ABSTRACT
The platoons of uniformed Salvation Army soldiers and Hallelujah Lasses who marched through the streets and the guerilla bands of larrikins who mocked and assaulted them dramatised a social chasm between ‘respectable’ and ‘rough’ elements in working-class life. The secret of the Salvation Army’s success was that it offered a faith openly hostile to social pretension and calculated to appeal to those enmeshed in the rough and harsh realities of working-class life. Barker had been commissioned in mid-1882 by General William Booth to ‘take charge of the work of the Salvation Army in South Australia with power to extend operations to neighbouring colonies’. Property-owners in the vicinity of the army barracks petitioned the local councils to put an end to troublesome antics of the Salvation Army.
