The Feel of a Word: cabbagers, larrikins and bodgies
Whoever thought the history of gangs in Australia would begin with a hat! That is to say, the cabbage-tree hat, commonly worn in the early days of the colony at Sydney Cove and still popular until the end of the century. Both townies and bushies needed protection from the fierce Australian sun and the hat, made from the leaves of the common cabbage tree palm, provided this.
To make the hat the young spears of the palm tree were needed but since the tree was plentiful this was an easily available source material. The spears were boiled, then spread out into their natural palm shape, bleached and dried. They were then cut into long, narrow strips, the width of the strip depending on the quality of the hat desired. Narrow strips gave you a finely-woven hat; wide strips gave you a cheaper large broad-brim hat.
The strips were then plaited into bands which were sewn together. The hat maker started at the centre of the top, sewing the bands together in gradually widening circles. The sides were made by tightening the sewing, and the broad brim by relaxing the sewing. A black velvet hat ribbon was the most popular.
In the early days convicts and settlers alike wore the hats. Townies wore the smart narrow-band hats and bushies wore the big broad-brim ones, tied under their chins so that they would not come off as they rode on horseback. There is a description of the colonial stockman:
We picture them as they rode, bewhiskered and bearded, all in their cabbage tree hats, blue Crimean shirts and tight-fitting moleskin trousers, …
Kings in Grass Castles Mary Durack 1959.
What happened next was that this hat was adopted as part of the ‘uniform’ of a group of young men who formed the cabbage tree mob. These cabbagers or cabbageites were not criminals but social misfits who found a collective strength in hanging out together. They were anti-authority, anti-gentility, and anti-the-well-to-do, and formed the habit of gathering outside Sydney’s theatre so that they could heckle the patrons who had the taste for and could afford such up-market entertainment.
They were contemptuous of new chums, especially of those with pretentious manners that they could mock, and were the forerunners of the larrikins who emerged in the 1860s. One suggestion is that they were the sons of bush workers who had come to town bent on fun dressed in their best bright shirts, tight trousers with a sash round the waist, and their cabbage tree hat. They were all currency lads, born and bred in Australia and scornful of those who were not.
For the larrikins who followed them clothes were also important.:
They are generally known by their peculiar style of dress, viz., the broad-brimmed, low-crowned felt hat, the coat dotted with buttons in every conceivable spot, the tight-fitting bell-bottomed trousers, and the heels of the boots or shoes, which are disproportionately small, being placed almost under the instep, while the uppers are usually studded with brass eyelet-holes.
1890 H.A White Crime & Criminals.
The larrikins also were on the fringe of the criminal underworld but not part of it. Louis Stone in Jonah comments that the members of a push were ‘all young – from eighteen to twenty-five – for the larrikin never grows old’. By twenty-five they had either left the gang, got married, got a job and become respectable, or they had become hardened criminals.
The word larrikin comes from British dialect and referred to a young man looking for a bit of fun and mischief. Out for a lark. Australian larrikins took idle mischief to a degree of outrageousness that meant they were hated and feared by most respectable citizens. The culture of the group was a macho one with an emphasis on proving manhood in fights which they often initiated by insulting or molesting passers-by. This introduced a degree of violence to the anti-authority and anti-refinement attitude inherited from the cabbage tree mob.
The larrikins, like the cabbagers, preferred to hang out together although the mob now became a push. This sense of push goes back to the convict slang recorded by James Hardy Vaux. His dictionary of the Flash Language has the following entry:
A crowd or concourse of people, either in the streets, or at any public place of amusement, &c., when any particular scene of crowding is alluded to, they say, the push, as the push, at the spell doors [the theatre]; the push at the stooping-match, &c. [the exhibition of one or more persons at the pillory].
A push could be identified by geography, as in the Rocks push, the Glebe push, and the different pushes often clashed. Loyalty to your push was absolutely required.
Still later, from the 1940s to the 1970s, there was the Sydney Push, a loose alliance of students, academics, journalists, musicians, lawyers, workers and criminals who gathered in a favourite pub in the Rocks, united by a left-wing libertarianism.
In contrast to the earlier mob the larrikins were definitely urban, the sons of the poorer people of the city with a sense of grievance. In Sydney they were linked with the Rocks which since early settlement had developed into a lawless part of the city. In Melbourne they were to be found in the poorer suburbs of the inner city — Prahran, Coburg, Collingwood, Northcote, etc. — and their style was captured by C.J.Dennis, notably in The Sentimental Bloke.
Larrikins survived into the first half of the 1900s. The next group to take over developed in the 1950s. They are introduced with a description of their attire:
The bizarre uniform of the ‘bodgey’ – belted velvet cord jacket, bright blue sports shirt without a tie, brown trousers narrowed at the ankle, shaggy Cornel Wilde haircut.
Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) 1950
Bodgie comes from bodger a British dialect word for a clumsy, unskilful worker, and then for something fake or worthless. In the Australian way the –er ending has been removed and the –ie ending added. The reason for applying it to this new male adolescent apparition is that these youths attempted to imitate American fashions and slang, and were, in a sense, fake Americans. The bodgies seem to have adopted the label happily enough. The women of the group who had been clinahs in the larrikin days, were widgies in the bodgie era. No one is quite sure how widgie was derived. It could have just been made up to match bodgie, or it could have been intentionally a blend of woman and bodgie. They also had their particular dress style:
Constable Waldon said: ‘A widgie, as she is known to me, is generally dressed in a very tight blouse, mostly without sleeves, and generally with a deep, plunging front. The blouse closely conforms to the lines of the body. In addition, she usually has a form-fitting skirt, which is very tight, especially around the knees. The skirt flares out a little below the knees and generally has a split either at the side or at the rear to enable her to walk. A widgie wears a short-cropped haircut.’
The judge in the court in 1955 congratulated the Constable on the clarity of his description.
Fashions in the bodgie world changed faster than in previous gangs, as William Dick relates in his account of his bodgie experiences, A Bunch of Ratbags (1965):
The clothing trend was becoming Americanised now. We all wore two-tone black-and-white full-drape Las Vegas jackets. They had black sleeves and back, with the fronts of the jackets panelled with off-white and the two jetted pockets trimmed with an inch of banding. Man, they were real cool. You could buy them with a zipper up the front or three leather buttons. The best one was the leather buttons, they looked real jazzy. The big padded shoulders made us look wider and tougher. We wore black shirts with a white T-shirt showing from underneath the collar where the top button was open, and a pair of black-pegged fourteen inch pants. Our shoes were generally made with one-inch crepe soles, the thickest you could buy. … We all wore Tony Curtis haircuts, .. If you had a square neck-trim with your hair more than an inch thick at the back and combed into a duck’s tail, man, you were the most! … We also had sideboards now, too. … By Jeez, they made you look rugged and tough…
It seems that bodgie style depended on who was the latest leading American actor, so they moved from Cornel Wilde to Tony Curtis. Latter on the style had changed again:
The bodgie style had changed from the jeans and so on to the new uniform of everything Junior Navy in colour – pants, shirts and socks. Cardigans were still the re-bob style. We now wore one-button full-drape patch-pocket sports coats, but only the very light colours such as off-white, oatmeal, light-blue or powder blue, with black shoes, suede or leather.
Still later the bodgies encountered Elvis Presley and rock music, and they morphed into rockers.
The larrikin spirit had something of a revival in the 1980s with Bob Hawke being described as a quintessential larrikin. His remark after Australia won the America’s Cup – ‘Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum’ -- is regarded as anti-authoritarianism translated into good-humoured irreverence.
Larrikinism had its place in the burgeoning world of the 80s entrepreneurs who were thought to display independence, initiative, lack of respect for outmoded ways of thinking and government red tape, often blowing off tired convention with good humour.
But the re-imagined larrikin has no place in today’s society, I think. His bold and energetic plans would be described as the work of a cowboy. His independence would be regarded as anti-social. He would be identified as ‘not a team player’.
His colourful language would be castigated as not appropriate, possibly offensive to someone, and totally unacceptable.
In the 1990s we had the emergence of what were called youth gangs or street gangs. These are groups of adolescent males who hang out together for solidarity and in some instances security against racism. Some gangs were identified as ethnic but others were based on shared enthusiasms such as for heavy metal music. Initially they may have thought of modelling themselves along the lines of the LA colour gangs of the 1970s, in particular the Bloods and the Crips who wore red and blue respectively, but mostly their shared backgrounds or interests dictated their dress code. They were not averse to random mischief and occasionally fought each other, usually with knives, but they were not criminal in intent, and thus not like the bikie gangs. Doonside and Blacktown and western Sydney generally were likely to be the haunts of these street gangs so they were now suburban rather than inner city. Other cities followed a similar pattern. Just as the larrikins and the bodgies developed a darker side, there is an element in these youth gangs that is escalating the criminality and violence.
Somehow the cabbagers, larrikins and bodgies seem more attractive as they recede into the past. The youth gangs of today have yet to gain the patina of nostalgia.