The Delinquents

DEIRDRE CASH (writing as Criena Rohan) was born in Melbourne in 1924 to Leo Cash, poet and entrepreneur, and Valerie Walsh, operetta principal. After her parents’ divorce, a young Cash and her brother were cared for by relatives in South Australia and Melbourne. Cash began to write while boarding at the Convent of Mercy in Mornington. She later studied at the Conservatorium of Music.

Cash first married in 1948 and gave birth to a son, Michael Blackall, later that year. The marriage did not last, and Cash worked as a torch-singer and ballroom-dancing teacher to support herself. In 1953 she met the ‘love of her life’—merchant seaman Otto Olsen. They married soon after, and their daughter Leonie was born the following year.

Cash’s health started to deteriorate and she was hospitalised in Geraldton, Western Australia, with suspected tuberculosis. This four-month stay resulted in her first novel,
The Delinquents
. Rejected by several Australian publishers,
The Delinquents
was published in London in 1962, to acclaim. It was made into a cult film, starring Kylie Minogue, in 1989.

Eventually diagnosed with cancer, Cash wrote her second novel,
Down by the Dockside
(1963), while in and out of hospital, writing the last pages wearing an oxygen mask. Cash reportedly also completed a third novel,
The House with the Golden Door
, but no manuscript has ever been found.

Deirdre Cash died in Melbourne in 1963, aged thirty-eight.

NICK EARLS is the author of thirteen novels for adults and teenagers, three collections of short fiction and the Word Hunters series for children. Most of his books are set in or near Brisbane. Five of his novels have been adapted for theatre and two have become feature films.

ALSO BY CRIENA ROHAN

Down by the Dockside

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Copyright © The estate of Criena Rohan, 1962
Introduction copyright © Nick Earls 2014

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First published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London 1962
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2014

Cover design by W. H. Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetting

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004
Environmental Management System printer

Primary print ISBN: 9781922182142
Ebook ISBN: 9781925095142
Author: Rohan, Criena, 1924–1963.
Title: The delinquents / by Criena Rohan; introduced by Nick Earls.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.3

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Good Old, Sweet Old, Wholesome, Pure Little Brisbane
by Nick Earls

The Delinquents

Good Old, Sweet Old, Wholesome, Pure Little Brisbane
by Nick Earls

IN 1989, nearly thirty years after the publication of Criena Rohan’s first novel,
The Delinquents
, Brisbane was on the cusp of change. Tony Fitzgerald had laid bare police corruption; an election was looming and the National Party was, for the first time in a generation, doomed to lose office. Meanwhile, at the Park Royal Hotel, my girlfriend played in the piano bar and Kylie Minogue was stuck, like a shorter-haired Rapunzel, many floors above, grappling with the onslaught of fame and, by day, attempting to film the screen adaptation of
The Delinquents
.

Kylie, with her famous eighties perm loosened a little for the fifties setting, played the feisty Lola, who gets knocked down repeatedly but keeps dragging herself back up, and who often doesn’t know where her next quid is coming from. I later read that Kylie made $13 million that year. In her own way, though, she was being buffeted by her circumstances: staying in the hotel under an assumed name, having jeans brought in when she needed a pair because it was no longer feasible for her to shop, trying to manage a private life while being pulled in all directions publicly. There must have been times when, despite her good fortune, she wondered if and when her life might start to make sense again.

Kylie was twenty at the start of production—the same age as Lola at the end of
The Delinquents
—and she turned twenty-one during the shoot. I hung around the fringes of the birthday party that the cast and crew threw for her in the hotel, before she flew to her official twenty-first in Melbourne.

At some point during my time on the periphery of the production, desperate to connect with any kind of writing community and to soak up what I could about the film business, I asked one of the producers why they’d chosen to film in Brisbane. He told me, wearily, that I wasn’t the first person in town to wonder. And he told me that
The Delinquents
was a Brisbane novel.

Why did it take a multi-million-dollar film and the presence of Kylie Minogue to teach me that?

Brisbane was not then in the habit of celebrating its literature. It was a place writers left, and wrote disparagingly about from exile. If that’s not entirely true, it’s often how it felt. Thea Astley, David Malouf, Thomas Shapcott, Rodney Hall—the list goes on. David Malouf’s
Johnno
had arrived in the mid-seventies, and was immediately taught in the classroom next to mine by a daring young English teacher who went on to lead the Democrats in the Senate. But where was
The Delinquents
?

Criena Rohan had died in 1963, a year after the book’s publication. She was not, in my years growing up in Brisbane, known as one of the city’s writers in exile. She wasn’t even from there. But her eye for the place, and her feel for its breezes and smells and seaminess, are true.
The Delinquents
is a landmark piece of Brisbane fiction that should stand beside
Johnno
as an account of life in the city in the mid-twentieth century.

A landmark, but not an edifice. One of the book’s strengths is its connection with the details of the troubled lives within it, and its pursuit of the stories of characters whom the civic leaders of the time would have wished to keep invisible. Lola and Brownie are two outsiders who find each other in their teens and who remain determined to be together, despite their families, society and the law continuing to find ways to pull them apart. In some respects
The Delinquents
feels less like a shelfmate to
Johnno
and more like Brisbane’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn
, with its Spring Hill scenes of sailors and sex workers and run-ins with the cops. Hubert Selby Jr’s novel was published two years after
The Delinquents
, and like Rohan’s pulls no punches in depicting the rough lives of those on the margins of urban life.

The Delinquents
refutes the nostalgia for a benign place where men wore hats to drive and everybody thanked the bus driver. It exposes the gap between the law and domestic conduct, and shows neighbours’ backs turning on violence within families. It reveals the horrors of pregnancy termination conducted outside the law yet alongside the proper lives in Queen Street, as the black Humber arrives to take the young woman to the pitiless room where the procedure is performed.

Lola and Brownie show us the everyday dishonesty, double standards and cruelty that lurked behind the brighter images of Brisbane in the fifties. It wasn’t all milk bars, big skirts and dances at Cloudland. Hugh Lunn’s 1989 memoir of the era,
Over the Top with Jim
, drew readers in their hundreds of thousands;
The Delinquents
shows a different Brisbane only streets away from the Lunns’ Annerley Junction bakery.

It also hints at the Queensland to come—the Queensland of the seventies and eighties, with the civil strife and the rottenness that Fitzgerald and others would drag into the light. ‘“If you ask me, all Brisbane’s full of coppers and all of them bastards,” [Lola] said, expressing in one concise sentence the full theory of central government of the sunshine state.’

The police are brutal enforcers in
The Delinquents
, and Lola and Brownie have grown up with targets on their backs. When they are caught in a pub, Brownie’s fined for underage drinking and bound not to contact Lola for twelve months, while she’s treated as a vagrant—a criminal offence—and put in Jacaranda Flats Girls’ Corrective School.

Later, stuck in the stifling care of Auntie Westbury, at tea with one of her successfully reformed young women, Lola bristles against the tedium of suburban convention:

Twenty years on, the Saints would be roaming the same inner-suburban streets as Lola and Brownie had, crafting hard, fast music that found its place at the vanguard of punk, daubing ‘(I’m) Stranded’ on the dirty wall over the broken fireplace of an abandoned terrace house and performing community-hall shows until police arrived to shut them down. The Saints’ music would have come as a shock—and not a pleasant one—to Lola and Brownie, but propelling it is a dis-affectedness and disenchantment that they would have recognised all too well.

How Brooklyn has changed since Hubert Selby Jr’s novel. How Brisbane has changed since
The Delinquents
—but there’s still a thread linking the troubled misfit characters of these books to the present. Though some details of their lives are different, these characters are still here. Even when the system tries to be more benign, there are people in our suburbs still falling foul of it, still having to look over their shoulders.

Reviewers in the UK and Australia praised
The Delinquents
upon its publication in 1962. Yet its author was already dying. Criena Rohan was on an oxygen machine when she finished her second novel,
Down by the Dockside
, and didn’t live to see the book published. She pushed on and wrote the now-lost manuscript
The House with the Golden Door
, determined to keep developing as a writer though her time was limited. Her early death cut short a significant literary career.