Girt Nation: The Unauthorised History of Australia Volume 3

By David Hunt

David Hunt tramples the tall poppies of the past in charting Australia's transformation from aspiration to nation - an epic tale of charlatans and costermongers, of bush bards and bushier beards, of workers and women who weren't going to take it anymore.

Girt Nation introduces Alfred Deakin, the Liberal necromancer whose dead advisors made Australia a better place to live, and Banjo Paterson, the jihadist who called on God and the Prophet to drive the Australian infidels from the Sudan 'like sand before the gale'. And meet Catherine Helen Spence, the feminist polymath who envisaged a utopian future of free contraceptives, easy divorce and immigration restrictions to prevent the 'Chinese coming to destroy all we have struggled for!'

Thrill as Jandamarra leads the Bunuba against Western Australia, and Valentine Keating leads the Crutchy Push, an all-amputee street gang, against the conventionally limbed. Gasp as Essendon Football Club trainer Carl von Ledebur injects his charges with crushed dog and goat testicles. Weep as Scott Morrison's communist great-great-aunt Mary Gilmore holds a hose in New Australia. And marvel at how Labor, a political party that spent a quarter of a century infighting over how to spell its own name, ever rose to power.

'Makes you wish David Hunt had been your history teacher. Laugh-out-loud funny and you'll actually learn something.' —Mark Humphries

'An entertaining and instructive historical romp through the formative period of Australian nation-making with a colourful cast of rhymesters, revolutionaries, rebels, racists, reprobates and rabbits.' —Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, The Australian National University

'Once again, David Hunt uses his sharpened wit to chisel away at misconceptions from Australian history leaving us with the cold, hard truth of how our nation came to be.' —Osher Günsberg

'Australian history told intelligently, but with more humour than ever before … Girt Nation is fabulous storytelling, putting meat on the bones of the national story.' —The Weekend Australian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781743822043

David Hunt

David Hunt is an unusually tall and handsome man who likes writing his own bios for all the books he has written. David is the author of Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, which won the 2014 Indie Award for non-fiction and was shortlisted in both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and Australian Book Industry Awards. True Girt, the sequel, was published in 2016, as was a book for children, The Nose Pixies. David has a birthmark that looks like Tasmania, only smaller and not as far south.

Book preview

Introduction

… a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation.

Edmund ‘Toby Tosspot’ Barton, 1897

AUSTRALIA.

How could one word mean so much, yet so little? It might one day be a nation, but who would be its people? Would its bounds encompass the lands of the penniless sand-dwellers to the west, or the atlas-makers’ afterthought on the wrong side of Bass Strait? Could the sturdy yeomen of the south, who’d never felt the leg iron’s chafe, reconcile themselves with the northern slavers? And how might the citizens of its two great cities join as one when they couldn’t even agree on a football code? These disparate peoples shared a continent, but could they share a future?

There were green and gold shoots of possibility. Yes, there were Tasmanians, South Australians, Victorians, Queenslanders, Western Australians and New South Welshmen – and they all considered themselves British – but they also called themselves and each other Australian.¹ There were differences, but also shared values. They believed in democracy (for men), a fair go (for white men) and housework (for women of all colours). They were committed to a free press, trial by jury and, for the most part, freedom of religion. They trusted in commerce, progress and the queen. And most of all, they shared the bond of losing money betting on ridiculously dressed shortarses engaging in S&M with defenceless animals.

The Melbourne Cup was not so much the race that stopped the nation, as the race that started it. Visiting American writer Mark Twain called Melbourne Cup Day ‘the Australasian National Day’, with no single event in the world, even the Fourth of July in the United States, able to match its fervour:

[The] race ground is the Mecca of Australasia. On the great annual day of sacrifice … business is suspended over a stretch of land and sea as wide as from New York to San Francisco, and deeper than from the northern lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; and every man and woman, of high degree or low, who can afford the expense, put away their other duties and come. They begin to swarm in by ship and rail a fortnight before the day, and they swarm thicker and thicker day after day … They come a hundred thousand strong …²

Horse racing gave Australians a common sport. More surprisingly, it gave them art, birthing ‘a national school of Australian poetry’. Why write about an old Greek pot or some dead Asian guy’s pleasure palace when you could dash off a few lines about a jockey being trampled to death in the sixth at Caulfield? It didn’t matter whether the poem rhymed or scanned – readers would love it as long as it had a horse in it. The cannier Australian poets didn’t just write about horses, they built their identities around them. ‘The Breaker’ wrote as a horse handler, while ‘The Banjo’ went one better and wrote as a horse.

Horses weren’t just found at the track, but on farms and pastoral runs, and in the untamed expanses of the Australian bush. There were so many wild and remote horsey settings for a poet to choose from – and so poems about racehorses evolved into poems about bush horses and the men who tamed and rode them.

Australian artists, realising the poets were onto a sure thing, turned their easels bushwards. They abandoned portraits of consumptive girls fondling spaniels for paintings of muscular men fondling sheep, bristling with vitality and facial hair.³ Landscapes featuring haystacks and flowering meadows were out – slab-huts and gum trees were in. The Bulletin, a cynical Sydney paper, remade itself as ‘The Bushman’s Bible’, somehow managing to be both racy and country, like the Picture and People, but with more bush.

Australia was the most urbanised place on earth in the 1880s.⁴ More than half the continent’s colonisers lived in cities and large towns, yet when an Australian man looked in the mirror – whether he was short or tall, old or young, from country or from town – a tough, honest, hard-working son of the land stared back at him.

This was the power of the bush legend – the power to make a mild-mannered Sydney accountant who owned an Akubra think he was the Man from Snowy River. Nationalists and Labor, the new workers’ party, latched onto the bush legend like blowflies to a jumbuck’s jacksy, hoping that a little of its blokey matiness would rub off.⁵ Labor, through some weird political alchemy, transformed the mateship of bushmen into the solidarity of workers. The nationalists helped make the bush identity an Australian one.

Australia now had Australians, but something was missing. The answer was un-Australians. To build a nation, you need to know not only who you are, but who you are not. Who would these un-Australians be?

Larrikins were un-Australian, with their song and dance routines, vegetable-themed double entendres and casual approach to violence. Actually, scratch that – although nobody liked a larrikin (including other larrikins), those things all seemed pretty Australian.⁶

Women looked promising. Most of them rode side-saddle and you couldn’t chase a mob of brumbies down a mountain doing that.⁷ They were also deficient in the sheep-fondling department. Women had, for the most part, been successfully corralled in the kitchen, laundry and bedroom, and were used to being looked down on. They would do.

It then dawned on Australian men that without Australian women there would be no Australian boys who would become Australian men. And women were increasingly breaking out of the domestic sphere that imprisoned them. They were popping up in all sorts of unexpected places and demanding all sorts of unexpected rights. Australians would have to find an easier target.

What about the natives? It would be tricky to argue that a native of Australia was not Australian – though, given time, some compelling arguments would surely be found. But how could Australians unite against a people who were hiding in reserves and missions? Un-Australians needed to be visible to reinforce feelings of Australianness. And the natives weren’t going to be around for much longer anyway – it would be harder to feel Australian if all the un-Australians were dead. A few people even argued that it didn’t seem fair to exclude the natives from Project Australia, as we’d ‘taken their country from them’.

Hang on a minute … what if some people took our country from us? Surely, that would be un-Australian. And so, Australians turned their eyes north. To China.

The Chinese wanted to invade Australia to take jobs from Australian men and give opium to Australian women. They wanted to infect Australians with leprosy and sell them un-Australian vegetables. And it wasn’t just the Chinese (although they were the worst). It was all the other yellow races – and the black and brown ones too! If Australians wanted to keep being Australians, then they needed to be white Australians.

The red blood that ran through the blue veins of white Australians would bind the disparate colonies into a nation: itself bound to the red, blue and white of the Union Jack. To keep that nation pure, it would be necessary to keep coloured folk out. It was time to raise the drawbridge of Fortress Australia. Thankfully, its moat was already well stocked with sharks and crocodiles.

There were, of course, things other than racehorses, racism and rugged bearded bushmen that bound the people of Britain’s six southern colonies together. There were concerns about all the French and Germans bobbing around the Pacific. There were trains, wars, international expos, droughts, floods, depressions, plagues of rabbits and plagues of Nellie Melba farewell tours. But most of all, there was the simple calculus of geography and a desire to show Mother Britain that her children had grown up, although they still wanted to return home every second weekend with a load of dirty washing.

The people of the Australian colonies achieved great things during their quest to become Australian. They transformed democracy, at home and abroad; they revolutionised women’s and workers’ rights; they introduced child and adult education reforms that were the envy of the world; they oversaw a second agricultural revolution; they achieved the seemingly impossible in simultaneously increasing jollity levels in both swagmen and jumbucks; they ushered in new freezing and food-preservation technologies and gave man wings; they invented the crouch start and beat the Poms at every sport; they attained the highest standard of living and GDP per capita on the globe; they ate more meat and drank more tea than anyone; and they reduced the incidence of harmful alcohol consumption and even more harmful masturbation.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Let us return to a simpler age, to an unassuming house in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. A six-year-old girl sings nursery rhymes in its tidy garden, her father anxiously pacing a narrow hall, his eyes on the door that is closed to him. If he could but open it and step across the threshold, he would see his wife on their bed, sheets spotted with blood, the midwife in attendance. He knew this child would be their last. His wife’s cries quieten. A new voice is heard. A voice that will unite a people. A voice that will harness the power of a club of sexist, racist insurance salesmen to transform Australia from an aspiration into a nation. The voice of Alfred Deakin.

1 Consideration was also given to calling New Zealanders Australian, but thankfully common sense prevailed.

2 Victoria remains the only place on earth to hold a public holiday for a horse race.

3 Both the men and the sheep.

4 If you didn’t count First Nations people – which was surprisingly easy in a land whose Constitution would soon provide, ‘In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives should not be counted.’

5 Jumbuck is an Australian word for a male sheep. It is believed to derive from junbuc, which Australian poet Charles Harpur claims was an Aboriginal word for a ‘shag-haired species of Kangaroo particular to mountain copses’, or from the Aboriginal pidgin for ‘jump up’, which is what a sheep does when you try to spear it.

6 These sacred larrikin traditions have been handed down through the generations by their custodians – hosts of The Footy Show.

7 Brumby is an Australian word for a wild horse. It is believed to derive from a lost Aboriginal word, or from Sergeant James Brumby, who left his horses to run wild when he was posted to Tasmania.

1

The PM, the Poet and the Push

I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be.

Milan Kundera, The Joke, 1967

OF PROPHECY AND COSTERMONGERY

ALFRED DEAKIN WAS A CHILD OF PROPHECY, HIS coming foretold by an ancient gypsy woman encountered by Alfred’s father, William, in the west of England. The wizened crone predicted that William would meet and fall in love with his future wife within weeks, that they would travel to the other side of the globe, and that the new Mrs Deakin would bear him two children – standard ancient gypsy woman schtick.

And lo, it came to pass that William, bearing gifts of apple, cabbage and turnip, did travel to the place that is called Abergavenny in the Kingdom of Wales. There he came upon the maid Sarah. And William said unto Sarah, ‘Will you marry me?’ And Sarah said unto William, ‘Sure.’ Then did William and Sarah journey even unto the ends of the earth, to a place of sin and darkness called Adelaide, where William begat Catherine. And the Spirit came upon William and called unto him, ‘Go ye forth to the lands of the tribe of Melbourne.’ William did as the Spirit bade and there, in the place of the Melbournites that is called Fitzroy, he begat Alfred. And it was good.

William Deakin was a humble costermonger when he met Sarah.¹ Costermongers sold fruit and vegetables on the streets, usually from a wheelbarrow. Some, like ancient gypsy women, were travellers – monging their costers by horse, pony, donkey or goat cart.²

Prophecy and costermongery had led William Deakin to Australia. Prophecy would guide William’s only son, Alfred, and raise him to the prime ministership of Australia. Costermongery would guide Australians in fashion, language and the arts – and in developing a national identity – for it is Australia, not Britain, that is truly a nation of grocers.

ALFRED DEAKIN’S SCHOOL DAYS

Alfred Deakin was named after Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Great Britain and Ireland. Both his parents dabbled with verse, and poetry would become one of Alfred’s great loves.

By the time of Alfred’s birth in 1856, William had abandoned his barrow for a stagecoach and vegetables for Victorians, transporting the latter from Melbourne to the Bendigo goldfields. He would rise through the coaching ranks to become the Victorian manager of Cobb & Co, nineteenth-century Australia’s largest land transport company. Alfred Deakin’s upbringing would be comfortably middle class.

And odd.

Alfred was packed off to boarding school at the unusually young age of four. Even more unusually, he attended Kyneton Ladies’ School, an institution that taught young girls how to be young ladies (i.e. chaste, domesticated and cultured). As the only boy among dozens of girls, he was cossetted and encouraged to be heard, not just seen – a ladies’ school first.

At the age of seven, the aspiring young lady found himself at the all-male Melbourne Church of England Grammar School. Australian grammar schools were modelled on British public schools and, during Deakin’s school days, were the sole providers of secondary education.³

Alfred didn’t make a good first impression at Melbourne Grammar. The other boys teased him for his girlish ways and one of the masters described him as ‘the most incorrigible vexatious restless and babbling creature I ever met’. Alfred performed poorly, later admitting that he’d been ‘an incessantly restless, random and at times studiously mischievous pupil’.

Alfred escaped the humdrum of class through daydreaming. He loved books and haunting public libraries, and seeing Sir William Don performing in drag sparked a lifelong passion for the theatre.⁴ Alfred, who lacked the practical skills of his father, was definitely more arts than crafts.

The young drag fan progressed to Grammar’s upper school and applied himself to his studies to please his favourite master, John Henning Thompson, brother of the two sisters who’d run Kyneton Ladies’. Alfred later recalled Thompson as ‘over 6 feet, handsome as Apollo, voice like a bugle, eyes beautiful as a woman’s … His influence over me was the most potent yet formed.’

The pliable young man was also shaped by his headmaster, Dr John Bromby, a clergyman who rose early, chopped wood for exercise, sat down to a spartan breakfast, lectured boys on moral living, encouraged their participation in organised games, sat down to a spartan dinner (definitely no alcohol) and retired early for the night, so that he might wake refreshed to do exactly the same again the following day.

Bromby was a Muscular Christian. Muscular Christians believed that manliness was next to godliness and that Christian men should work out more because Jesus was buff.⁵ They were ascetics who insisted Christian men should preserve their God-given bodies by not abusing them with anything enjoyable, for the degradation of a body made in God’s image was an assault on God Himself.⁶ The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) helped spread the doctrine of looking hot for Christ around the globe by encouraging young Christian men to exercise and developing new manly sports, including basketball and volleyball.

The Muscular Christian movement, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, was popularised by two English Christian socialist writers, Thomas Hughes and the Reverend Charles Kingsley.

Hughes was a lawyer, judge and politician who championed workers’ cooperatives and the legalisation of trade unions. His works included Notes for Boys, True Manliness and The Manliness of Christ, but today he’s best remembered for Tom Brown’s School Days, in which Tom, an unacademic but athletic pupil at the elite Rugby school, bests the school bully, Flashman, and develops into a manly young man who does not cheat on his homework, says his nightly prayers and is jolly good at ball games.

FIG. 1: THE YOUNG MEN OF MELBOURNE GRAMMAR KNEW IT WAS FUN TO STAY AT THE YMCA.

Kingsley was a Church of England clergyman, Cambridge history professor, novelist and poet who championed workers’ cooperatives and the liberal education of working-class men. He was also chaplain to Queen Victoria and private tutor to the Prince of Wales – nice work for a socialist, if you can get it.

Kingsley believed the British royal family were descendants of the Norse god Odin, which might explain the muscularity of the superior ‘Norse-Saxon race’, if not the Christianity. Kingsley didn’t like Italians, Turks, Jews, blacks or Americans. Poor Irish Catholics were ‘white chimpanzees’ and Catholics more generally were slaves to effeminate priests who couldn’t relate to women in the manly way God intended. Effeminacy, Kingsley asserted, had also weakened the Church of England. There should be no place in the clergy for sissies – just cissies, born men who were born leaders and proclaimed their masculinity to the world.

Kingsley is today best remembered for his children’s novel The Water-Babies, in which Tom, a young chimney sweep, drowns after being chased from a rich girl’s house and awakens as a 3.87902-inches-long aquatic cherub whose moral education is completed while living in a commune of other tiny aquatic cherubs, and who saves the soul of his also-drowned former master, for which he is returned to life and becomes a great industrialist and scientist.⁷

Kingsley and most early Muscular Christians were ‘broad church’ liberals who reinterpreted Christianity according to personal experience and reason. A friend of Charles Darwin, Kingsley championed the theory of evolution, arguing that God had ‘created a few original forms capable of self-development’.

Dr Bromby included evolutionary theory in Melbourne Grammar’s curriculum, and Alfred Deakin, with his inquiring mind and desire to reconcile his spirituality with his observations, integrated this ‘new science’ into his Christian faith. He believed that God had set the wheels of the universe in motion and then taken a back seat, allowing scientifically observable processes to keep those wheels spinning.

Alfred also embraced Dr Bromby’s regimen of self-discipline. The impressionable schoolboy swore off alcohol, coffee and tea, and became a strict vegetarian. Alfred’s vegetarianism was motivated by both his commitment to temperance and his belief that animals had rights, not the least of which was the right not to be eaten.⁸ Alfred also took up vigorous morning exercise, which became a lifelong habit, although he disdained the organised games that were of growing importance to Muscular Christians and Australians.

Marching was more Alfred’s thing. He lied about his age to join the Southern Rifles, a volunteer regiment that embarked on a recruitment drive when Britain withdrew the last of its troops from the Australian colonies in 1870. The Rifles were warrior poets and Alfred joined their debating society, learning to wound with weapons and words alike.

Alfred had become a well-rounded if tediously earnest young man. In 1871, at the age of fifteen, he finished school and passed the exam to study law at the University of Melbourne.

BARTY AND THE BANJO

Rose Paterson gave birth to a healthy baby boy at Narrambla Station, near the New South Wales town of Orange, on 17 February 1864. The baby’s birth certificate recorded his name as Baby, suggesting that Rose and her husband, Andrew, were very literal people. He was later christened Andrew Barton Paterson, but everybody called him Barty.

The Patersons were descendants of John Petersen, a Scandinavian who’d changed his surname after moving to Scotland. They were into sport, horses and losing vast sums of money, a common Australian trifecta. Barty’s grandfather Captain John Paterson was a champion curler.⁹ John Paterson, another relative, bred the first Clydesdale horses. And Barty’s ancestor Sir William Paterson convinced Scotland to invest 20 per cent of its money to establish a colony in Panama – the colony failed and Scotland went bust, forcing it to accept union with England.

Barty also had poetry in his veins. Captain Paterson wrote verses about his adventures in India, while Barty’s grandfather Robert Barton married Emily Darvall after reading her poems aboard the ship they shared to Australia. Barty’s early childhood was spent at Buckinbah Station, where he hung out with Jerry the Rhymer, an old convict shepherd and balladeer.

Barty’s idyllic years at Buckinbah were interrupted by a broken right arm, which his mother diagnosed as teething. Rose treated the break by slicing Barty’s gums and burning him behind the ears in an attempt to drain toxins from his body. This was far less dangerous than standard teething treatments – alcohol syrup, laudanum (a tincture of opium) or chlorodyne (a tincture of opium with some cannabis and chloroform thrown in for good measure).¹⁰

Barty’s break was not detected until he rebroke his arm after falling from a horse. He snapped it again at the age of twelve and was left with a permanently shortened and weakened limb. Rose, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, blamed Barty’s Aboriginal nurse for the original break:

That horrid Black Fanny must’ve been climbing trees with him or something of that sort and never let on to us for a moment that anything happened to the child.

Aboriginal women evened the ledger when the accident-prone Barty asked Nora Budgeree, a young Aboriginal girl, for a spear-throwing demonstration. With uncanny accuracy, she threw the spear through his leg.

The Patersons’ curse of losing vast sums of money struck when Barty was five. Andrew senior lost the farm (and two others he owned) when a failed Queensland property venture bankrupted him. Andrew remained station manager at one of his properties, Illawong, a glorified servant on what had once been his own land. He hit the bottle and took laudanum for back pain, slipping into an addict’s depression. Rose took to calling her husband ‘the old cripple’ and lapsed into paranoia, believing Illawong’s new owners were listening in on her conversations and engaging her servants as spies.

Barty found solace in riding The Banjo, a family horse, wryly observing that his stunted arm gave him ‘a light hand on the rein’. He fell in love with racing at the age of eight when he attended his first meet, at which Pardon won the Bogolong Town Plate. He was not alone in his obsession. Australians loved nothing more than a day at the races with a pint and a punt.¹¹

Australians loved horse racing so much they wrote poems about it. Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote ‘Visions in the Smoke’, in which he hallucinated a Melbourne Cup race in his pipe smoke. The Cup in this drug-induced dream was won by Tim Whiffler, inspiring superstitious racehorse owners to name their horses Tim Whiffler. There were two Tim Whifflers in the 1867 Melbourne Cup. One of the Tim Whifflers won and was put out to stud, siring a colt named Tim Whiffler.¹²

Gordon had left England after his ‘strength and health were broken by dissipation and humbug’. After serving as a South Australian mounted policeman, he found work as a horse-breaker and befriended Father Julian Tenison-Woods, a Catholic priest who lent him books and encouraged his love of poetry. After a short stint as a parliamentarian, Gordon embarked on a career as a poet who wrote about horses. ‘The poet of the horse’, as Gordon was known, was also a champion steeplechase racer, but his short-sightedness resulted in falls that caused brain damage, manifesting as a profound melancholia. When his 1870 Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes sold poorly, he trudged into the tea-tree scrub and shot himself. This proved a great career move, with his resulting popularity leaving him the only Australian to be commemorated in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. More importantly, as observed by his contemporary Marcus Clarke, author of the serialised His Natural Life (renamed For the Term of His Natural Life after his death), Gordon’s work formed ‘the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry’.

Barty loved Gordon’s work. At age ten, the young poetry fancier went to live with his grandmother, Emily Barton, a society widow whose Gladesville home Rockend overlooked Sydney’s Parramatta River. Barty was packed off to Sydney Grammar, where he was dux of the junior school.

Barty blamed his subsequent academic slide on ‘fish and rabbits’, just two of the many animals he delighted in killing.¹³ He’d been introduced to cockfighting by his infants teacher and wrote for the Sydney Grammar magazine about the simple childhood pleasures of wasting a platypus and pumping a pelican full of lead. Barty was also into ‘wallarooing’, a popular Sydney Grammar pastime in which a small boy would be hunted, pushed to the ground and have his mouth stuffed with grass, his boots stolen and his boater trampled, but it was all in good fun.¹⁴

Sport was another great passion, with Barty’s dodgy arm forcing him to learn to play tennis left-handed. He also loved rowing, although here his arm proved a liability. Still, he’d watch Ned ‘The Slab’ Trickett, the 1876 world sculling champion (and first Australian world champion in any sport), race Bill ‘Gypsy’ Beach (Australia’s second world sporting champion) on the river below Rockend. Barty wrote that their successes gave rise to an ‘orgy of sculling’ in Australia.¹⁵

In winter, Sydney Grammar boys played rugby, the sporting vehicle for Muscular Christianity and Empire. In summer, they played cricket, the sporting vehicle for racism and rioting. Cricket, more than any sport, fostered inter-colonial rivalry and, paradoxically, drew the colonies closer together. The colonies loved beating each other, but they loved beating England even more.

Australians thrilled at the success of the cricketers who toured England in 1868, the first Australian sports team to travel overseas. Alright, they were all Victorians, but nobody’s perfect. And they were all Aboriginal, but they’d been given proper white names like Dick-a-Dick, Jimmy Mosquito, King Cole, Red Cap, Twopenny, Tiger and Jim Crow.¹⁶

London’s Daily Telegraph sniffily reported that Australia produced nothing of interest ‘except gold nuggets and black cricketers’, although it acknowledged the tourists ‘were fully clothed and in their right minds’. The Times huffed that the games were a ‘travestie upon cricketing at Lords’, but Australians were proud that the team won as many games as it lost – although it was embarrassing for normal folk to be towelled up by ‘conquered natives’.¹⁷

Victoria prevented any further embarrassment by passing the Aboriginal Protection Act in 1869. The Act protected foreign cricketers from being beaten by Aboriginal people by making it illegal to take Aboriginal people out of Victoria without the approval of a new Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines.

Which would not be forthcoming.¹⁸

Still, other Australians could beat the Poms – and they did, when a combined Victorian and New South Wales XI defeated England in the world’s first test match, held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1877.

Barty was a spectator when England played New South Wales at the Sydney Cricket Ground during England’s 1879 Revenge Tour. Each team selected an umpire. New South Wales chose one of Barty’s distant relatives, Edmund Barton (Toby to his friends), an accomplished cricketer.¹⁹ Barton was also an excellent rower and fisherman, and an aspiring politician. England chose George Coulthard, a star footballer with the Carlton Australian Rules football club.

Coulthard, a treacherous Victorian, judged New South Wales opening batsman Billy Murdoch run out early in the second innings. The home captain, Dave Gregory, demanded a new umpire and halted the game when Lord Harris, the English captain, refused. Barty and about 2,000 mostly drunk spectators invaded the pitch. Coulthard was jostled and Lord Harris whipped, before England’s two leading fast bowlers, holding the mob at bay with cricket stumps, escorted their captain from the field.²⁰

The Sydney Riot of 1879 relegated Ned Kelly’s raid on Jerilderie to the inner pages of Australian newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald called it ‘a national humiliation’ that ‘would remain a blot upon the colony for some years to come’. Barty called it a fun day out.

Barty also attended cricket matches at Gladesville’s Hospital for the Insane, where the sports-loving assistant superintendent, Teddy Betts, staged matches between the inmates and some of Australia’s leading cricketers. The cricketers participated in Betts’ ‘therapy for the patients’ because they were given ‘cold roast suckling pig and all the beer they wanted’. The hospital’s wicketkeeper, incarcerated for homicidal mania, once had to be restrained from violently inserting a stump into future Australian captain George Giffen.

With all the sport, hunting, fishing, riding, rioting and stuffing small boys’ mouths with grass, Barty had little time for his studies and was awarded a Low in French. Still, his natural ability would have assured him a place at university had he not been quarantined with severe typhoid during his final exams. And he was still able to practise law, because his grandmother’s wealth and connections secured him a position at a reputable firm.

Alfred Deakin and Barty Paterson both loved poetry and were interested in the law, but Deakin was inflexible fragile chalk to Paterson’s agreeable sweaty cheese. Deakin was drawn to the spiritual – Paterson to the physical. Deakin worked for his success – Paterson trusted it would come naturally. Deakin wanted to protect animals – Paterson wanted to kill them. Deakin considered exercise necessary – Paterson considered it fun. Deakin sought mastery over himself – Paterson cheerfully surrendered to himself and others.

But both these young men would shape Australia and the very notion of what it was to be Australian.

CHILDREN OF THE COSTERMONGERS

On 7 February 1870, as Alfred and Barty attended school, Melbourne’s Age ran a story about a group of boys who’d never seen the inside of a classroom.

A stout six-foot constable next makes his appearance, having in each hand a youngster of the rowdy class, commonly termed ‘larrikins,’ who have been amusing themselves in company with some twenty others of similar tastes, by insulting every person who passed them.

This was the first time the word larrikin appeared in print. The Melbourne press knew it was on to a good thing, with papers soon outdoing each other in the rush to publish stories on the ‘larrikin menace’.

There were a lot of young people for old people to whinge about in 1870, as the infants of the gold rush baby boom were now surly teenagers. Old people couldn’t flee to the suburbs to escape the disrespectful young folk who spat on the footpath or spoke loudly in the Botanical Gardens, because there were no suburbs to flee to. Australian cities were all city, with the upper and lower classes packed densely together.

Melbourne did disaffected youth far better than Sydney. Sydney had the Cabbage-Tree Mob, young men who wore hats woven from palm fronds and enjoyed giving their betters a ‘bonneting’ – smacking the tops of their hats to force them over their eyes. Bonneting and wallarooing made Sydney the youth hat vandalism capital of Australia, but that was about as hardcore as it got.

Australia’s first larrikins were members of loose gangs, known as forties and then pushes, the latter term borrowed from the ‘flash’ language of the convicts.²¹ The gangs formed in Alfred Deakin’s neighbourhood of Fitzroy and Collingwood in the late 1860s. Their members adopted the name larrikin, which meant ‘a mischievous youth’ in a Warwickshire and Worcestershire dialect. Originally pronounced learykin, the name probably also appealed because leary was flash for streetwise and kin spoke to a common identity.

Most larrikins were unskilled labourers – bootblacks, bottle collectors, newspaper boys, rag sellers, carters and street vendors. They were tuppenny-capitalists who disdained those who’d learned a trade. They first appeared when employment was plentiful and would constantly switch jobs – like millennials, but not as irritating.

Though mostly born of poor, Irish Catholic immigrants, larrikins saw themselves as Australian and their parents’ generation as foreign in nationality and attitude. They were the future, and they would remake Australia in their own image. Unfortunately, the image they’d adopted was that of the Cockney costermonger.

Costermongers would attract customers with a rapid-fire sales patter of rhymes, songs and chants. Police regarded them as a traffic hazard and a source of petty crime. Costermongers adopted a distinctive dress code, incorporating a kingsman (a large colourful neckerchief), long waistcoat and bell-bottomed trousers with mother-of-pearl buttons adorning the seams. The gaudy grocers were known for their rhyming slang, but communicated among themselves in back slang, a coded language in which words are spoken backwards – yob, for example, which originally meant ‘boy’, but came to mean ‘lout’ or ‘hooligan’. Without costermongery, Australia would have no yobbos.²²

Cockney costermonger acts were a music hall staple from the 1860s. Stage costermongers would sing about women, drinking, skiving off work and the foolishness and arrogance of the upper classes. Their skits and songs frequently used catchphrases and fruit and vegetable–themed double entendres.²³

The stage costermongers, with their faux-aristocratic clothing worn in a streetwise way, modelled their look on the petty street criminals in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. English authorities had banned stage performances of Oliver Twist in 1845 because they were concerned the lower classes would copy the thieving ways and styling of the gang that took in the innocent Oliver. The stage costermongers’ adoption of Dickens’ flash look was a deliberate ‘up yours’ to the authorities.

Early larrikins shared a love of musical theatre. They’d perform scenes from popular melodramas and burlesques, and sing music hall songs on improvised stages. They’d attend singing rooms, dance saloons and theatres, and hold dance-offs in public places.²⁴ Victims of the first larrikin attacks would have felt like they were being mugged by the cast of West Side Story.

Larrikins liked to look rorty, costermonger and larrikin slang for rowdily risqué. They aped stage costermonger fashion, wearing flamboyant scarves and handkerchiefs like Austral Oscar Wildes. The 1874 Victorian Police Gazette described Collingwood larrikin Garney Cooper as wearing a ‘black-cloth sac-coat, soft black felt hat with white horseshoe in band, light tweed trousers, and a showy striped scarf’. Thin moustaches were popular among those old enough to grow them. Hair might be greased, shaved or both. Tattoos were in. At least that was the male larrikin look.

Some larrikin groups included young women known as donahs, a demeaning term for ‘girlfriend’ derived from the Spanish doña (Mrs). These low-paid domestics and seamstresses showed an unseemly amount of ankle and hat, with their heavily feathered headpieces an object of popular scorn. Brazenness and bare-knuckle street fights were a donah’s stock-in-trade.

The press took the larrikin name and gave it a different meaning. Larrikins were no longer mischievous youths, but yobs. Conservatives were alarmed by young people fighting and dancing in public spaces and offending their elders and betters with their ‘saucy words’. The solution, they believed, was intervening before larval street urchins matured into fully formed larrikins. Surely children would be better off out of the streets and into the schools, where some good sense, Christian morality and respect for authority might be thrashed into them.

WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION

Liberals were also concerned that many children received no education. Children had historically been treated as a vaguely irritating but necessary form of parental property, but liberals had come to believe that children were small people who had rights of their own, including the right not to be killed while cleaning heavy industrial machinery. Surely children would be better off out of the factories and into the schools, where they might learn to improve themselves and society.²⁵

With liberals and conservatives in accord, the time was ripe for reform. In 1872, Victoria became the first Australian colony (and one of the first places in the world) to provide compulsory, free and secular public elementary schooling.²⁶ It also stopped funding church-run schools.

Churches had traditionally run Australian schools with government financial aid, a few private schools being their only competition. This heightened sectarian tensions, and most communities lacked the population to maintain schools for children of different faiths. The solution was state-provided education, but most churches resisted reform.

Enter New South Wales’ Robert Lowe, the albino politician known in less woke times as ‘Pink-eyed Bob’. Lowe championed