Author Description

Edited by Gary Simes, Australian Underworld Slang contains two previously unpublished glossaries of Australian prison and underworld slang compiled in the 1940s and 1950s. The first was compiled in 1944 by Ted Hartley, a conscientious objector imprisoned for his political beliefs. On Hartley's release, the novelist Kylie Tennant asked him to produce the glossary to assist her in the writing of a novel about prisoners. The glossary then lay forgotten and unrecognized in the National Library until Gary Simes's fortuitous discovery of it. The second glossary was compiled by a prisoner calling himself `35', whose identity has never been divulged. The `Argot', as it was called, was revised by `35' in 1975, but this edition has not been located. Dr Simes combines the glossaries and draws on the full resources of the OED and the AND and his own formidable database of underworld and sexual language to place them in a broader lexicographical and historical context. He also contributes a long and important essay on the criminal literature since the Middle Ages.