sympathy for the genre - C+
Gee, thanks, Miss! To suggest a simile, I feel like a fish savaged by a bicycle!
But backslang and Oz... hhm, I await the paper with interest (online I hope), perhaps with the title The Meta-language of London and Melbourne?
In deference to those whose specialist area this might be, I would still like to suggest that Robert Hughes' book gives a fairer picture of the real roots of Australian life and therefore language (full details at foot of this message). He deals with the forcible transportation of convicts on which the initial colonies were founded, before the kind of philanthropically-minded assisted emigration got started which J mentions.
The seeds of Australian transportation were sown in the fertile ground of rapid social upheaval in Britain, with three factors prominent. Firstly America, until then a repository of England’s unwilling exports at the rate of 40,000 people a year, ceased to be available from the time of the revolution (thus a by-product of the American revolution became the founding of Australia!). Secondly between 1801 and 1840 the population of England virtually doubled – an unmanageable explosion against a background of labour displacement and agricultural disasters. Workers “were pincered between falling wages and rising prices… runaway unemployment and the inexorable spread of enclosure” of common grazing lands (Robert Hughes). Thirdly, England had no penitentiary system (William Penn’s ideas took some time to trickle back to the brutal mother country), and her creaking and often arbitrary system of ‘justice’ was threatening to collapse under the weight of these social pressures. A brief enumeration of transported numbers, decade by decade, gives this picture:
1787-1810 11,800 (men and women)
1811-1820 164,00
1821-1830 32,800
1831-1840 51,200 (1840 ended transportation to NSW, with the last transport ship to Western Australia arriving in January 1868)
It is notable that the decade of most vigorous recourse to transportation fell exactly when England’s population was rising at the most rapid rate.
“The stereotype insists that the human fodder of transportation sprang from the root of British decency, the innocent starving yeomen in the British village” (Hughes). The actual truth was otherwise, showing the majority of the transportees were town dwellers.
LL Robson’s statistical analysis in his survey of 1965 examined a random sample of 1 in 20 names in the public record office in London, finding the following categories of crime amongst those transported:
34% larceny
15% burglary
13% stealing domestic fowl etc
6% stealing clothing
3% offences against the person
2% coining or counterfeiting
1.5% treason, conspiracy, union organization etc (includes Ch-yartists?)
70% were tried in England, mainly in 6 county assizes: Lancashire (aye, there was trouble at t’mill), Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Surrey, Gloucestershire and Kent – these areas were home to 4 in 10 transportees. 20% of transportees came from Ireland, mostly tried in Dublin. It would therefore seem more likely that the single most dominant linguistic influence might come from the Irish contingent, rather than back-slanging Cockneys.
However, there is an urban slang that definitely did get exported. 60% of the English transportees had previous criminal convictions. Hughes suggests that “although we cannot speak of a criminal class with the same confidence as early Victorians did, there certainly was a subculture of crime in the British Isles… (which) expressed itself in common interests, cant language, specialization…” Some of the specialised trade terms he mentions (quoting Henry Mayhew’s contemporary reports) are as follows:
‘Snoozers’ Sleepers at stations decamping with others’ luggage
‘Sawney-hunters’ Purloiners of bacon from shop windows
‘Dead Lurkers’ Stealers of coats and umbrellas from passages at dusk
‘Skinners’ Women who enticed sailors and children to go with them and then stripped them of their clothes
‘Kitten Hunters’ Stealers of pewter pots left drying on railings
‘Bulker’ Runner of interference for a sneak thief
‘Pradnapper’ Horse thief
‘Buffer’ Dog-killer who sold their pelts to glovers
Other wonderful phrases reported include ‘rum daddles’ for expert pickpocket hands, ‘buzz-gloaks’ for a pickpocket, a ‘fam lay’ for palming of a stolen ring, and the squire of the tribe whose ‘means are two pops and a galloper’ – a mounted highwayman with two pistols!
I have no information on whether this language survived in any shape or form in Australian life; my preconception would be that it would be consciously rejected by the second generation, the so-called ‘Currency’ or native-born white Australians.
In the latter half of the 19th century there were of course massive and very rapid changes in Australian population. With colonies established on every seaboard, the gold rush of the 1850s drew in a new influx of people from all over the world. The 1871 census showed the following demographic changes over the preceding 20 years:
New South Wales 197,000 - 500,000
Victoria 77,000 - 730,000
South Australia 67,000 - 189,000
Queensland 30,000 - 122,000
Western Australia 6,000 - 25,000
- so maybe the cant elements of language would have been simply swamped by dilution as well. I would be interested to hear of any known Oz etymology deriving from cant sources – anyone care to shed some light or point to where to LIU?
To conclude, I would heartily recommend Hughes’ remarkable volume, wherever in the world you live or whatever your interests. It is a powerful story of a unique episode in human affairs. The facts and figures I have abstracted here do no trace of justice to the tale he weaves, with great insight and humour. The Washington Post describes it as “popular history in the best sense… commanding prose” and the Australian Sunday Telegraph suggests it is “becoming the standard opus on the convict years”. Enjoy.
Title: The Fatal Shore
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Pan Paperbacks (Macmillan General Books)
Publication: 1988
ISBN: 0 330 29892 5
