‘I Was a Man of Honour’: Masculinities and Theft in Early Twentieth-Century Western Australia

Abstract

The interrelationship between masculinity and crime has been recognised when it comes to violent or explicitly ‘gendered’ offences. The role of gender in property offending has received less attention. This article draws on letters to judges and police character reports – items that went from being intermittent to almost standard inclusions in Australian legal briefs between the 1920s and 1950s – to examine the changing ideals of masculinity evident in men’s attempts to contextualise their property offending. These sources demonstrate that the conceptions of masculinity that men expressed were structured in relation to a range of changing social factors, from the evolution of the Australian economy and family unit to the psychological impact of war on the nation’s men. It will be argued that three models of masculinity – the tough man, working man and family man – influenced the ways in which male thieves presented themselves to Australian courts across the interwar period.

I would like to thank the peer reviewers, the editors of Australian Historical Studies and Professor Mark Finnane for the valuable feedback they provided on this article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Mark Finnane, Andy Kaladelfos, Alana Piper, Yorick Smaal, Robyn Blewer and Lisa Durnian, et al., The Prosecution Project Database (hereafter PP), https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au (version 1, 17 July 2016), Trial ID #18523, Western Australia Supreme Court (hereafter WASC), Anonymous, 1951.

2 WASC, Files – Criminal Indictment, State Records Office Western Australia, WAS122.

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4 Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001); Colin James, ‘Marriage, Masculinity and Law in Australia, 1900 to 1999’ (PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2001); Gregory Young, ‘Man amongst Men: An Examination of Images of Australian Masculinity across Time’ (PhD thesis, Monash University, 2002); Chelsea Barnett, Reel Men: Australian Masculinity in the Movies, 1949–1962 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019).

5 Wray Vamplew, Australians, Historical Statistics (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1987), 39.

6 Russell Earls Davis, A Concise History of Western Australia (Sydney: Woodslane Press, 2012), 168.

7 R.H. Pilmer, ‘Men’s Work, an Australian Saga’ (Manuscript, State Library of Western Australia, 1937).

8 Raymond Evans, ‘A Gun in the Oven: Masculinism and Gendered Violence’, in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, eds Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 203.

9 F.K. Crowley and B.K. de Garis, A Short History of Western Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1969), 71.

10 Mark Finnane, Punishment in Australian Society (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65.

11 Stephen Garton, ‘Crime, Prisons, and Psychiatry: Reconsidering Problem Populations in Australia, 1890–1930’, in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective, eds Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 23–52; Stephen Garton, ‘Criminal Propensities: Psychiatry, Classification and Imprisonment in New York State 1916–1940’, Social History of Medicine 23, no. 1 (2009): 79–97.

12 Alana Jayne Piper, ‘To Judge a Thief: How the Background of Thieves Became Central to Dispensing Justice, Western Australia, 1921–1951’, Law & History 4, no. 1 (2017): 113–44.

13 Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis, ‘Introduction’, in Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., eds Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1–21; Jennifer Travis, Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

14 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, ‘Masculinity, Violence and Emotional Life’, in Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues, eds Gillian Bendelow and Simon J. Williams (London: Routledge, 1998), 193–210.

15 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 190–205; Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).

16 Stephen Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 56 (1998): 94.

17 Arlie Loughnan, ‘“Society Owes Them Much”: Veteran Defendants and Criminal Responsibility in Australia in the Twentieth Century’, Critical Analysis of Law 2, no. 1 (2015): 106–34.

18 PP, Trial ID 13970, WASC, Louis Raynor, 1921; PP, Trial ID 11597, WASC, Anonymous, 1946; PP, Trial ID 18522, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

19 PP, Trial ID 20428, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

20 PP, Trial ID 18521, WASC, Anonymous, 1951; PP, Trial ID 20430, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

21 Australian War Memorial, ‘Enlistment Statistics, First World War’, www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/enlistment/ww1, and ‘Enlistment Statistics, Second World War’, www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/enlistment/ww2 (accessed 1 April 2019).

22 PP, Trial ID 8721, WASC, Cyril Wood, 1936.

23 Stephen Garton, ‘“Fit Only for the Scrap Heap”: Rebuilding Returned Soldier Manhood in Australia after 1945’, Gender & History 20, no. 1 (2008): 49.

24 PP, Trial ID 6623, WASC, Anonymous, 1951; PP, Trial ID 18637, WASC, Anonymous, 1951; PP, Trial ID 20389, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

25 PP, Trial ID 20384, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

26 Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History (London: University of London, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 2001), 39.

27 Joseph Pugliese, ‘The Gendered Figuring of the Dysfunctional Serviceman in the Discourses of Military Psychiatry’, in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 162–77; Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014), 215.

28 Loughnan, 106–34.

29 PP, Trial ID 11597, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

30 PP, Trial ID 18625, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

31 PP, Trial ID 11015, WASC, James McGregor, 1926.

32 PP, Trial ID 12433, WASC, Hugh Donald Turner, 1931.

33 PP, Trial ID 18701, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

34 Elizabeth Nelson, ‘Civilian Men and Domestic Violence in the Aftermath of the First World War’, Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 76 (2003): 97.

35 PP, Trial ID 8768, WASC, John Hay, 1936; PP, Trial ID 18523, WASC, Anonymous, 1951; PP, Trial ID 12429, WASC, Wallace Dusting, 1931.

36 John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000), 35.

37 Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1980), 7.

38 Ex Parte H.V. McKay [1907] Commonwealth Arbitration Report 12.

39 Damousi, 39.

40 Garton, ‘“Fit Only for the Scrap Heap”’, 48–67.

41 G.D. Snooks, ‘Development in Adversity to 1946’, in A New History of Western Australia, ed. C.T. Stannage (Perth: UWA Press, 1981), 246.

42 R.N. Ghosh, ‘Economic Development and Population Growth in Western Australia since 1945’, in Stannage, 271; Mark Peel, ‘A New Kind of Manhood: Remembering the 1950s’, Australian Historical Studies 27, no. 109 (1997): 147–57.

43 PP, Trial ID 20341, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

44 PP, Trial ID 20389, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

45 PP, Trial ID 20441, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

46 PP, Trial ID 18873, WASC, Anonymous, 1941.

47 PP, Trial ID 12471, WASC, Frederick William Hill, 1931.

48 PP, Trial ID 10947, WASC, Leslie St John Brown, 1926.

49 PP, Trial ID 18922, WASC, Anonymous, 1941.

50 PP, Trial ID 12449, WASC, Ernest Dawson, 1931.

51 PP, Trial ID 18613, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

52 PP, Trial ID 12450, WASC, Charles Napier, 1931.

53 PP, Trial ID 12470, WASC, George Barsby, 1931.

54 Kate Murphy, ‘The “Most Dependable Element of Any Country’s Manhood”: Masculinity and Rurality in the Great War and Its Aftermath’, History Australia 5, no. 3 (2008): 72.1–20.

55 Geoffrey Bolton, Land of Vision and Mirage: Western Australia since 1826 (Perth: UWA Press, 2008), 90.

56 PP, Trial ID 10973, WASC, Douglas Black, 1926; PP, Trial ID 12445, WASC, George Colin Weldon, 1931; PP, Trial ID 18895, WASC, Anonymous, 1941.

57 PP, Trial ID 10774, WASC, Thomas Gladstone Ross, 1926.

58 PP, Trial ID 13970, WASC, Louis Raynor, 1921.

59 Bolton, 112.

60 PP, Trial ID 6617, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

61 PP, Trial ID 18606, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

62 PP, Trial ID 10973, WASC, Douglas Harry Black, 1926.

63 PP, Trial ID 12471, WASC, Frederick William Hill, 1931.

64 PP, Trial ID 18522, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

65 Michelle Arrow, Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia since 1945 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 19.

66 Ibid., 20, 24.

67 Ibid., 14–15.

68 PP, Trial ID 6841, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

69 PP, Trial ID 6611, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

70 Robert Rutherdale, ‘Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the Good Life during Canada’s Baby Boom, 1945–1965’, Journal of Family History 24, no. 3 (1999): 351–73.

71 John Murphy, ‘Work in a Time of Plenty: Narratives of Men’s Work in Post-War Australia’, Labour History 88 (2005): 215–31.

72 PP, Trial ID 12486, WASC, Percy Tuckwell, 1931.

73 PP, Trial ID 12429, WASC, Wallace Dusting, 1931.

74 PP, Trial ID 12443, WASC, Ernest Leo Brown, 1931.

75 PP, Trial ID 18875, WASC, Anonymous, 1941; PP, Trial ID 20431, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

76 Peel, 149.

77 PP, Trial ID 20351, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

78 PP, Trial ID 10775, WASC, Leslie White, 1926.

79 PP, Trial ID 14146, WASC, Ben Taylor, 1921.

80 PP, Trial ID 18675, WASC, Anonymous, 1941; PP, Trial ID 20448, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

81 PP, Trial ID 18613, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

82 PP, Trial ID 20341, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

83 PP, Trial ID 18625, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

84 PP, Trial ID 18630, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

85 PP, Trial ID 6878, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

86 Peter Conole, Policing the Western Third (Perth: Western Australia Police, 2009), 10.

87 PP, Trial ID 12429, WASC, Wallace Dusting, 1931.

88 PP, Trial ID 8768, WASC, John Hay, 1936.

89 Jessie B. Ramey, ‘“I Dream of Them Almost Every Night”: Working-Class Fathers and Orphanages in Pittsburgh, 1878–1929’, Journal of Family History 37, no. 1 (2012): 39.

90 Shurlee Swain, ‘“I Am Directed to Remind You of Your Duty to Your Family”: Public Surveillance of Mothering in Victoria, Australia, 1920–40’, Women’s History Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 252.

91 Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, 35; Johnny Bell, ‘Putting Dad in the Picture: Fatherhood in the Popular Women’s Magazines of 1950s Australia’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 6 (2013): 912.

92 Chris Cunneen and Rob White, ‘Masculinity and Juvenile Justice’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 29 (1996): 69–70.

93 PP, Trial ID 12486, WASC, Percy Tuckwell, 1931.

94 PP, Trial ID 14148, WASC, William Ivory, 1921; PP, Trial ID 18880, WASC, Anonymous, 1941.

95 PP, Trial ID 18880, WASC, Anonymous, 1941.

96 PP, Trial ID 18625, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

97 PP, Trial ID 20353, WASC, Anonymous, 1946.

98 PP, Trial ID 20451, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

99 PP, Trial ID 8768, WASC, John Hay, 1936; PP, Trial ID 20448, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

100 PP, Trial ID 8768, WASC, John Hay, 1936.

101 PP, Trial ID 18640, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

102 PP, Trial ID 18699, WASC, Anonymous, 1951.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council FL130100050 The Prosecution Project.