become the much-loved classics The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and The Moods of Ginger Mick. These were highly romanticised and bore almost no resemblance to the realities of the street, with soft Bill ‘the Bloke’, his love for Doreen and friendship with street rabbit-seller Ginger Mick, and other characters who hung around Melbourne’s ‘Little Lon’. These verse novellas sold in great numbers, making Dennis a wealthy man and establishing the ‘rough diamond’ with a soft centre stereotype of the larrikin, recycled for decades in stage shows and the early Australian cinema. The image lives on still.

  The Prince of Pickpockets

  It is difficult to sift fact from folklore in the life of George Barrington (1755–1804). The Irish-born rogue of uncertain parentage was a colourful man-about-town in early nineteenth-century London, though his early life began in obscurity and crime.

  His story begins with him stabbing a schoolmate and robbing his teacher. The sixteen-year-old ran away and joined a travelling theatre troupe where he gave himself the name George Barrington and learned the pickpocketing business. He then went to London where he affected the wealth and style of a gentleman, his eloquence assuring him of acceptance into even the highest circles. It became something of a social honour to have had one’s pocket picked by the great thief. He notoriously relieved the Russian Count Orlov of a diamond-encrusted silver snuffbox said to be worth 30,000 pounds, an unimaginable sum for most people at the time. Barrington was caught and made to return his booty. Orlov refused to prosecute.

  But the incorrigible Ba
rrington was later arrested on another charge and sentenced to three years’ hard labour. He was described at the time as ‘the genteelest thief ever remembered seen at the Old Bailey’, despite the fact that he lived in Charing Cross, then one of London’s less respectable districts.

  The Prince of Pickpockets was out after serving barely a year of his sentence. After his release he returned to his nefarious trade and was soon arrested again, this time going down for five years. He was freed through the influence of friends in high places on condition that he left the country. He did so briefly, but soon returned and was caught thieving yet again.

  During his last appearance at the Old Bailey, Barrington made a lengthy and elaborate speech in his defence and argued against his hanging. This was quite unnecessary, as his crime was not a capital offence. Without delay the jury pronounced him guilty. Always wanting to have the last word, the eloquent cutpurse replied:

  My Lord,

  I had a few words to say, why sentence of death should not be passed upon me; I had much to say, though I shall say but little on the occasion. Notwithstanding I have the best opinion of your lordship’s candour, and have no wish or pleasure in casting a reflection on any person whatever; but I cannot help observing that it is the strange lot of some persons through life, that with the best wishes, the best endeavours, and the best intentions, they are not able to escape the envenomed tooth of calumny: whatever they say or do is so twisted and perverted from the reality, that they will meet with censures and misfortunes, where perhaps they were entitled to success and praise. The world, my lord, has given me credit for much more abilities than I am conscious of possessing; but the world should also consider that the greatest abilities may be obstructed by the mercenary nature of some unfeeling minds, as to render them entirely useless to the possessor. Where was the generous and powerful man that would come forward and say, ‘You have some abilities which might be of service to yourself and to others, but you have much to struggle with, I feel for your situation, and will place you in a condition to try the sincerity of your intentions; and as long as you act with diligence and fidelity, you shall not want for countenance and protection?’ But, my lord, the die is cast! I am prepared to meet the sentence of the court, with respectful resignation, and the painful lot assigned me, I hope, with becoming resolution.