ABSTRACT
Somewhere between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries there occurred a curious transformation in the image of Australian youth. The young colonial, as we meet him in fiction and social criticism during the early nineteenth century, is depicted as a tall and muscular lad, more robust than his convict or Immigrant forebears and positively bursting with good health and animal spirits. Commissioner Bigge’s famous description of the native youth - ‘tall in person, and slender in their limbs…capable of undergoing more fatigue… than native Europeans …in their tempers…quick and erascible, but not vindictive…’ - is echoed by many later writers (quoted in Mcnab & Ward, 1962.291). By the 1870s and 1880s, as a new generation of goldrush children rose to their teens, a fresh theme emerged: there were fears that these well-fed youngsters, lacking the pioneering challenge of their fathers, would grow restless, bored and rebellious. R.E.N. Twopeny in his perceptive Town Life in Australia,(1883) noted that ‘parental relations are undoubtedly the weak point of family life in the colonies. During childhood a certain obedience is of course enforced; but public feeling is strong in favour of the naughty boy and wilful girl, looking as it does upon these qualities as prophetic of future enterprise’ (1883:101–2). There were complaints of the breakdown of the apprenticeship system, of the growing numbers of truants and ‘street arabs’, and of the unwi11ingness of colonial youths steadily to pursue their vocation (Davison, 1978:56–61; McConville, 1981:39–48). Around the 1890s a new and more sinister note was heard: increasingly the young Australian was pictured, not only as morally enfeebled, but as physically degenerate. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, if fiction is any guide, Australia’s young men, particularly those who lived in the great cities, became thinner and shorter, turned sallow-faced and hollow-chested, and began to cough, smoke and spit. When he emerged, during the 1870s and 1880s, the larrikin was pictured as a rough and rebellious, but physically hearty, specimen. But in Edward Kinglake’s portrait of 1891 he was ‘generally a weedy youth, undersized and slight…He has a repulsive face, low forehead, small eyes, a colourless skin and irregular colourless teeth’ (King lake, 1891:107). In his ‘Captain of the Push’, Henry Lawson (1892) described the ‘beau-ideal of a Sydney larrikin’ as ‘bottle-shouldered, pale and thin’ (1892:186–188). The heroes of Ambrose Pratt’s and Edward Dyson’s larrikin stories published shortly after the turn of the century were short, puny and sallow-faced. But the most extreme treatment of the degenerate type of city youth is found in Louis Stone’s famous novel, Jonah (1910), in which the hero, Jonah, was actually a hunchback and the entire action was underscored with images of savagery and brutality.( 1 )
