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| On ABC Canberra Radio: I’ve just heard Richard Fidler interviewing Kel Richards about Richards’ new book “Flash Jim; the story of James Hardy Vaux and his Dictionary of Flash Language”. On Conversations. |
Fascinating.
Will “shortly” be on the ABC Radio website and I can’t recommend it highly enough. LATER: Here it is.
Richards tells the story of a James Vaux, a right scoundrel who was transported to Australia a record three times, getting rearrested each time back in England for yet another variation of his many cons. In Australia he tried — successfully— to mitigate a Hard Labour sentence by writing what turned out to be Australia’s first dictionary - “Dictionary of the Flash Language”.
From the ABC Website:
Australia's first dictionary was authored by a convict named James Hardy Vaux.
When researching the life of James Vaux, author Kel Richards discovered the story of a fraudster and gentleman thief transported to New South Wales three times for his crimes.
In order to avoid hard labour, Vaux wrote a dictionary of convict slang, known as the 'Flash Language', so magistrates could understand what prisoners were saying.
Over time, many words and phrases from the Flash Language became a part of Australian English, and words like 'pinch', 'yarn', 'togs', and 'snitch' entered everyday life.
Further information: Flash Jim is published by HarperCollins.
ADDED: Vaux is pronounced “vox”; at least by Kel Richards and I guess he knows. I would have assumed it rhymed with “faux” as in faux pas. Which in turn reminds me of an old school friend Barry Faux, pronounced “foe”, though occasionally we teased his as “Barry Fox”. He later set up his own company calling it, to this day, Fox Furniture. I’m wondering, was “Vaux” always pronounced “vox” or did it just become that way in Oz?
By the way, Fidler is pronounced “fie-dler”. (Not, as I would have assumed, “fiddler”…).
