From Bodgies to Eshays: Exploring the history of Adelaide’s youth subcultures
Since the 1950s - and even earlier - teenagers have been ruffling the feathers of the middle-aged. Bodgies and widgies, surfies and sharps, which group did you belong to?
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Don’t worry, folks, the kids are all right. At least that’s what University of SA’s Paul “Nazz” Oldham says.
Dr Oldham, who wrote his PhD thesis on Australia’s sharpie gangs, said the phenomenon of teenagers and young adults forminginto groups and getting under the older generation’s skin — as most recently demonstrated by the eshay movement — was far from a new one.
The lecturer in popular music, industry, culture and identity said youth gangs and cliques in Australia stretched back to the cabbage-tree mobs of the convict era — young men who wore hats made of palm leaves who organised bare-knuckle boxing matches in the scrub around Sydney. A predecessor of the larrikin, cabbage-tree mobs enjoyed crushing the nice felt hats of uppity colonialists.
“This is something that goes back at least as far as the industrial revolution,” Dr Oldham said.
“Of course, this isn’t isolated to Australia. Basically from the industrial revolution — and back even further than that — we can see these gangs of young people being … well, annoying, basically.”
**Scroll down to read more about Australia’s history with youth gangs and sub-cultures**
Dr Oldham said Australia was quite an unusual country, in that it was quite socially conservative, although it tended to embrace the larrikin — or at least the idea of the larrikin.
“That’s probably part of the electricity, of what makes it so exciting,” he said.
He said youth movements that were focused on looking good — such as the sharpies and eshays — tended to be working-class movements.
“In the middle class, you might see rebellion in young people dressing down and looking scruffy and railing against conservativevalues with liberalism,” he said.
“That is not what is going to be common in the working class. Long hair and scruffiness is exactly what they’re rebelling against. “They want to look sharp.”
While youth groups could appear intimidating to outsiders, they often provided a valuable sense of belonging for the young people involved.
“The sharpies, for example, were not only multicultural, but they were also very welcoming to women,” Dr Oldham said.
“If we take the time to see the need and the value of these groups, then we’ll be more likely to understand them and more likely to focusmore on the things that really should be causing alarm — and that’s not usually young people.”
Read on to learn more about some of Australia’s most prominent youth subcultures.
BODGIES AND WIDGIES
The Australian version of rockers and greasers, Bodgies (the boys) and Widgies (the girls) caused outrage in conservative 1950s Adelaide.
The blokes grew their hair long and combed it back into an Elvis-style quaff with Brylcreem while the girls cut their hair short and wore tight skirts and (shock horror) flat shoes.
Taking its cues from the emerging rock ’n’ roll culture that was sweeping the world, bodgies were one of the first post-WWII youth movements.
A full page story from newspaper The Mail in 1951 demonstrates the fear that the fashion inspired.
“The Bodgie-Widgie Cult – Its Bad Influence is Spreading” the headline read.
“The alarming picture of the Bodgie-Widgie has worsened with a report child welfare officers have just made to Education Minister (Mr Heffron).
“They reported sex and marijuana parties, drug addiction, and crime were due directly to bodgie-widgie influence.”
The article included a dictionary of bodgie-widgie slang, including beachings (beach parties), heavy date (boyfriend or girlfriend) and crum (larrikin).
Dances where bodies gathered sometimes turned violent, especially when they were crashed by their arch-enemies, the surfies.
CLOTHES: (Men) T-shirts, colourful shirts, pegged trousers, jeans oversized suit jackets, leather jackets, ripple-soled shoes. (Women) Pencil skirts, three-quarter pants, bobby socks, flat shoes.
HAIR: Slicked back for the boys, short for the girls.
MUSIC: Bebop jazz in the early days, then rock ’n’ roll! Johnny O’Keefe, Elvis, Bill Haley.
CAR: Big and American was best, big and Australian was also good. Motorcycles too.
SURFIES
The natural enemy of the bodgie, the surfie was heavily influenced by the rapidly growing surf culture that came out of California and was being embraced by young Australians.
Surfing had been a popular pastime in Australia for years, but things really took off in the early 1960s. The Beach Boys were making music, Gidget was riding high in the cinemas and a young bloke from Sydney called Bernard “Midget” Farrelly had been crowned as the world’s best surfer at Makaha in Hawaii. Surf was cool. Unless you were a motorcycle-riding bodgie or rocker – to them surf, with its “bushy blond hairdos” and Beach Blanket Bingo vibe was anything but cool.
Which is why they would sometimes crash the surfie dances – known as stomps – and cause trouble.
And it wasn’t just the fighting that freaked out “the squares” – even the dance styles raised eyebrows.
The stomp – aka the surfer stomp – was, as its name suggests, a dance that involved stomping in time to the music. Many councils banned the dance fearing it would damage the timber dancefloors, and rumour has it that the “stompers” may have even broken through the wood at the West Beach Surf Club.
Surf historian Matt Warshaw, in his esteemed Encyclopedia Of Surfing, described the stomp as an “artless but irresistible foot-stomping dance step created in 1960, most likely at Dick Dale’s early ‘surf stomp’ shows”.
CLOTHES: Beach gear, rolled jeans, desert boots, corduroy.
HAIR: Bushy bushy blond hairdos (but not TOO bushy yet).
MUSIC: The Atlantics, Dick Dale, The Del-Tones, The Ventures, The Beach Boys, The Surfaris, Little Pattie.
CAR: Old “surf chaser” bombs piled high with boards. A woody station wagon was the dream car.
SHARPIES
Short hair and bad attitudes, the Sharpies - or sharps - were one of the most feared youth subcultures of the 1970s.
And while they might have looked mean, with their shaved heads, boots and homemade tattoos, they were also uniquely Australian, championing local bands and sowing the seeds for great Aussie pub rock wave that broke acts like AC/DC and The Angels.
Sharpies had been around since the 1960s, but the culture really exploded out of Melbourne in the early seventies and was soon influencing youth fashion, and behaviour, around the country. They wore their hair short – girls included – sometimes with a bit of length or a rat’s tail at the back. Pants were tight, but flared at the bottom, boots were big and cardigans – yes, cardigans – were worn a few sizes too small.
The blokes often wore homemade T-shirts with the name of their sharpie gang printed on the front.
Sharpies even had their own dance style, which involved a monkey-like swinging of bent arms and they busted it out to bands like Lobby Lloyde and the Coloured Balls.
CLOTHES: Flared jeans, platform boots, tight customised T-shirts, cardigans.
HAIR: Short. Really short. The occasional micro-mullet or rat’s tail, but generally an all-over buzz cut.
MUSIC: Lobby Lloyde and the Coloured Balls, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, AC/DC, Skyhooks, Finch.
CAR: The train.
GOTHS
Unlike bodgies and sharps, goths weren’t particularly interested in fighting.
They were united not by violence but by an almost vampiric loathing of sunlight and love of dark music. And … well just the dark in general.
Goths were the black-clad, mascara-wearing sons and daughters of the punk movement who really hit their stride in the 1980s. They listened to The Cure and Joy Division and Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, hung out in nightclubs and smoked.
It has been widely speculated, but not proven, that the use of hairspray at the height of the goth movement was largely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.
Goths never really died away as the teenage urge to dress in black and draw the blinds is strong indeed. The goth spirit lives on in emo, screamo and whatever other “oh” the kids are into.
CLOTHES: Black, black and more black, with edgy accoutrements like bondage gear and fishnets, with boots befitting such an outfit. White makeup to cover up even the tiniest trace of a tan and create that “I may have already died” look.
HAIR: Black, obviously (although you could get away with bleach blonde or shocking pink), and big. Really big. Almost touching the clouds.
MUSIC: As mentioned, Bauhaus and The Cure. On an Australian tip, The Boys Next Door/Birthday Party and Dead Can Dance.
CAR: The train or perhaps something European. And black.
ESHAYS
Eshays, or lads, are the latest youth subculture to inspire moral panic and raise middle class eyebrows across Australia.
On paper it doesn’t make much sense (but youth movements rarely do, which is what makes them so interesting) – outer suburban young people dressing in up-market leisurewear from brands like Ralph Lauren and Nautica, bum bags worn diagonally across the body and teamed with gaudy Nike TN sneakers.
They like to speak in pig Latin and randomly shout “esheay bra!” while riding the am-tray to the each-bay and tagging the seats.
Eshays love their Aussie hip hop – with Kerser being the godfather – and high-energy dance music like Dutch gabber, which gives them a chance to bust out the eshay dance.
Originally very much a working class movement coming out of Sydney, many eshay tropes have been adopted by middle class kids in recent years.
CLOTHES: Polo shirts, caps, short shorts, colourful sneakers, bum bags over the shoulder.
HAIR: A super-short mullet fits the look, or a fresh fade.
MUSIC: Aussie hip hop and drill, hardstep and gabber.
CAR: No car, it’s public transport all the way. Razor scooter in a pinch.
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