Melissa Bellanta. Journal of Australian Studies. Volume 34, Issue 4, 2010.
The male larrikin, or street rowdy, is a common figure in late-colonial Australian history. His female counterpart is much harder to find. Rather than presenting us with images of female larrikins, many commentators tell us that the closest equivalent to the male larrikin was the prostitute, or that adolescent girls only participated in the larrikin subculture as ‘donahs’ (meaning ‘moll’ or ‘girlfriend’). These commentators mostly reach this conclusion from reading the Bulletin and the fictional work of its contributors. This over-reliance on the Bulletin is problematic because its images of the larrikin and ‘donah’ in the 1890s were heavily influenced by Cockney vaudeville routines. In this article, I offer alternative evidence to show that there were adolescent Australian girls who acted as larrikins in their own right rather than simply as girlfriends or sexual conveniences to the boys. These girls held prize fights, got drunk on street corners, participated in attacks on police and in rare cases even formed members of pushes—all activities considered to be hallmarks of larrikinism in Australia at the time. I also suggest that these girls’ relationships with each other were more significant to them than their relationships with male larrikins. It is thus time to set aside the image of the ‘donah’ in favour of the brazen larrikin girl among her female friends.
The violence dealt out to women by rough working-class youths known as ‘larrikins’ lends a chill edge to the history of relations between the sexes in late nineteenth-century Australia. It is hard not to feel angry after reading of the cavalier attitude to sexual violence expressed by young hooligan or ‘larrikin’ men. Who could not feel angry after hearing of the youth who shrugged at raping a twelve-year-old girl in 1889, saying ‘I went for her just the same as anyone else would do’? This feeling is even stronger when one hears of pack rapes committed by gangs or ‘pushes’ of male larrikins. Even the less extreme image of the larrikin heckling female pedestrians carries an uncomfortably menacing air.
From these descriptions of gang rape or sexual harassment, one could be forgiven for assuming that male larrikins only fraternised in predatory groups among themselves. Alternatively one could be forgiven for assuming that girls were only included in late nineteenth-century larrikin activities as sex-objects or punching bags. Neither of these assumptions is correct. Young female rowdies were a part of Australia’s late-colonial larrikin subculture, not just as ‘donahs’—another word for ‘moll’, or girlfriend—but as participants in their own right. Aged mostly in their mid-to-late teens, these girls (as I shall call them) both socialised with male larrikins and engaged in larrikin activities of their own. They drank, stayed out late, hiked up their skirts, got into fights, and generally dared each other to act rebelliously.
When their existence has been recognised at all, late-colonial larrikin girls have mostly been judged dismissively by historians. The fact that these girls took part in such an obviously misogynistic scene has even led some to describe them as masochistic ‘drabs’ whose whole self-worth came from male regard. This kind of assessment has been made of girls involved in many different violent street subcultures over the years. Contrary to this, however, female friendship was of key significance to larrikin girls. So was the sense of clannish identity that came with belonging to a larrikin peer group. Rather than accepting the widely-held view that Australian larrikinism was exclusively masculine, it is thus important to recognise the presence of female larrikins as well as the relationships between them. It is also important to note that the classic image of the submissive ‘donah’—an image most notably produced by the waggish paper, the Bulletin—was mostly a product of theatrical fantasy.
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The fact that the larger cities spawned a subculture of unruly or ‘larrikin’ youth, most of them employed in unskilled labour or scavenging from the streets, is now a commonplace of late-colonial Australian history. The term ‘larrikin’ first came into use in Melbourne around 1870 to describe rowdies who hung about the streets, aged anywhere between about twelve and their early twenties. In the considerable commentary on these larrikins, the Sydney-based Bulletin is the source most commonly relied upon. In the 1940s, for example, the lexicographer Sidney Baker provided instances of larrikin slang drawn almost exclusively from poems published in the Bulletin. Manning Clark drew heavily from the Bulletin when he wrote about larrikins in his History of Australia. The numbers of youth studies scholars who have since written about ‘moral panics’ over larrikinism have taken most of their material from the same source.
It is not hard to see why the Bulletin has been in demand among commentators interested in the larrikin subculture. It has long been given a prominence by researchers of this period far exceeding its significance in the day. It has also provided memorable depictions of male larrikins. Who could forget the florid tirades which it issued against a larrikin ‘orgy’ at the harbourside pleasure-ground at Clontarf in 1880? It is similarly hard to forget the larrikin caricatures which regularly appeared in the paper during the 1890s and early 1900s. This is partly because these caricatures were meant to be funny—a marked shift from the panicked jeremiads about larrikins most often featured in the 1880s—and partly because they were so skilfully drawn.
The larrikin caricatures appearing in the Bulletin after 1890 were primarily the work of comic artists Tom Durkin and Ambrose Dyson. Ambrose Dyson in particular published regular cartoons of larrikin characters under the heading ‘In Push Society’ in the late 1890s. He and his brothers Ted and Will Dyson were all interested in drawing or writing about larrikins in this period. So was their friend and colleague Durkin, a Melbourne-based artist renowned for the anti-feminism of his cartoons. It is not surprising, given this, that the larrikin caricatures produced by Durkin and Dyson portrayed the larrikin girl as a ‘donah’ who was willing to put up with anything for her man. The raw-boned unfeminine ‘donah’ in their work was often portrayed in the midst of a pseudo-romantic repartee with her larrikin amour. Either that, or she was shown skiting of the shiner he had given her the previous Saturday night. This donah was also invariably dressed in a large feathered hat and talked in a dialect bearing only a sketchy resemblance to any spoken in Australia in the day:
Poll: There goes May. One of ‘er lamps is blackened!
Liz: Must a-been an acciden’, then. She ain’t got no bloke!
Both the Bulletin‘s cartoons of larrikins’ ‘donahs’ and other work produced by its contributors have strongly influenced historians’ descriptions of girls associated with the late nineteenth-century larrikin subculture. Manning Clark, for one, claimed that they ‘could be recognised by their draggle-feathered hats and their black eyes’—an allusion to both the ‘In Push Society’ images and other Bulletin commentaries. John Rickard similarly claimed that the larrikins’ ‘donah’ was ‘very much an auxiliary’, ‘her role seeming to be dependent on the identity of the push’. James Murray described female larrikins in a still more unflattering way. In Larrikins: 19th Century Outrage (often treated as the unofficial textbook on the topic), he called them ‘larrikins’ drabs’. As he saw it, these young women enjoyed being clobbered by their men and were ‘strangely jealous of other women given such masculine attentions’.
The degree to which the Bulletin‘s larrikin caricatures were based on actual observation of larrikins is an open question. It may well have been the case that Durkin and Dyson went to some pains to base their portrayal of larrikin dress on characters they observed in the streets. It is quite possible, given this, that the feathered hats in their caricatures were actually worn by the better-off among larrikin girls. With their references to larrikin trips to dance halls and harbourside picnic grounds, the paper’s ‘In Push Society’ series also drew on actual instances of outings which had taken place in previous years. Even allowing this, however, the jokes and scripts which framed these images came from Cockney vaudeville routines. Such acts featured crude female figures called ‘donahs’ engaged in laughable dialogue with their loutish boyfriends. They were also doing the rounds of Australian burlesques and vaudeville shows in the 1890s when the Bulletin cartoons were produced.
One of the most obvious sources for the mini-narratives appearing in the Bulletin caricatures was a hit song by London’s celebrated Cockney performer, Gus Elen. Called ‘Never Introduce Your Donah To a Pal’, it introduced the figure of a Cockney fellow and his ‘donah’ for comical purposes. This Cockney donah was highly fickle and promiscuous, constantly running off with a new bloke in an ever-more extravagantly be-feathered hat. Another was ‘The Coster’s Serenade’ by Albert Chevalier (also a famous impersonator of Cockneys in the London music halls), which was cast in faux-romantic style. The protagonist was a street-hawking suitor who sang the praises of his sweetheart in earnest though ungrammatical attempts at courtly speech. Numerous renditions of these other ‘donah’ songs were offered by Australian performers in the 1890s. So too were local versions which substituted larrikin figures for the Cockney and his gal.
A good example of a larrikin act modelled on a Cockney serenade was performed by the London burlesque comedian, E. J. Lonnen, during a tour of Australia in 1892. Lonnen was famous for his mischievous Cockney or Irish routines. One of these was the Cockney boozing-song, ‘’Ave a Glass Along of Me’, which went down a treat with Australian crowds. Also endearing to Australian audiences was Lonnen’s song, ‘I’ve Chucked Up the Push for My Donah’, which was written for him upon arrival in Australia. In this number, he played a larrikin gone soft on a ‘donah wot I met at Chowder Bay’—a gratifying attempt to localise his repertory. Such was the enthusiasm of its reception that versions of ‘I’ve Chucked Up the Push’ were soon being performed by local artistes in Australia and New Zealand and widely parodied in the press.
From the late 1890s, larrikin characters based on stage Cockneys were often to be found in Australian papers and literature. The Bulletin‘s ‘In Push Society’ series was an obvious example. (It was also influenced by the range of music hall and minstrel songs which exaggerated the size and unfemininity of working-class women, whether Cockney or Irish or African-American in origin). A chapter in Banjo Paterson’s An Outback Marriage (1906) drew from similar sources. It was so lacking in originality that it even used the same title as the Bulletin series: ‘In Push Society’. Each of these works provided Gus Elen-esque riffs on the fickleness of larrikins’ ‘donahs’. First published as stand-alone poems in the Bulletin from 1908, C. J. Dennis’ The Songs of the Sentimental Bloke (1915) followed more in the mould of Albert Chevalier’s romantic Cockneys or Lonnen’s ‘I’ve Chucked Up the Push’.
Most people suitably versed in vaudeville comedy at the time would have recognised the just-mentioned works by Bulletin contributors as amusing parodies of theatrical songs. This was especially the case for The Songs of the Sentimental Bloke, given that its very title emphasised its connections to musical theatre. Mostly, however, later generations of readers have failed to get the joke. In particular, numerous historians have approached these turn-of-the-century representations as if they were reflections of actual characters from ‘push society’. They speak now as if female larrikins really were called donahs, and as if the young women in the Bulletin‘s caricatures or in Dennis’ poetry were based transparently on real larrikin girls.
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The word ‘donah’ did not appear with any regularity in the Australian press until after 1892, when Gus Elen’s ‘Never Introduce Your Donah’ and Lonnen’s ‘I’ve Chucked Up the Push’ were appearing on the stage. Admittedly there is an 1878 cartoon for the Melbourne Punch in which a male larrikin is shown promenading with his ‘dona’ [sic]—but this is the only example I am aware of prior to 1892. It thus seems likely that the word only gained broad currency in Australia as a result of the popularity of 1890s Cockney routines. It also seems likely that ‘donah’ was never widely used by larrikins themselves. I may be wrong about this, of course—there is always the possibility that the term was in circulation among them in the 1870s, and that it increased in usage after it hit colonial vaudeville shows in the 1890s. Louis Stone uses the word ‘donah’ in his novel Jonah (1911), for example, a work said to have been based on his observations of street life in the industrial Sydney suburb of Waterloo. While this book is full of on-the-mark period detail, one would still do well to be cynical about the extent to which it was true to life. The figure of Jonah himself, an orphan larrikin turned earnest father and wealthy businessman, offers cause for reserve. Significantly, too, Stone’s knowledge of the variety theatres attended by Waterloo larrikins only extended as far as the Tivoli.
There were plenty of theatrical venues better placed to draw Waterloo custom in the early twentieth century than the Sydney Tivoli. Among these were E. I. Cole’s Haymarket Hippodrome adjoining Belmore Park, Harry Clay’s once-weekly vaudeville shows in Newtown, and the others which Clay ran in the Masonic Hall or the Royal Standard Theatre, both in lower Castlereagh Street. The Tivoli, on the other hand, was in upper Castlereagh Street and pitched itself at crowds coming from the North Shore by ferry or across the Domain from the eastern suburbs. Given that the extant examples of donah songs come almost exclusively from the Tivoli circuit, there is thus reason to doubt the extent of their circulation in larrikin neighbourhoods.
It will hopefully be obvious by now that any account of larrikin girls which relies on turn-of-the-century caricatures and fiction which were themselves heavily dependent on Tivoli larrikin acts and Cockney songs must be taken with a pinch of salt. Many historians’ views on female larrikins are problematic on this count. This is especially the case for those that assure us that these girls were ‘donahs’ who happily endured beatings to keep their bloke. But of course, it is not as if one can dodge all problems of knowledge about female larrikins simply by shifting to non-fictional sources. Since nothing said about them at the time was free from prejudicial attitudes towards poor urban women, one is always going to be dogged by problems of representation when looking for evidence of these girls. Short of giving up altogether, however—or otherwise confining oneself to exploring public attitudes towards female larrikins (a much easier, but also tediously predictable enterprise)—one has to be content with making the best of the historical material to hand. At the very least, this means hunting up a diversity of sources, going beyond the usual quotes from the Bulletin and the work of fiction-writers such as Louis Stone. It is only when one has a broad-enough array of data that one can form a judgement about which of it is the most reliable, and develop strategies to deal with the rest.
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One of the most frustratingly recurrent problems one faces when reading non-fictional sources on female larrikins is the number of times any girl in the company of a larrikinish youth was dubbed a ‘prostitute’. Concerned citizens or police officers were forever speaking of the ‘larrikins and prostitutes’ which contaminated certain neighbourhoods after dark, getting into fights and shocking public decency. Of course, there were male larrikins who went to brothels or were caught on the town with inveterate streetwalkers, although those women tended to be older than the larrikin girl’s mid-teen to early-twenties age-group. There were also younger girls who moved in larrikin circles and earned money from time to time through sex. Usually, however, the phrase ‘larrikins and prostitutes’ was used carelessly by contemporaries. Like a private-school kid now referring to ‘a pack of westies’ or ‘bogans’, it was generally delivered in a flippantly elitist spirit, with little interest in the details at hand. Most often the person speaking did not care whether the girls in question really were prostitutes or not. So far as they were concerned, the girls’ morals were so self-evidently loose that it was all one and the same.
At the very least, all those references to ‘larrikins and prostitutes’ tell us that rowdy young men and women were regularly seen in each other’s company. Once one reads them in this way, avoiding the assumption that the ‘prostitutes’ were only present as sexual conveniences for the boys, then it is startling how much mixed-sex socialising among these people has left a trace in the record. There are also other sources which convey this same impression without resorting to sexualised insults towards the girls. References to male and female rowdies alike being the members of a larrikin ‘tribe’ appear intermittently in the record. They proceed on the assumption that girls could be larrikins in their own right rather than just hired squeezes or donahs to the boys. Happily, too, many provide specific examples of female larrikins and can sometimes be corroborated by other accounts. They are thus not only more desirable but also, in sum, more reliable than vague references to ‘larrikins and prostitutes’ or the donah with two lovely black eyes.
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On 29 April 1882, the Collingwood Mercury reported that four young members ‘of a gang, or “push” as they term themselves’ had been arrested for insulting behaviour. Each of these push members was between fifteen and seventeen years of age, and had been found half-drunk at one in the morning on vacant land in St David’s Street. They were well known in the area for loitering in Smith Street (the main drag of Collingwood), making it ‘impassable to decent folk’. The names of these ‘push’ members were then listed: William Engleton, George Cook, Maria Clements and Jane Madelin.
‘Pushes’ of larrikins which included female members appear more often than one might suppose in the local Collingwood press at the start of the 1880s. A number of complaints were made by locals about the ‘young blackguards of both sexes’ who hung about Smith Street, pushing people they disliked into gutters and ‘loung[ing] around in groups’. The police courts also heard about such individuals as sixteen year-old Elizabeth Pollock, a ‘brazen-faced larrikiness’. She belonged to a gang of ‘thieves and prostitutes’ (it was said) which regularly met up next to Fox’s Hotel. A similar group of so-called ‘male scamps’ and ‘female brothel-keepers’ was brought to court before a crowd of sympathisers in 1880 after a heady and perhaps hunger-fuelled escapade. They had broken into a local butchery one night and run off with strings of German sausages and bacon. Yet another incident involving ‘larrikinesses’ was a fight between two girls named Elizabeth Fry and Ettie Dickens in early 1890. After quarrelling in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, they had decided to settle their differences with a ‘regular set-to’ before hundreds of locals and friends.
Elizabeth Fry and Ettie Dickens were not the only larrikin girls to indulge in pugilism in the late-Victorian years. A few weeks before she was arrested as a participant in that self-described ‘push’ in 1882, fifteen-year-old Maria Clements fought another girl in a Collingwood roadway. Like Fry and Dickens, she and her combatant were surrounded by roaring onlookers; in this case, a group of their male friends. The youths present included John Batty, later to be arrested for his involvement in a gang rape of a Collingwood woman in 1889. Back in 1882, however, Batty and his male friends had tried to stop Clements and her fellow pugilist from being arrested once a couple of police officers arrived. ‘We won’t let our____ go that way; if the bobbies take them they’ll have to take us’, they cried.
Frustratingly, we will never know the word that John Batty and his fellow male larrikins used to describe Maria Clements and her fighting companion. It was evidently something similar to ‘bitches’, which imparted the sense of possessiveness which these youths felt towards female ‘push’ members. This possessiveness is obviously objectionable. It gives us an inkling of the sense of masculine prerogative which ran throughout the larrikin subculture. At the same time, however, it imparts a sense of the clannishness felt among these disreputable teens. For male and female larrikins alike, hanging out with fellow rowdies from one’s neighbourhood imparted a sense of being part of a ‘tribe’. It meant that they stuck up for each other if threatened by outsiders. In spite of the patent differences between male and female experiences of the larrikin scene, aspects of larrikin girls’ motivations were hence the same as the boys’—a desire to feel the togetherness that came with ‘push society’.
Instances of male and female youths banding together to help a friend resist arrest crop up in the sources every now and then. In 1876, for example, two girls called Emma Gould and Alice Lacey were charged for their role in a larrikin assault on Collingwood police. As two officers tried to arrest some of their male companions, these ‘larrikinesses’ gathered the rest of their group together and incited them to pelt the police with stones. Similar cases of young women assisting their male friends to evade arrest (and vice versa) were recorded in Brisbane. Another more spectacular instance of this also took place in Sydney on Eight Hours Day in 1890 at the harbourside pleasure-ground of Chowder Bay.
On the afternoon of 6 October 1890, a ruckus erupted at Chowder Bay. The scene of the fracas was a picnic held by an Irish-Catholic friendly society to raise money for the Maritime Strike and to celebrate Eight Hours Day. Two larrikin groups described in the Sydney Morning Herald as the ‘Woolloomooloo push’ and ‘Gipps Street push’ had descended on this picnic and turned it into a fiesta of blows. They had first got into a fight with each other in the dance pavilion, but then united to fight the police and artillerymen sent to bring them into line. More than forty arrests were made on the scene of the Chowder Bay riot (as it became known), whether for beating police with sticks or hailing them with bottles and stones. At least four of those arrested were young women or adolescent girls. They had been caught forming part of a large mixed-sex group of larrikins which chased police in the process of hauling some of their fellows away.
Intriguingly, three of the female larrikins arrested during the Chowder Bay riot were married women in their early twenties. They had each married the previous year somewhere in the Sydney district, and had chosen spouses of a similar age. This suggests that ‘the social group’ to which these women belonged included both themselves and their young husbands—although of course this is speculation on my part. If this is correct, then it provides us with another intimation of the clannishness felt among groups of urban rowdies. So too does the fact that one often hears of siblings socialising in larrikin circles. Another significant factor here is that larrikins came overwhelmingly from Anglo and Irish backgrounds. Many also expressed a racist animus towards Chinese and other non-white Australians. A shared sense of being white, intensified by kinship and/or neighbourhood connections, helped to breed the ‘tribal’ mentality which was evident among larrikin groups and which crossed gender lines.
The reason we now know about girls such as Elizabeth Pollock is because they were arrested for larrikin behaviour. There were many more girls who were not arrested, however, because the police were far more interested in running male larrikins to ground. In 1882, for example, a ‘mob of male and female roughs’ congregated at the intersection of Stanley and Wellington Streets in Collingwood and held ‘high carnival’ there. Four youths from that mob were rounded up by police and charged with insulting behaviour. The girls were allowed to run away. Much the same thing happened in Carlton in March 1890. Given the extent to which larrikinism was framed as a problem of male violence after the Kelly gang’s exploits and the pack rapes of the 1880s, it is likely that there were a great many cases in which girls involved in larrikin hijinks were allowed to disappear in this way.
The fact that there was plenty of boy-on-girl violence within larrikin networks is another reason why girls’ presence was understated in reportage on the ‘larrikin menace’. The tendency, in other words, was to assume that boy-larrikins’ female associates were their hapless victims rather than fellow push members or adversaries. This is certainly understandable, given that male larrikins did make victims of women on a regular basis. The most obvious cases of this were the gang rapes I have already mentioned. There were also numerous cases in which young men described as larrikins were brought before the courts for beating young women in the streets. In these latter cases, it was assumed that the victims were submissive girlfriends or innocent passers-by. This assumption, however, was sometimes misconceived. An example of this may be found when a Brisbane youth, James Hayes, was charged with the assault of eighteen-year-old Norah Swan and her female companion in June 1885.
The Brisbane youth James Hayes was a young man of the ‘larrikin class’. This, at any rate, was what the magistrate declared when he was brought before the court for bashing Norah Swan and her friend. At the time of his arrest, Hayes was at a pub with another violent youth who lashed out at the police officer concerned. He had prior charges for drunkenness and the like. The court reporter duly wrote up Hayes’ assault of Swan and her friend as another instance of unsuspecting female pedestrians being attacked by a brutal male larrikin. The detail of the incident, however, reveals a more involved state of affairs.
Norah Swan and her associate were both acquaintances of James Hayes. They came upon him in Brisbane’s Albert Street as they walked towards Chiriani’s Circus one Saturday night. James Hayes was with a female friend, Kate Bowden, whom Swan and her companion also knew. The four of them acknowledged each other as they approached, but quickly fell to quarrelling. From what I can make out from the court records, Hayes caused the argument by making fun of the way Swan and her friend were dressed. The pair had tucked up their skirts, aiming for the racy short-skirted look preferred by fast girls of the day. Enraged by this, Swan threw stones at Hayes and his companion, shouting ‘you young buggers!’ At this point, Hayes called her a ‘bloody whore’ and knocked her to the ground. For a few moments, he lingered to kick her in the head and body and deliver a passing blow to her friend. Then he took off, Kate Bowden at his side.
The bashing that James Hayes delivered to Norah Swan is yet another reminder (if we needed one) that male violence towards women was common within larrikin circles. Nonetheless, Swan’s inclination to throw stones at someone who had insulted her is an indication that violence was also a more generalised larrikin phenomenon. It was not just expressed by young men towards women or young men among themselves, but also by young women towards each other and their male acquaintances. The capacity to inflict pain and to bear it without complaint was the source of cachet among these youth, for the girls as well as the boys. This hardly means that we should now deem it acceptable that male larrikins were routinely violent towards female ones, or that it was acceptable for the Bulletin to make jokes about this, implying it was all in good fun. It does mean, however, that we can quit seeing those girls as drabs waiting hopefully for a bashing as proof of their boyfriend’s regard.
In the end, the question of how one views the role of these girls’ within the larrikin subculture depends to a great extent on whose perspective one chooses to view it from. Youths such as John Batty may well have viewed their female companions as their ‘bitches’ (or rather, the late-Victorian equivalent of that term) and used this to cultivate a sense of masculine solidarity among themselves. But those female companions did not see themselves as passive items of property. Nor did they regard themselves as peripheral to their own social scene. If they entered into a relationship or had casual sex with a larrikin youth, that did not make them ‘just a girlfriend’ or ‘just a root’ (if you will pardon the ockerism) so far as they were concerned. And why should we assume that girls always regarded their relationships with boys as the main game? Young larrikin women worked up their own sense of same-sex solidarity. They had their own friendships and animosities and rivalries. For many, the allure of these girl-on-girl relationships was a key impetus for their involvement in the larrikin scene. It helped to compensate both for the casually brutal treatment of the boys and the prejudices directed at them by colonial society.
Prostitutes living and socialising together were a regular sight in late-Victorian districts known for their sex trade. A ‘supportive female subculture’ existed in such places. This allowed women rejected by the rest of society to find companionship, share chores, and manage the physical risks involved. Such young women rented accommodation together and called themselves ‘mates’. Similarly supportive relationships were found among girls sent to industrial schools. It was not unusual to hear of girls escaping from these institutions together and afterwards going out on the town. During the 1870s, too, some of the girls at Biloela Industrial School on Cockatoo Island in Sydney harbour developed extraordinarily close-knit relationships. At least one of these was homosexual.
Cases of intense female friendships among unruly girls may be found among those living at home with their families as well as those in institutions such as Biloela. There are numerous instances of ‘short-skirted girls’ daring each other to engage in risky behaviours. In spite of police reluctance to prosecute them, all-girl duos or trios were still arrested during this period for jostling pedestrians off the footpath or behaving riotously together. In the late 1880s, too, Mary Ann M. from Waterloo in Sydney formed a close attachment to another girl her age. She and this friend, Nell D., had gone on a spree of sorts when they were twelve years of age. The two girls had stayed away from their homes several nights in a row. (This was a fairly common event, if the number of parents seeking the arrest of their daughters who had absconded with female friends is anything to go by). During this time, M. and D. had had sex with a couple of youths, enacting a sense of racy sisterhood together. The following year, in February 1887, Mary M. was discovered by a constable in bed with a young fireman at the Redfern fire station. She told him she had had sex ‘of my own free will’ with three of the young firemen there. She also told him she had planned to go straight to Nell D.’s house when she was done that night.
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Over the years, street subcultures prominently involving young men have been celebrated by Left-leaning commentators as a form of resistance to the dominant social order. This was certainly how the punks were presented by neo-Marxist scholars back in 1970s Britain. Ditto the mods and the teddy boys in their day. Typically, the scholars championing these delinquent boys have been male and have paid little attention to their female associates. Australian commentators have similarly talked up the anti-authoritarianism or anti-‘wowserism’ of male larrikins in the late-colonial years.
If a rejection of authority or respectability is to be one’s yardstick for judging larrikin culture, however, then surely many of its female participants scored higher than the boys. What about the female inmate of Sydney’s Shaftesbury Reformatory who boasted that she could ‘fight with any man’ in 1891, for example—surely she departed far more flagrantly from social expectations than a boy challenging a man to a fight? Not only that: few youths could have delivered a more patent ‘up you’ to respectable values than that delivered by the Biloela girls who threw off their dresses and ran semi-nude during a riot in the early 1870s. They ran bare-breasted onto a beach and threw stones at a hooting ship of sailors, damning their ogling and cheers.
It is perhaps not all that surprising that the rebelliousness of female larrikins has been glossed over by many an historian or Australiana enthusiast in past years. The works of Manning Clark, James Murray and the like were completed in the 1960s or early 1970s, before most of Australia’s feminist histories had appeared. What is surprising, however, is the fact that it has been so largely ignored by feminists writing about the late nineteenth century. This is perhaps because girls’ participation in the violent larrikin subculture is politically unpalatable. As sociologist Angela McRobbie has said of similar subcultures in Britain, one does not go looking to macho street scenes for sources of ‘feminist excitement’. It is also, however, because Australian feminist historians of this period have long been preoccupied with the ‘politics of respectability’. This is not uniformly the case. Witness, for example, the fine work on prostitution towards the turn of the century, of which Raelene Frances’ Selling Sex is the most recent (and compulsively readable) ex ample. Nonetheless, we still know comparatively little about the politics of unrespectability in the late-colonial era. The material presented here is an attempt to show how rich this topic might be as a topic of future research. It is also, finally, an attempt to challenge the authority of accounts of ‘larrikins’ donahs’ drawn from the Bulletin, pointing out the extent to which that paper based its accounts on music-hall songs and sexist vaudeville comedy.