Boomerang on the Fuselage: The Australian experience of aviation in the Great War by Lance Rainey

Author:Lance Rainey [Rainey, Lance]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: L. C. Rainey
Published: 2015-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22: Ross Smith - The Larrikin Leader

In Australian parlance, a ‘larrikin’ is a variety of exuberant, irreverent rogue. The distinction between a delinquent lout and a loveable reprobate is sometimes extremely grey, and it was certainly the ‘larrikin’ spirit that infused the vicious razor gangs who flourished in Sydney in the couple of decades before the Great War. Yet it also was the prevailing ethos amongst a large proportion of the ordinary soldiers and many of the officers of the AIF. It was an ethos that demanded a ‘fair go’ for every man (whatever the written regulations were), that judged a man by his performance not his title, and that held firm to the belief that men who voluntarily risked their lives were entitled to a bit of fun and a few perks. The attitude exasperated many in authority who dealt with them. One senior Australian officer observed that his men thought the Army was a union shop, that their officers were the foremen and that the normal rules of industrial disputation applied.

But this larrikin army gained an enviable reputation, amongst both friend and enemy, as a formidable fighting force. Field Marshall Haig, the British commander on the Western Front who was hardly known for his tolerance of casual military attitudes, defended the Australians under his command by declaring that they had always done what he had asked them to do in an efficient manner, which, he declared, was the true meaning of discipline. Yet many an officer had been tormented by larrikin tricks, such as a dozen or more Australians spacing themselves out along a street and forcing the officer to return an endless series of salutes as he walked by (while his girlfriend tittered at the joke).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.