The Convict Who Wrote A Dictionary

             Spread on the table in front of him were sheets of paper, a pot of ink, a small knife and a quill.

NIGHT HAD FALLEN on the new penal settlement north of Sydney town. It was June 1812 and its name, Newcastle, had just been proclaimed – or rather, borrowed from the coal port in northeastern England – as the permanent replacement for the earlier title of Coal River. The long, low wooden barracks was in darkness except for a flickering glow that could be seen through a small open window at one end.

The light was coming from a candle sputtering on the table at which the convict residents had eaten their evening meal. Still sitting there was a man of 30 wearing the grey flannel of a convict. Spread on the table in front of him were sheets of paper, a pot of ink, a small knife and a quill. This was James Hardy Vaux, and he was writing Australia’s first dictionary.

Born in 1782, Vaux grew up in the Shropshire market town of Shifnal. His father worked as a butler in a grand English house and his grandfather was a lawyer. He received a good education at a local grammar school but declined to follow his grandfather into law. He longed instead for a more “active” life in the army or navy.

His parents and grandparents were horrified. A compromise was arrived at and Vaux was apprenticed to a merchant in Liverpool.

Unfortunately, in that bustling port of international trade he found the lure of the city’s dark underside irresistible and fell into a life of petty crime. His apprenticeship was cancelled, and he returned home in disgrace.

His family sent him to London to work as a solicitor’s clerk – another job he lost, for being “of corrupt character and a bad influence on the other clerks”. By then Vaux was frequenting a notorious haunt of the professional criminal class called The George & Blue Boar Inn. Soon he was a skilled con man, pickpocket and thief.

He managed to break away from this life briefly when in 1798 he joined the navy, signing on to the ship Astrea as a midshipman. But his tour of duty ended after less than a year when in 1799 he jumped ship for the love of a girl. During shore leave in London, Vaux had become so taken with a young prostitute he moved in with her and abandoned his post in the navy…and the straight and narrow path to an honest living.

AFTER THE GIRL’S angry father turned up to reclaim his daughter from the life into which she’d fallen, Vaux was again on his own but continued working as a fraudster, con man and street thief. His downfall came in 1800 when he joined a team of pickpockets and was arrested.

He was convicted and sentenced to seven years transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales. Thanks to his good education, James Vaux had a distinct advantage as one of the very few convicts who could read and write. Moreover, he was experienced in clerical work. This often kept him out of the convict gangs labouring away on hard physical jobs, and saw him instead assigned to keeping records and accounts for colony officials.

As a clerk to the Rev. Samuel Marsden, he played a role in 1806 in an early Australian census – officially called a “muster”. Partly because of this contribution, Vaux was allowed to return to England in 1807, just as his seven-year sentence was about to expire.

He sailed on the ship Buffalo with former NSW governor Philip Gidley King, and was assigned the job of writing up King’s records, which were to be handed over to the Colonial Office in London when they arrived. But by the time the Buffalo sailed into Portsmouth Harbour in November of that year, Vaux had fallen out with King and his rank had been reduced from a clerk to an able seaman in the British Navy. He was dismayed at the prospect of serving in the navy during the Napoleonic Wars, so once the Buffalo was anchored in Portsmouth Harbour, Vaux again found a way to jump ship and flee to London.

There he resumed a life of crime, and once more teamed up with a young prostitute. But this woman insisted he marry her, which he did. They worked together, stealing from jewellery shops by day and by night picking pockets in crowded London theatres.

Inevitably, Vaux again fell into the hands of the law and by 1809 was back in the Old Bailey, charged with the theft of valuable jewels – a capital offence. He was found guilty and sentenced as James Lowe, but his death sentence was commuted to transportation for life to NSW.

VAUX’S SECOND TERM in the convict colony did not go well for him. He was convicted of reoffending by taking part in a series of serious thefts from the deputy judge advocate of the colony, Ellis Bent. As a result, he was sentenced to hard labour in the Newcastle coalmines, which was where repeat offenders were sent. And it’s where Vaux wrote his dictionary of convict slang known as “flash language”.

Vaux was perhaps uniquely equipped to notice and record this evolving local lingo of the new colony. He’d been born into a middle-class family, was well educated for the times, and, as he wrote often in his memoirs, was given every opportunity to find a sound career and live an honest life. This meant that as he drifted into criminal ways, he’d learnt to speak flash as a kind of second language. He had the education to understand how these words were being used, and the literary skill to record this knowledge.

He wrote his dictionary to present to the commandant of the Newcastle convict station, to help ‘translate’ the evidence presented in magistrates’ courts by convicts, either as witnesses or as the accused. Flash language had become so ingrained with convicts that it peppered all of their conversations and left the magistrates baffled.

Vaux hoped his little dictionary would prove useful, and that as a result, he would be released from hard labour in the mines and rewarded with a soft job as a clerk in the quartermaster’s office. His scheme worked.

Sometime later the commandant at Newcastle, impressed and amused by Vaux’s skill as a storyteller, persuaded him to put down his memoirs in writing. The result ended up on the desk of Barron Field, an English lawyer appointed in May 1816, at the age of just 29, as judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature in NSW. Field was also a published author and he sent Vaux’s manuscript to his own publisher in London, John Murray.

Vaux titled his work Memoirs of the First Thirty-Two Years of the Life of James Hardy Vaux, A Swindler and Pickpocket; Now Transported, for the Second Time, and For Life, to New South Wales and it was published in London in 1819 as Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux, Written by Himself. Printed at the back of the book was his small but important dictionary, which was given its own title: A New Vocabulary of the Flash Language.

It’s worth noting that Vaux’s memoirs have been called the first autobiography written in Australia, giving the career criminal two distinguished firsts.

In due course, the author received a payment of £33 18s 8d for that first edition of his book, a large sum which, to the always impecunious Vaux, must have seemed like a windfall.

A SECOND EDITION was published in 1827, this time featuring only the memoirs. Tales of crime and criminals were popular in the 19th century, and Vaux became a relatively well-known name among the eager devotees of this sort of sensational literature. Large slabs of his memoirs were reprinted in the popular monthly publication The Newgate Calendar, and in 1830 Vaux himself was portrayed on the London stage in a play about convict life in Australia.

What happened to Vaux after the publication of his book? He managed to escape from the convict colony once more. Exactly how is unclear but he ended up in Ireland. There he continued to follow his calling as a fraudster and con man and was caught and convicted once more, this time for forging banknotes.

He should have received the death penalty because crimes that undermined the currency were regarded as particularly serious in those days. But he wrote a persuasive letter to the governors of the Bank of Ireland and was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge. The result was that, for the third time, he was transported as a convict under the alias James Young.

He appears, after having served his sentence, to have remained in NSW and found honest work. But he faced court one last time in 1839, on what was for him a most unusual charge – attempted criminal assault on an eight-year-old girl. He was convicted and at the age of 57 went to jail again. In 1841 he was released, and walked off the pages of history. Diligent research has failed to find any further trace of Vaux or identify when and where he died.

But he was never forgotten. In 1944 historian Brian Elliott wrote the learned monograph James Hardy Vaux: A Literary Rogue in Australia. This memoir, together with the dictionary of flash language, was republished in 1964 with detailed notes by historian Noel McLachlan. Then, in 1971 Ron Blair brought Vaux back on the stage in his musical play Flash Jim Vaux. And, in 2019 Simon Barnard published a centenary edition of Vaux’s flash dictionary, with each entry illustrated from Barnard’s own vast store of convict tales.

Meanwhile, Vaux’s little dictionary took on a life of its own. It was one of many sources used by lexicographer Eric Partridge in compiling his 1937 A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. The legendary philologist Sidney J. Baker, in his great book The Australian Language, acknowledges Vaux’s role in shaping the early days of our distinctive dinkum lingo. Baker writes of Vaux’s dictionary that “it gave an extremely good picture of the type of slang our Pilgrim Fathers had imported”. He adds that “after Vaux there was a gap of nearly seventy years until the next dictionary of slang was put together in Australia”.

He acknowledges Vaux’s importance to the story of Australian English as a pioneer; he was the first, he says. I tell his remarkable and colourful story in my new book Flash Jim; at the back the whole of Vaux’s dictionary is reprinted, indicating the influence convict slang had on the birth of the Australian language.

Convict slang, the so-called flash language, still plays a role in the way Australians speak today. If you have a lot of something you may say that you have a “swag” of it: “I’ve got a whole swag of sausages for the barbie.” And when you do, you are talking like a convict. Swag originally meant, in Vaux’s small dictionary, “a bundle, parcel, or package”. From such humble origins this word grew to play an important role in Aussie English.

An itinerant bush worker carried a “swag” on his back and so became known as a “swagman”, or “swaggie” for short. Of course, the most famous swagman in Australia (and a jolly one at that) is the one who stuffed a stolen sheep into his swag and then jumped into a billabong to escape the law. This notably extends Vaux’s shadow to as far as Banjo Paterson’s iconic Aussie bush poem, such is the power of flash language.

When you call the clothes you wear “togs” or describe some scheme as a “put up affair”, when you call a heavy drinker a “lush” and ask for a “dollop” of anything, or if you call a friend a “chum”, you’re using early Aussie criminal slang recorded by James Hardy Vaux – the convict who wrote a dictionary.

(Originally published in the Journal of Australian Geographic Society. The credit of this article wholly belong to Australian Geographic Journal).