By Matthew Klugman
In 1877 the Melbourne writer Marcus Clarke mocked celebrations of the coming greatness of white Australia in an essay on The Future Australian Race. Among other attributes, Clarke predicted that Australian men would become renowned for their ‘good lungs’ and strong jaws. But while Clarke was imagining the Australia of 1977, within a decade Melbourne had become notorious for the howling and hooting of men who seemed to be putting their robust lungs and muscled jaws to ill use. Indeed to some scandalised observers these barrackers – as they were termed – were evidence that white Australian men were degenerating rather than progressing.
The earliest known references to barrackers occur in 1878, just one year after Clarke’s essay was published. The occasion was a cricket game between South Melbourne Imperial and Hillside that was marred by ill-feeling between the vocal spectators. In a letter to one of Melbourne’s numerous suburban newspapers, ‘Hillite’ blamed the ‘barrackers (a slang appellation) of the South Melbourne Imperial Club’. (Record and Emerald Hill and Sandridge Advertiser, 15 February 1878) One of the umpires of the game replied with a letter claiming that the ‘barracking’ of the Hillside supporters was ‘far more troublesome’ than that of those supporting South Melbourne. (Record and Emerald Hill and Sandridge Advertiser, 22 February 1878) ‘A Lover of Cricket (When it is Fair)’ joined in the debate a few weeks later, stating that the South Melbourne ‘barrackers’ had used ‘disgusting’ language ‘towards the Hillside men’. The partisan behaviour of these supporters was especially troubling for this observer. When South Melbourne’s captain was bowled the ‘barrackers’ let loose ‘numerous cries of “What a fluke, how did you do it”’, but that when the Imperials ‘bowled a man out there were no cries then of “what a fluke”’. (Record and Emerald Hill and Sandridge Advertiser, 8 March 1878)
In these early exchanges it was already clear that the terms barracker and barracking were pejorative. To barrack was to jeer or shout out abuse. Not only was such behaviour offensive, but barrackers behaved unfairly, cheering one side while haranguing the other. As ‘Hillite’ made clear 18 months later, those at fault were viewed as uncouth workingclass men. Cricket was ‘better off without them’ because the ‘barracking fraternity … converts the cricket field into a low bawling house’ with ‘a lot of excited partisans rushing about frantically with their mouths full of unrefined adjectives, hardly fitted for respectable society, or to be tuned in a modest one’s ears’. (Record and Emerald Hill and Sandridge Advertiser, 21 November 1879)
When Edward Morris published his groundbreaking Austral English in 1898, the terms barrack, barracker, and barracking had become primarily associated with Australian Rules football rather than cricket. Nevertheless, their general use remained disapproving. As Morris noted, to barrack generally meant ‘to jeer at opponents, to interrupt noisily, to make a disturbance; with the preposition “for”, to support as a partisan, generally with clamour’. The verb barrack had even been ‘ruled unparliamentary by the Speaker in the Victorian Legislative Assembly’.
Yet while the early meaning of the terms was clear, the etymologies of barrack, barracker, and barracking were contested in a manner that hinted at the tensions and complexities of a British colonial settler sporting culture shaped by invasion, migration, and the displacement of Aboriginal peoples. Morris was certain that barrack derived from borak, an Aboriginal word he attributed to New South Wales (likely Dharug) ‘meaning banter, chaff, fun at another’s expense’. Borak is now understood to be from the Aboriginal Wathaurong language of the Bellarine Peninsula (meaning ‘no’ or ‘not’). It inspired the once widely used Australian phrase poke borak (‘poke fun’ or ‘ridicule’), and thus might be linked to the jeering nature of barracking.
In 1884, shortly after arriving in Melbourne, Edward Dyson published a short story in Australian Tit-Bits that directly tied barracking to poking borak (Colac Herald, 12 September 1884). However, fifty years later the lexicographer Eric Partridge was scathing of what he considered to be the unnecessarily ‘pedantic’ linking of barrack to an Indigenous Australian term rather than to the language that British migrants brought with them. Writing in 1937 in his famous A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Partridge declared that barracking was ‘a very natural development’ of the Cockney barrakin or barrikin which meant ‘jargon’.
In a later edition Partridge mentioned a letter from the prominent Victorian journalist Guy Innes who attributed barracker to the British soldiers who resided in the Victorian barracks in Melbourne until 1870. Perhaps this letter shaped Geoffrey Blainey’s view that the term barracker became popular because it evoked memories of those loud, rough British soldiers whose games against Victorian teams drew large crowds in the mid to late 1860s (A Game of Our Own).
More recently The Australian National Dictionary (second edition, 2016) and others have come down in favour of the Northern Irish word barrack – to brag and boast of fighting powers. Yet if the term did come from overseas, the link to a vocal, rough sporting spectator culture seems to have been developed in Melbourne. Sporting barrackers and associated acts of barracking were first mentioned occasionally in the British press in the 1880s in discussions of Australian Rules football and cricket crowds. Usage of the term slowly increased over the ensuing decades as British journalists started using it to describe the behaviour of local sports spectators as well as those in the Antipodes. However the terms retained their pejorative edge, and they continue to be used in a disapproving manner in Britain to this day.
But to return to Melbourne: who were the initial barrackers and what was so disturbing about their actions to occasion the development of these new terms? As the references to barrackers and barracking increased in Melbourne’s suburban newspapers in the early 1880s, the focus shifted to Australian Rules football. Like the first references to cricket, the barrackers in question were depicted as working-class men unable or unwilling to behave in a respectable manner. They yelled loudly and crudely. Worst of all they tended to direct their frustration and rage at one individual: the umpire.
The Leader newspaper’s main football correspondent ‘Follower’ led the condemnation. ‘This abominable “barracking” mania is becoming simply insufferable’, ‘Follower’ wrote in 1883, decrying the mass ‘hostility to a capable and impartial umpire, probably for fairly and strictly enforcing the laws which are supposed to regulate the game’. (Melbourne Leader, 18 August 1883) As a sardonic letter to the Melbourne Punch put it:
Football umpires in all our big matches are the most disobliging set of individuals in existence. They seldom if ever comply with the wishes of the thousands of spectators who assemble every Saturday to witness our big events. (Melbourne Punch, 30 July 1885)
Like larrikins, barrackers were taking pleasure in flouting the rules of respectability. In this case, barrackers indulged in the pleasures of partiality. Rather than behaving reasonably, they cheered umpires for decisions in favour of their team, and harangued them when the decision went the other way, regardless of whether they appeared to be the correct calls. As ‘Follower’ put it, the ‘mass of those who allow themselves to become victims to excitement’ became ‘senseless’ and incapable of judging ‘the merits of the game dispassionately’. The result, ‘Follower’ concluded sorrowfully, was ‘that your real red hot “barracker” is as a rule singularly blind to that which he would rather not see’. (Melbourne Leader, 18 July 1885)
But rationality was a hallmark of civilised masculinity. It was what supposedly placed white men above white women and the men of other races. To wilfully choose pleasure over reasonableness was to risk one’s manliness and court degradation. Umpires needed to be protected ‘from the jeers and taunts of leather-lunged partisans’ if the game were ‘to be carried on as a manly sport’, editorialised the Sportsman. (Melbourne Sportsman, 9 September 1885)
The bodies of the barrackers themselves seemed to be at risk. Eyes would go blind, lungs coarsen, jaws harden, brains wither. In 1887 Edward Dyson claimed to have conducted an in-depth study of the ‘scientific’ devolution of ‘the barracker’s mouth’. (South Bourke and Mornington Journal, 13 July 1887) He returned to this theme in 1889 providing a grotesque, if sardonic, vision of the future mouths of Melbourne’s barrackers:
I have watched the rise and progress of the barracker with great interest. I have noted the development of his lungs, and seen, the corners of his mouth drive his ears back, till they will nearly meet and tie behind. … and I foresee the time when his mouth will run down to his hips, and he’ll split apart like a clothes horse when he desires to express the warmth of his feelings at a future match. (Melbourne Punch, 23 May 1889)
In the same year ‘Viator’ of the Weekly Times was both appalled and fascinated by the way barrackers ‘contorted their faces and their bodies’ all the while, ‘yelling’ themselves hoarse. ‘What will become of the great army of barrackers’ asked Viator, their ‘brains are out, but the men don’t die’. (Melbourne Weekly Times, 17 August 1889)
By this time newspaper reporters were increasingly concerned that middle-class men were also succumbing to the joys of barracking for one team and against the other. Dyson’s account in 1887, for example, asserted that, ‘The barracker belongs exclusively to no grade of society. He may be a counter jumper, grocer’s clerk, or young mechanic. Even the gentle civil servant becomes energetic enough to howl’. (South Bourke and Mornington Journal, 13 July 1887)
In other words, it seemed to at least some observers that the excitement of football games threatened the impartiality – and thus rationality – of men of all classes. The result of such racial degradation could also be seen as threatening future generations, with a writer claiming in the Melbourne Punch in 1889 that ‘the great-grandchildren of the football barracker’ would be ‘paupers, lunatics, or criminals’. (Melbourne Punch, 16 May 1889)
In the 1890s it seemed like women were also embracing barracking. Accounts of female barrackers typically evinced surprise that girls and women could follow Australian Rules football as passionately as men. This surprise turned to horror in 1896 when female barrackers were accused of starting a melee and attacking the umpire during a clash between North Melbourne and Collingwood. A report in the Argus decrying these women was reprinted around the world:
The woman ‘barracker’, indeed, has become one of the most objectionable of football surroundings. On some grounds they actually spit in the faces of players as they come to the dressing-rooms, or wreak their spite much more maliciously with long hat pins. In the height of this melee some of the women screamed with fear, others screamed ‘Kill him’. (Argus, 21 July 1896)
It was not until 1909, however, that some men called for women to be banned from attending games. In what might have been part of the backlash following Victorian women winning the right to vote in November 1908, ‘Meteor’ wrote to the Melbourne Herald in June 1909 arguing that the coarse language of male barrackers was harming young women who ‘would be better employed at home in domestic work’. (Herald, 12 June 1909) A few months later the state MP Samuel Mauger sparked further debate by announcing that ‘a leading doctor in Melbourne had informed him that the young women of Melbourne were undermining their constitutions by yelling and getting excited at football matches’. (Age, 22 September 1909)
Although female barrackers were often described as ‘invading’ football grounds, the claims of ‘Meteor’ and Mauger were met with derision. The Leader observed caustically that ‘hitherto nobody has imagined for one moment that’ women might endanger their ‘health by indulging in vocal exercise’, and that it was ‘a terrible warning for suffragettes and female politicians generally’. (Melbourne Leader, 25 September 1909) Punch, meanwhile, noted that there was ‘not much to be gained from the discussion, since woman has answered it in a most emphatic manner, a manner that leaves no loophole for disputation, by going to football matches persistently and in large numbers’. (Melbourne Punch, 15 July 1909)
Sports reporters were not the only people concerned by the rise of Melbourne’s barrackers. Bankers like J.H. Barrows and socialists like Bernard O’Dowd were equally disturbed by this particular form of ‘football mania’. Yet barrackers seemed to here to stay, and the term largely lost its pejorative edge in Melbourne and the rest of Australia after the First World War. It has nevertheless remained a characteristic Australian term. Indeed the words of O’Dowd’s friend, John Buckley Castieau, still ring true. Writing as ‘Jarno’ in 1900 in the socialist newspaper Tocsin that he co-edited with O’Dowd, Castieau proclaimed that the Australian barracker was ‘as distinct a species as the platypus and kangaroo’, transcending both ‘social [class] distinction’ and ‘sex’, and that ‘the female enthusiast, both highborn lady and daughter of the people, forms not an unfamiliar variation in Australian crowds’. (Tocsin, 4 January 1900)
Matthew Klugman is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Health & Sport, Victoria University. His research interests include those who love and hate sport, and the intersections of sport, passions, bodies, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and migration. He has written about the emergence of ‘Genus Barracker’ in Australian Historical Studies, and the rise of female barrackers in the International Journal of the History of Sport. Email: [email protected]
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