ABSTRACT
This chapter examines firstly two key offenders identified in the 1882 royal commission, larrikins and prostitutes. It then considers the way in which the ‘criminal class’ was transformed in the twentieth century before tackling the issue of aggregated crime rates. The transformation of both the larrikin push and the market for vice paralleled similar changes in the character of the ‘criminal classes’ as a whole. In 1881 a royal commission had found that thieves, garrotters and other small-time criminals congregated in the neighbourhood of Little Bourke Street and Little Lonsdale Street — ‘in dens living almost promiscuously [and able] to associate and combine for vicious objects’. An ordered ‘underworld’ rose up from the depths. Motor cars and firearms made this underworld even more dangerous. The safe, sober and moral city seemed no closer in the 1920s than it had in the 1880s.
