larrikin

noun

1. (Australia, New-Zealand, historical, slang)A young, brash, and impertinent, and possibly violent, troublemaker, especially one who is a gang member; a hooligan.

   “To keep me out of trouble I was sent to the wood-gang Cascade an out station about two miles from headquarters. On arriving at this place the following dialogue passed between me and the overseer: […] "A bit of a larrikin, T——, but it won't do here, you know." "No odds about that—what's the work?"”

   “How dare you talk to me like that, you young larrikin? Be off! or I'll send for a policeman.”

   “The reputation of the Melbourne larrikin was world wide, the larrikin being the forerunner of the hooligan. Law and education had failed to reform these larrikins, and at last some of the citizens hit on the method of forming cadet corps, which had proved to be a conspicuous success, and larrikinism was now dead; the streets of Melbourne knew it no more as a real source of terror.”

2. (Australia, broadly, slang)A high-spirited person who playfully rebels against authority and conventional norms; a maverick or scamp.

   “On all occasions Captain Smith's military character was good, though he was always a bit of a larrikin, and had a way of practical joking.”

   “When [Frank] Browne's turn came, he went down like a true larrikin, giving cheek to the end. He spoke eloquently and at length about freedom of speech.”

   “From the moment he had become opposition leader following the defeat of Lindsay Thompson's government in 1982, Jeff Kennett had been viewed as a political larrikin. […] To his defenders, Kennett was simply a brash and youthful leader seeking to energise the defeated Liberal Party and remove the "dead wood" from its ranks. Yet, to his many detractors, Jeff Kennett was shallow and reckless with a propensity for silly and embarrassing gaffes.”

adj

1. (Australia, historical, slang)Exhibiting the behaviour or characteristics of a larrikin (noun sense).

   “Hoping my letter will have the desired effect of removing the larrikin nuisance especially in such a central portion of the town, […]”

   “A similar larrikin streak sends louts into city parks to shy stones at monuments and chip noses of statuary.”

   “[…] [Edward] Dyson turned to the city, and in Fact'ry 'Ands (1906) concentrated upon the larrikin class which had developed in Melbourne since [Robert Percy] Whitworth first noted it.”

   “‘Larrikin gangs’ were a conspicuous feature of Sydney; and as a result of the selection acts, it was said, in the country perjury became a common-place in the lives of all.”

   “Despite his skills as a singer and storyteller, Percy [Bird] sometimes felt like an outsider among the diggers, excluded by his own ideal and practice of moral manhood from the more larrikin masculinity that he perceived to be predominant.”

2. (Australia, broadly, slang)Exhibiting the behaviour or characteristics of a larrikin (noun sense).

   “Mungo [Wentworth] MacCallum is hardly typecast as the chronicler of the story of what has gone right and wrong about the business of immigration, regular and irregular, to this country but this most larrikin and cold-eyed of one-time Canberra chroniclers brings to this story all his wit and dryness and power of mind.”

   “"We're all a bit embarrassed by him [Steve Irwin]. He puts that image of Australia to the world – that larrikin attitude – and we're not all like that," says Milo Laing, 27, the manager of an Australian-themed bar on Shaftesbury Avenue. "But at the end of the day he did a lot of work for charities and he employed 550 people in his zoo. He grabbed life by the horns."”