English

Noun

larrikinism ‎(uncountable)

1. (Australia, New Zealand) The behaviour of larrikins (hooligans); impertinent and disrespectful behaviour.
   • 1901, Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, Chapter XXIX,

     I would have thrashed him well at the start but for the letters I constantly received from home warning me against offence to the parents, and knew that to set my foot on the children's larrikinism would require measures that would gain their mother's ill-will at once.

   • 1977, Ted Robert Gurr, Peter N. Grabosky, Richard C. Hula, The Politics of Crime and Conflict: A Comparative History of Four Cities, page 382,

     The apparent decline of larrikinism in Sydney in the late 1890s provides a specific illustration of the ambiguous relation between official policies, socioeconomic change, and change in deviant behavior.

   • 1978, Peggy Gwendoline Koopman-Boyden, Families in New Zealand Society, page 9,

     Good quality homes promised deliverance from the problems of illegitimacy, divorce, larrikinism, wife-desertion, general immorality and crime.

2. (Australia) Behaviour that is rebellious against and contemptuous of authority and convention.
   • 2003, Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, page 203,

     Neither Menzies nor Fraser made any attempt to wield the imagery of the legend, and Gorton's larrikinism made him unfit to hold high office in the eyes of Liberal Party powerbrokers.

   • 2007, Marjolein C. 't Hart, Dennis Bos, Humour and Social Protest, page 239,

     The sense of independence and loyalty remained, though the humour, irreverence, and “larrikinism”, core qualities of the digger identity that appeared so strongly in social protests throughout the war, were hidden within a new encompassing sense of respect and remorse, and a new identity in the “Anzac”.

   • 2010, Peter Stanley, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, unnumbered page,

     The AIF's bad characters became transmuted in popular memory into at worst merely mischievous larrikins. Since larrikinism was a common response of young Australian men to life, let alone war, the image has been easy to accept. But as we have seen, the AIF's behaviour went beyond mere larrikinism, and it seems time to acknowledge that fact.