The astonishing story of James Hardy Vaux, writer of Australia's first dictionary and one of the first candid true-crime memoirs
If you wear 'togs', tell a 'yarn', call someone 'sly', or refuse to 'snitch' on a friend ... then you are talking like a convict.
These words, and hundreds of others, once left colonial magistrates baffled and police confused. So comprehensible to us today, the flash language of criminals and convicts had marine officer Watkin Tench complaining about the need for an interpreter in the colonial court.
Luckily, by 1811, that man was at hand. James Hardy Vaux - conman, pickpocket, absconder and thief - born into comfortable circumstances in England - was so drawn to a life of crime he was transported to Australia ... not once, but three times!
Vaux's talents, glibness and audacity were extraordinary, and perceiving an opportunity to ingratiate himself with authorities during his second period of sentence, he...