"The Melbourne `larrikin' has differentiated himself from the London `rough,' and in due season a term had to be developed to denote the differentiation."
1893. `Sydney Morning Herald,' Aug. 12, p. 13, col. 2:
"Robert Louis Stevenson, in a recent novel, `The Wrecker,' makes the unaccountable mistake of confounding the unemployed Domain loafer with the larrikin. This only shows that Mr. Stevenson during his brief visits to Sydney acquired but a superficial knowledge of the underlying currents of our social life."
1896. J. St. V. Welch, in `Australasian Insurance and Banking Record,' May 19, p. 376:
"Whence comes the larrikin? that pest of these so-called over-educated colonies; the young loafer of from sixteen to eight-and-twenty. Who does not know him, with his weedy, contracted figure; his dissipated pimply face; his greasy forelock brushed flat and low over his forehead; his too small jacket; his tight-cut trousers; his high-heeled boots; his arms—with out-turned elbows—swinging across his stomach as he hurries along to join his `push,' as he calls the pack in which he hunts the solitary citizen—-a pack more to be dreaded on a dark night than any pack of wolves—and his name in Sydney is legion, and in many cases he is a full-fledged voter."
1896. W. H. Whelan, in `The Argus,' Jan. 7, p. 6, col. 3:
"Being clerk of the City Court, I know that the word originated in the very Irish and amusing way in which the then well-known Sergeant Dalton pronounced the word larking in respect to the conduct of `Tommy the Nut,' a rowdy of the period, and others of both sexes in Stephen (now Exhibition) street.
"Your representative at the Court, the witty and clever `Billy' O'Hea, who, alas! died too early, took advantage of the appropriate sound of the word to apply it to rowdyism in general, and, next time Dalton repeated the phrase, changed the word from verb to noun, where it still remains, anything to the contrary notwithstanding. I speak of what I do know, for O'Hea drew my attention to the matter at the time, and, if I mistake not, a reference to your files would show that it was first in the `Argus' the word appeared in print."
("We can fully confirm Mr. Whelan's account of the origin of the word `larrikin.'"—Ed. `Argus.')
[But see quotation from `Argus,' 1871.]