INDEX: Bodgies and Widgies | Beatniks | Surfies | Mods and Rockers | Hippies | Sharpies

1950s - Bodgies and Widgies 

‘What’s a bodgie, Connie?’  ‘A drongo who’s younger than a grub but thinks he’s old enough to have a widgie.’
(P. Radley, Jack Rivers and Me, 1981, p. 25)

Bodgies and Widgies were a youth subculture that existed in Australia and New Zealand in the 1950s, similar to the Teddy Boy culture in the UK or the Greaser culture in the US. The males were called Bodgies and the females were called Widgies. Bodgies were well-known for their often loutish behaviour. On 1st February 1951 the Sydney Morning Herald wrote on its front page: What with "bodgies" growing their hair long and getting around in satin shirts, and "weegies" cutting their hair short and wearing jeans, confusion seems to be arising about the sex of some Australian adolescents.

The Mazengarb Report (Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents) of 1954 was partly a response to the emergence of the bodgie & widgie subculture. In 1956, the Sydney Morning Herald suggested: The first bodgies were World War 2 Australian seamen who as well as impersonating Americans were black marketers and the first bodgie gang was the ‘Woolloomooloo Yanks’ who congregated in Cathedral Street Woolloomooloo. By 1948, about 200 bodgies were regularly frequenting Kings Cross milk bars. Soon, bodgie gangs formed at other inner-Sydney locations. After a time, moccasins and American drape suits complete with pegged trousers replaced their attire of blue jeans and leather American Airline jackets or zoot suits. For bodgies, almost all of whom were working class, emulating the high status Americans who had so recently occupied Australia as military personnel was easier than achieving upward social mobility.

In 1983, the Melbourne Age suggested: the term "bodgie" arose around the Darlinghurst area in Sydney. It was just after the end of World War II and rationing had caused a flourishing black market in American-made cloth. "People used to try and pass off inferior cloth as American-made when in fact it was not: so it was called bodgie"... "When some of the young guys started talking with American accents to big-note themselves they were called bodgies."

1950s - Beatniks

The Beatnik culture, inspired by authors such as Jack Kerouac, was in vogue in the 1950s. Known also as The Beat Generation, Beatniks originated and were predominant American. The original Beat Generation writers met in New York. Later, the central figures ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. The language and topics of beat writing pushed the boundaries of acceptability in the conformist 1950's: they often openly discussed drug use, sexuality (in particular homosexuality) and criminal behavior without condemnation, and sometimes with approval. Their philosophies fostered an interest in Eastern religion, and a rejection of materialism. It was from the remants of Beatnik culture that the Hippie culture would eventually revolve. Members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

Maynard G. Krebs, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis	Peter, Paul & Mary

The Beatnik code of dress for women included oversized chunky long sweaters with huge cowl collars worn over slim fitting pencil skirts or slacks with stirrups. They usually had a French pleat hairstyle or showed the start of a beehive. Men wore circular or semi-circular pencil beards. Wearing all black or light grey was a favourite choice for beatniks. Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver), Dobie Gillis' best friend on the TV sitcom, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was the first Beatnik on television and remains the most famous Beatnik in history.

The early 1960s folk music culture that pervaded the coffee houses of New York City's Greenwich Village evolved out of the early New York Beat culture of the previous decade. Peter Yarrow and Noel (Paul) Stookey of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, which developed out of the Greenwich Village folk music scene, are seen with Beat Generation pencil beards and wearing light grey Beatnik suits in early group photographs and on early album covers.

1960s - Surfies

Most Australians, and particularly middle class young Australians, possessed an optimistic outlook on life in the 1960s - or at least the popular press told them that they should. The great depression was a distant memory for older Australians and fullemployment was the norm. Opportunities to succeed were unprecedented. Little wonder, that so many believed that they were living in a ‘Lucky Country’.

Consequently, Australians embraced an urbanised, middle-class reality with leisure at the centre of its social focus. Advertisers, sought to identify with potential customers by embracing sun-tanned, healthy, youthful, well-to-do beach goers as a new target demographic. As young Australians internalised advertisers’ messages, social stratification based on surfing ability, good looks, wealth and ethnicity became commonplace on Australia’s beaches. Representations of the ideal surfer and physically attractive female beach-goers alienated the not-so wealthy, the not-so-good looking and the less well-informed, but their inability to belong strengthened the image’s exclusive appeal.

Commercial Radio and television stations recognised the buying-power of the affluent young, leaving working-class baby-boomers resentful and alienated by the promotions. Teenage television programmes such as Sing, Sing Sing, Bandstand, and later, Komotion offered suitable vehicles for soft drink, denim jeans, toothpaste and hair shampoo advertisements that specifically targeted teenagers and often projected the beach as a backdrop. Some of the most popular stations actually visited the beaches. The radio broadcasts may have appeared inclusive, but the tabloid newspapers reporting the events invariably focused upon the glamorous young people at the beach. For Melbourne’s Sun, for example, almost any excuse was utilised to insert a photograph of a teenage girl in a bathing suit in its pages.

The cult of surfing achieved a high degree of media, and therefore public, acceptance. Its adherents were also more likely to be largely middle or upper class with the finances to afford holidays at the beach. Teenagers in beach side suburbs conformed to the dictates of surfie fashions. As Craig McGregor related in a 1964 Walkabout article about Midget Farrelly, surfing had become a ‘cult’. ‘Surf records regularly top the hit parades and teenagers who’ve never been on a surfboard pack out screenings of American surf films’. By the late 1960s, many male and female surfies wore long hair bleached blonde, caftan style tops or T-shirts, corduroy or denim jeans and leather sandals or thongs. This was not working class attire, and even amongst middle-class teenagers, acceptance was far from assured, with a brutal hierarchy operating in most High Schools. For youths in the Melbourne beachside suburbs of Frankston and Mt Eliza, acceptance was dependent upon a slim build, blond hair and a deep tan. In Brisbane, some surfie school-girls attached small, carved, wooden surfboards to their necklaces.

Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, in Puberty Blues (right), set in the early 1970s, vividly describe the scene: "Sue and I were trying to make it into the ultimate surfie gang at Greenhills. It was special - the prettiest and coolest girls at school and the best surfers on the beach. To graduate into the surfie gang you had to be desired by one of the surfie boys, tell off a teacher, do the Scotch drawback and know all about sex. … You had to be interested in surfing, but not interested enough to surf. .. The surfie boys were brown and broad. The longer and blonder the hair, the better. … The better they surfed, the higher their rank."

Surfers’ conversation was larded with American slang, they bought the latest American surf magazines and, in part, identified themselves with the US teenage cult. Antagonism existed between surfies and rockers based upon upper class snobbery and working class resentment. In the early 1960s, ‘rockers, roamed Sydney’s beaches assaulting surfers’, with the gangs offering working class youth ‘solidarity against the individualism and diffuse styles of consumer capitalism adopted by the middle class’ surfies.

Many beaches in the 1960s reflected class divisions. The prestige of the suburb in which beaches were located was often important. Amongst Melbourne’s bay beaches, Brighton was more prestigious than Chelsea and Portsea had a higher status than Rosebud. In Sydney, the rich tended to frequent the northern beaches of Newport, Avalon, Whale Beach and Palm Beach while the workers gravitated to Bondi, Coogee and Maroubra. Surf board riding was not an inclusive sport. From an early age, surfies learnt about social stratification based upon surfing ability, good looks, wealth and ethnicity. In Puberty Blues, Carey and Lette comment that in the early 1970s at Crunulla, the beach was divided into three main sections - South Cronulla, North Cronulla, and Greenhills. The most skilled surfboard riders and ‘the prettiest girls from school’ ‘hung out’ at Greenhills, whereas ‘the bad surfboard riders on their ‘L’ plates, the Italian family groups and the ‘uncool’ kids from Bankstown (Bankies), swarmed to south Cronulla’.

Traditional class-based, racist, sexist values dominated the popular image of the beach in the 1960s. In December 1967, Everybody’s magazine, similarly described the migrants who gravitated to the working-class beach of Bondi in patronising terms: On a blazing Sunday, [Bondi] lures 100,000 people to its shores. They swarm like ants on the sand. And they come in all shapes and nationalities. … there is a Momma and a Poppa and the bambinos and salami sandwiches and flasks of warm ‘red’. … On weekends, it’s hard walking along the sand without treading on someone or finding a space to swim (Everybody’s, 20th December 1967).

Male surfers frequently discriminated against young women who wished to surf. In 1967, a regular ABC program, Checkerboard, investigated the situation. Interviews with young male board riders revealed that they regarded the sport as a masculine activity. Their statements included: ‘You see a girl out in the surf and it looks ridiculous’; ‘they do develop muscles in the wrong spots and I don’t like taking a girl out with arm muscles bigger than myself’; ‘I think it’s just a men’s sport’; ‘I don’t like girls surfing at all. I reckon they clutter up the water’ and ‘I think they should involve themselves in more feminine activities’ (Checkerboard, 1967). Notwithstanding male derision, numbers of females participated in the sport. During May 1970, the world surfing contest took place at Bells Beach, near Torquay, but the newspapers still portrayed females conservatively, with the Sun in its coverage printing a full-page photograph of dual
world champion surfer, Joyce Hoffman, darning her wetsuit (Sun, 1st May 1970). As Age reporter and novelist Fiona Capp, reflecting upon the period, commented, ‘for a girl to be accepted into a surfie gang, … she had to be interested in surfing but not interested enough to surf’ (Age, 9th November 2003).

Craig McGregor, writing for Walkabout magazine, accurately predicted in 1966 that the baby boomers would ‘increase the sophistication of … society … but also accelerate the change-over to opportunist, middle-class values’. Forty years later, the individualism of this 1960s beach-going generation has become mainstream.

1960s - Mods and Rockers

Mods, a term derived from from modernists, originated in London, England in the late 1950s and peaked in the early to mid 1960s. Significant elements of the mod subculture include: fashion (often tailor-made suits); pop music, including African American soul, Jamaican ska, and British beat music and R&B; and Italian motor scooters such as the Vespa. The original mod scene was also associated with amphetamine-fuelled all-night dancing at clubs. From the mid to late 1960s onwards, the mass media often used the term mod in a wider sense to describe anything that was believed to be popular, fashionable or modern.

The term mod was a term first used in the 1950s to describe modern jazz musicians and fans. This usage contrasted with the term trad, which described traditional jazz players and fans. The 1959 novel Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes describes as a modernist a young modern jazz fan (predominantly University students) who dresses in sharp modern Italian clothes.

The haunt of mods were coffee bars, most of which had juke boxes which in some cases reserved some of the space in the machines for the students' own records. In the late 1950s, coffee bars were associated with jazz and blues, but in the early 1960s, they began playing more R&B music. At these venues, youths would meet collectors of R&B and blues records, who introduced them to new types of African-American music, which the teens were attracted to for its rawness and authenticity. For Britain and to a lesser degree Australia, these were the first sign of the youth movement of the 1960s. By the summer of 1966, the mod scene was in sharp decline; it lost its vitality when it became commercialised, artificial and stylised to the point that new mod clothing styles were being created by clothing companies and by TV shows like Ready Steady Go!, rather than being developed by young people customising their clothes and mixing different fashions together. More ...

Rockers grew out of the Teddy Boy subculture and we seen as opposities to Mods. While mods were seen as "effeminate, stuck-up, emulating the middle classes, aspiring to a competitive sophistication, snobbish, [and] phony", rockers were seen as "hopelessly naive, loutish, [and] scruffy", emulating Marlon Brando's motorcycle gang leader character in the film The Wild One by wearing leather jackets and riding motorcycles. Rockers, who were predominantly leather-jacketed bikers, viewed the vanity and obsession with clothes of the Mods as not particularly masculine. British mods and skinheads commonly called rockers greasers or grease as an insult.

In the United Kingdom, rockers were often engaged in brawls with mods. Mods and rockers were jailed after riots in seaside resort towns on the south coast of England, such as Margate, Brighton, Bournemouth and Clacton in the spring of 1964. In recent years, the British media has been accused of turning the mod subculture into a negative symbol of delinquent and deviant status, and that the clashes between the Mods and Rockers were no different from the evening brawls that occurred between youths throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, both at seaside resorts and after football games, and that in the later guise, continue today.

First seen in the United States and then England, the Rocker fashion style was born out of necessity and practicality. Rockers wore heavily-decorated leather motorcycle jackets, often adorned with metal studs, patches, pin badges and sometimes an Esso gas man trinket. The rocker hairstyle, kept in place with Brylcreem, was usually a tame or exaggerated pompadour hairstyle, as was popular with some 1950s rock and roll musicians. Largely due to their clothing styles and dirtiness, the rockers were not widely welcomed by venues such as pubs and dance halls. Rockers also transformed rock and roll dancing into a more violent, individualistic form beyond the control of dance hall management.

The Rockers' look and attitude influenced pop groups from The Beatles in 1960, to punk rock bands and their fans in the late 1970s. In the early 1970s, the British rocker and hardcore motorcycle scene fractured and evolved under new influences coming in from California: the hippies and the Hells Angels. The remaining rockers became known as greasers (the title of the movie Grease is a reference to greasers). The Rocker subculture never disappeared completely, Rockers still wear engineer boots or full-length motorcycle boots, but Winklepickers (sharp pointed shoes) are no longer common. Rockers have continued to wear motorcycle jackets, leather trousers and white silk scarves while riding their bikes. More ...

1970s - Sharpies

Like both international subcultures of the day, the Mods and Skins, Sharpies were predominantly working-class white boys who banded together and found an outlet in gang codes and rituals. The sharpies of the 1970s are very much part of Melbourne folklore. Peter Robertson’s 2001 exhibition of photographs of the South Blackburn Sharps fouced on the sub-culture of the 70’s sharpies. Roberston has described this period as a “distinctly Australian vernacular”, a vibe that was all about growing up in suburbia before video, the internet and computer games. “Life as a teenager was unbearably boring for some. Out of this environment came sharpies”.

The Sharpies uniform - tight, knitted "Conte" cardigans and chisel-toed leather boots hold the signs of early Australian multiculturalism. Filmmaker Rebecca McLean explains: "I spoke to a Greek guy who came to Australia as a boy. He was a bit earlier than Sharpies, kind of late 1960s when he was a young man, and he would always dress up - even if you had no money you would always dress up - you'd spend your money on clothes before anything else. He said he'd try to get himself a pair of tailored pants and you just couldn't get anything - there was nothing on the shelf, it was all just Yakka-type stuff and so he'd go to a tailor and ask them to make a pair of pants and say 'I want them like this.' And then he'd go to a cobbler and say 'I want my shoes just so' and so that's how they got their gear. And then people like the Conte family came over and they started making cardigans because they had no money. They had a knitting machine and no money, so the community said 'well, you knit us our cardigans and that will be your thing'."

In the same way that the Hippie counter-culture and peace movement, which was taking hold in universities in the 1970s, provided a pivotal ground for middle-class rebellion, the Sharpie gangs of the suburbs were a reaction against conservative post-war Australia. The Sharps' attention to style and detail in their outfits were a rebellion against the bland conservatism that was suburban Australia in the '70s. But while retrospective adulation from the contemporary fashion world might paint them as progenitors of a sophisticated Australian fashion consciousness, the Sharps were as concerned with busting heads as they were with looking good. Sharps expressed their difference through a well-dressed thuggery that was designed to intimidate by thumbing its nose at mainstream conventions of dressing and behaviour. A lot of the time, violence and bullying was the defining experience of being a Sharp.

Musician Larry Jenkins was a member of the Blackburn South Sharps. Hec recalls, "We'd travel in numbers. And we'd get hassled by the cops, big time, because you were a Sharpie. The record is I got picked up by the cops four times in one day, that's the most I got picked up. You'd get picked up all the time because we looked the way we looked. Really it was such a hassle to go somewhere you'd either get in a fight or the cops would get you, you sort of stayed in your boundaries unless you had something you wanted to go to like the Myer Music Bowl to see AC/DC. There we had a big punch up with the Melbourne Sharps. Everywhere we went we had trouble. But we would go to certain events - go see bands in other suburbs or see girls. We listened to Susie Quattro and watched Clint Eastwood movies, we liked Paul Hogan, Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls and AC/DC. We just liked everything that was tough. Tough movies, acting tough, and that's what it boils down to basically." By the end of the decade the sharpies had all but disappeared and a new kind of rebel was taking their place - punks.

Further information: Mods | Rockers | Sharpies | British Mods & Rockers | Teddy Boys | Blockies