Larrikin

A Ned Kelly Icon

      I don't remember reading the term larrikin before I packed for Australia. It popped up when I was reading up on that iconic Australian figure, Ned Kelly. (Yes, the character portrayed by Heath Ledger in the 2002 film of that name.) Ned Kelly, the armor clad Australian Robin Hood, was a something of larrikin: 

 ...almost archly self conscious, too smart for his own good, witty rather than humorous,       exceeding limits, bending rules and sailing close to the wind, avoiding rather than evading responsibility, playing to an audience, mocking pomposity and smugness, taking the piss out of people, cutting down tall poppies, larger than life, skeptical, iconoclastic, egalitarian

 yet suffering fools badly, and above all, defiant...(as described by Australian historian Manning Clark)

     Most larrikin traits describe my father, Croswell Bowen, about whom I'm writing a book. Not surprisingly, given the history of the Irish as convicts in Australia, when it was a British penal colony, the term is thought to come from the Irish pronunciation of larking. As a behavour, it evolved, as Ned Kelly did, as a reaction to corrupt and arbitrary authority. Suddenly, I see my father, the Irish-Catholic, the larrikin, at Choate, that American model of an elite British school; I see the larrikin confronting Sinclair Lewis and the FBI. 

     A brilliant Australian scholar, Melissa Bellanta , writes about larrikinism and other Australian cultural phenomena. (Cate Blanchett fans should check out Melissa's review of Blanchett's performance as King Richard II, in the Sydney Theatre Company's War of the Roses, Pt. 1.) Bellanta has found that the larrikin type evolved and persisted in various Australian cities into the 20th Century. 

     I decided to conduct a little sociolinguistic research, asking everyone I met in Australia to define the term. From my small sample, it seemed that younger Aussies define larrikin differently than their elders. The young responded with synonyms like silly, joker; people my age i.e. early sixties, mentioned the transgressive nature of the larrikin. I'll leave it to the Australians to figure out what that means.