Abstract
On a Saturday night in 1887, 13-year-old Mary Ann M., a resident of the inner-industrial Sydney district of Waterloo, paid a visit to Paddy’s Market. After winding past the sideshows and colourful stalls, the sound of bands and the calls of vendors, she ended up talking with a group of ‘larrikin’ youths in the streets outside. ‘Larrikin’ was a colloquialism used throughout colonial Australasia in this period, most often in Sydney and Melbourne. It described participants in an urban youth subculture based around loose-knit street gangs known as ‘larrikin pushes’ or ‘mobs’. Composed of young people of both sexes aged between their early teens and early 20s, the larrikin subculture was characterized by a hectic enjoyment of popular entertainments, street-smart dress, burlesque humour, a love of pugilism and clashes with police. It was also characterized by sexual activity, including group acts of male sexual violence towards women.1
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Notes
Melissa Bellanta, Larrikins: A History (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012).
Judith Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990), 55–56;
David Walker, ‘Youth on Trial: The Mount Rennie Case’, Labour History, no. 50 (1986), 27–41; Bellanta, Larrikins, 86–105;
Juliet Peers, ‘The Tribe of Mary Jane Hicks: Imaging Women through the Mount Rennie Rape Case 1886’, Australian Cultural History, vol. 12 (1993), 127–44.
James Murray, Larrikins: 19th Century Outrage (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1973), 114.
Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, ‘Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration’, in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 177.
Anne Campbell, The Girls in the Gang: A Report From New York City (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991 [originally 1986]);
Frederic Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013 [originally 1927]), 221.
See also the discussion of these works in Susan A. Batchelor, ‘Beyond Dichotomy: Towards an Explanation of Young Women’s Involvement in Violent Street Gangs’, in Barry Goldson (ed.), Youth in Crisis? ‘Gangs’, Territoriality and Violence (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 111.
Ibid.; Jody Miller, One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001);
Karen Joe-Laidler and Geoffrey Hunt, ‘Accomplishing Femininity Among the Girls in the Gang’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 41, no. 4 (2001), 656–78.
Melissa Bellanta, ‘The Larrikin Girl’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 34, no. 4 (2010), 499–512.
Chris Brickell, ‘Sensation and the Making of New Zealand Adolescence’, Journal of Social History, vol. 47, no. 4 (2014), 994–1020.
Andrew Davies, ‘Street Gangs and Late Victorian Society’, in Goldson, Youth in Crisis?, 38–54; Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, 1875–1945 (London: Pimlico, 2008), 33–48.
Kennell Jackson, ‘Travelling While Black’, in Harry Elam Jr and Kennell Jackson (eds), Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1–42.
Veronica Kelly, ‘A Complementary Economy: National Markets and International Product in Early Australian Theatre Managements’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1 (2005), 77–95.
Bruce Moore, Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 97–8.
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 89–96;
John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830s–1996 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 11–37.
Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 115–20, 147–49; Bellanta, Larrikins, 19.
Melissa Bellanta, ‘Poor Urban Youth and Popular Theatricals in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia’, in Victor Emeljanow and Gillian Arrighi (eds), A World of Popular Entertainments (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), 233–43; Sleight, Young People, 147–48; Bellanta, Larrikins, 69–70.
Bellanta, Larrikins, 1–30; Melissa Bellanta and Simon Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin: Street Style in Late-Colonial Australia’, Cultural and Social History, vol. 11, no. 2 (2014), 263–83.
Manning Clark, A History of Australia, vol. 4 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 361.
For analogous discussions of female workers’ access to popular entertainments, see Catriona M. Parratt, ‘Little Means or Time: Working-Class Women and Leisure in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England’, International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 15, no. 2 (1998), 22–53;
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 34–55, 143–44.
On the earnings of Australian domestic servants and factory workers, see Beverly Kingston, My Wife My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia (Melbourne: Nelson, 1975), 29–73.
Alana Piper, ‘In Bad Company: Female Criminal Subcultures in Melbourne and Brisbane, 1860–1920’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 2013), 140.
John Stuart James, The Vagabond Papers, ed. Michael Cannon (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), 29–30.
Peter Bailey, ‘Custom, Capital and Culture in the Victorian Music Hall’, in Robert Storch, (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 196.
Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176.
Clay Djubal, ‘What Oh Tonight: The Methodology Factor and Pre-1930s Variety Theatre’, vol. 2 (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 2005), 270.
See for example Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52;
Jacqueline Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (London: Macmillan, 1975), 97–104; Bailey, Popular Culture, 101–27.
Andrew Davies, ‘“These Viragoes are No Less Cruel than the Lads”: Young Women, Gangs and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 29, no. 1 (1999), 72–88.
Vanessa Toulmin, A Fair Fight: An Illustrated Review of Boxing on British Fairgrounds (Oldham: World’s Fair, 1999), 27–44.
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Bellanta, M. (2016). Leery Sue Goes to the Show: Popular Performance, Sexuality and the Disorderly Girl. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_14
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