Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914 by Simon Sleight

Author:Simon Sleight [Sleight, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781134789979
Google: PgKOCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-11T16:12:37+00:00

Chapter 4

Interstitial Acts: Urban Space and the Larrikin Repertoire

On a winter’s day in the late 1870s, Anglo-Indian writer Henry Cornish alighted from his train carriage and found himself somewhat disappointed with Melbourne. ‘My … conviction’, he stated in his travelogue Under the Southern Cross, ‘is that Melbourne, like some of the gawky, weedy “larrikins” in her streets, has grown too fast in her youth, and has thus run too much to arms and legs. Her frame-work is big enough to last her for the next fifty years. What her constitution now requires is consolidation.’1 Cornish’s neat conflation of Melbourne’s growing pains with those of its youthful inhabitants suggests a relationship between the character of city space and the attributes of city dwellers. Regarded in this light, urban form and group disposition are mutually reinforcing.

Taking Cornish’s passing observations as our cue, Melbourne’s physical structure can indeed be seen to have helped nurture the larrikins in its midst. Within the unfolding pattern of the city’s urban frame lingered gaps, vacant land, interstitial spaces: areas soon colonized by bands of working-class youths themselves located in age somewhere in the cleft between childhood and adult maturity. This chapter revisits these metropolitan settings and contends that larrikinism, a term first popularized in Melbourne in 1870 and taken to refer to ‘young rough[s], cad[s], and general mischief maker[s]’,2 is best understood as a series of ‘performances’ in space. Reading the city as a stage, key aspects of the larrikin’s repertoire – dress, speech and public behaviour – are explored and larrikin activities related to the transitional urban locations in which they occurred. The sexualized undertones of larrikin behaviour are also examined and contextualized alongside contemporary anxieties concerning the apparent precocity of native-born youth. Assessment of the attempted literary reclamation – or perhaps rather, after Cornish, the ‘consolidation’ – of the larrikin rounds out the analysis, with nationalist writers demonstrating their determination to safeguard the reputation of ‘Young Australia’ by presenting a sanitized image of larrikinism for public consumption.

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