Pod Insights ABC Rewind The Crutchy Push About this episode It’s the early 1900s and a gang of men moves through the gritty streets of inner-city North Melbourne: they dress sharp and inspire fear wherever they go. This gang, the Crutchy Push ruled the streets of North Melbourne over a ten year period, from late 1890s. And the reason for their curious name? All the members of this gang were amputees: mostly one-legged, and they used a crutch - and not just for walking!
To mark the International Day for People With Disability, Melbourne-based writer and disability advocate Kaitlyn Blythe https://To%20mark%20the%20International%20Day%20for%20People%20With%20Disability,%20Melbourne-based%20writer%20and%20disability%20advocate%20%20Kaitlyn%20Blythe%20digs%20up%20the%20little-known%20story%20of%20the%20gang%20and%20its’%20charismatic%20leader%20Valentine%20Keating,%20and%20explores%20how%20it%20busts%20a%20lot%20of%20myths%20about%20disabled%20people%20in%20Australian%20history. digs up the little-known story of the gang and its’ charismatic leader Valentine Keating, and explores how it busts a lot of myths about disabled people in Australian history.
Guests:
Brendan Gleeson
Tansy Bradshaw
Readings - Toby Truslove
Credits:
Producer - Kaitlyn Blythe https://To%20mark%20the%20International%20Day%20for%20People%20With%20Disability,%20Melbourne-based%20writer%20and%20disability%20advocate%20%20Kaitlyn%20Blythe%20digs%20up%20the%20little-known%20story%20of%20the%20gang%20and%20its’%20charismatic%20leader%20Valentine%20Keating,%20and%20explores%20how%20it%20busts%20a%20lot%20of%20myths%20about%20disabled%20people%20in%20Australian%20history.
Sound design and production - Matthew Crawford
Supervising Producer - Michelle Rayner
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:09 Speaker 01 It's the early 1900s and a gang of men moves through the gritty streets of inner city North Melbourne. They dress sharp and inspire fear wherever they go.
0:19 Speaker 02 A young man was admitted to the Melbourne Hospital in a cut and battered condition at 2am on Saturday. He was set upon by the notorious Crutchy Push who knocked him down and kicked him. The only reason given for the ferocious assault is that the push resented the young man's claim to be the best man with his hands in North Melbourne.
0:41 Speaker 01 The UK TV show Peaky Blinders may be fiction, but this gang, the Crutchy Push, was very real. They ruled the streets of North Melbourne over a 10-year period from the late 1890s. And the reason for their curious name? Well, all the members of the gang were amputees, mostly one-legged, and they used a crutch, and not just for walking. Hello, Kirsty Melville with you, and in the History Listen today, to mark the International Day of People with Disability, Melbourne-based writer and disability advocate Kaitlyn Blyth digs up the remarkable story of the Crutchy Push and its charismatic leader, Valentine
1:26 Speaker 01 Keating, and reveals how the existence of this gang busts a whole bunch of myths about disabled people in Australian history.
1:42 Speaker 03 As a disabled Australian, I'm not used to seeing disabled people included in our history. If disabled people are mentioned, we're in passive roles, objects of pity or burdens on charity. We don't get to be action stars, which is why I was gripped when I heard about the Crutchy Push. A push was 19th century Aussie slang for a gang of young street toughs, or larrikins. The Crutchy Push was a gang of larrikins with an unusual rule: they only recruited amputees. Australia gangsters like Ned Kelly and Squeezie Taylor are well-known and represented in our period dramas, but the Crutchy Push has mostly gone under the radar of history,
2:25 Speaker 03 even though they were frequently written about in newspapers at the time.
2:30 Speaker 02 The Crutchy Push is so named from the fact that half a dozen of its most reputable members are furnished with one leg apiece and a solid, heavy crutch with which they dealt out assault and battery when occasion offers. This organisation is a standing menace to the society which it infests. The Age newspaper, September the 5th, 1901.
2:53 Speaker 03 A gang of amputees ruling North Melbourne with an iron fist and wooden mobility aids. How had I never heard about them?
3:02 Speaker 04 It's a colourful and at the same time a bit disturbing story, isn't it? Because they really were quite a violent little mob.
3:09 Speaker 03 Professor Brendan Gleeson is an author and researcher in disability studies and he lives in North Melbourne, the Crutchy Push's old stomping ground.
3:18 Speaker 04 They were an example or an instance of a youth gang in a Melbourne and in a Sydney had them two, larrikin pushers. So I'm coming from the sidelines as a North Melbourne resident and that's where the Crutchy Push had their reign of terror from 1895 to about 1905.
3:37 Speaker 03 To me, the Crutchy Push represents a really audacious agency for disabled people to be taking in their own lives and they're existing loudly out in public spaces, they're being visible, they're forcing themselves into people's faces. Do you get a sense of how disabled people existed in 19th century Melbourne?
3:56 Speaker 04 Well, I think they were both visible and invisible, if I can put it that way. And that's my investigations and my doctorate and I published a book called Geographies of Disability after that that summarised all that. But I think certainly lots of people had physical disabilities and they were manifest, right? Because let's think of the Crutchy Push, this small gang of larrikins and they were never, it seems more numerous than about 12, 15 or something, but they were set within that, almost like a Russian dole of the larger youth push gangs, larrikin gangs that terrorised inner Melbourne and it was much source of debate. But I think it's a manifestation of the fact that there were people that got around with physical disabilities.
4:39 Speaker 04 Particularly in the poorer areas of Melbourne, trying to make do. There was a lot of push and pull in that. You know, sometimes the police would... Because people would drift into vagrancy, because it was very hard to have paid work if you had a physical disability, right? In an industrial city like Melbourne. And that's one of the things that came up in my work. And police and magistrates, even out of humanity, would sometimes jail people for vagrancy. And they were so-called cripples, uncomfortable term, but that's the term that was used, to at least provide some food and lodging for them.
5:13 Speaker 03 The crutches had a lot of dealings with the North Melbourne Police. The most famous Crutchy push member, Valentine Keating, was first arrested for assault when he was just a child.
5:23 Speaker 05 So when he had his first court appearance, he was already disabled and using a crutch.
5:29 Speaker 03 At 12?
5:29 Speaker 05 At 12.
5:30 Speaker 03 That's author and archivist Tansy Bradshaw. They've been researching the Crutchy push for years. And we met up on Bailey Street, North Melbourne, in the very spot where Valentine Keating and his gang had one of their famous battles. The blacksmiths may be gone, but there was still a mechanic working across the road from us. Some things have changed in the last 100 years, but some things stay the same. Being both physically disabled ourselves, Tansy and I struggled a bit walking on the bluestone cobbles. There was nowhere to sit, so we sat on the curb. Navigating these streets as a working-class kid with one leg in late 1800s Melbourne couldn't have been easy for Valentine Keating either.
6:12 Speaker 05 Valentine was born in Chinatown and of Irish immigrants of the potato famine. So, living in poverty and all that. And then, from my research, his father was a drunk. So combining all that plus with him and his missing limb, plus the other children and all that. It seems to be kind of a make the best of what you've got situation.
6:46 Speaker 03 Valentine Keating's family moved from Chinatown to North Melbourne when he was a child. From the sounds of it, he might have been a lot like his mum. Mrs. Keating was a sly groger, someone who illegally sold alcohol without a licence, and she also got into fights. In 1902, when the police tried to enter her house to take away her son Valentine, Mrs. Keating fought back using chairs, jugs and iron bars. A lot of our information on Valentine Keating's life and the lives of the people around him comes from court transcripts and newspaper reports. So it can be hard to put together a picture of the Crutches' day-to-day life, but Tanzi is working on it.
7:27 Speaker 05 Being trained as a library technician, I am very much was taught how to properly research databases, find information and all that. So I've been able to tour through the records and find court documents, photos that are mentioned may not be the exact thing but similar. I've gone all the way through ancestry and mapped out every house I saw that.
7:56 Speaker 03 That's sort of a question that I had about the Crutchy push was how did they all find each other?
8:02 Speaker 05 I'd like to think it was something just like they saw each other hanging around or they got to know of Valentine's reputation. I know that one guy in the gang ended up being the husband to Valentine's sister. So there was a little bit of that connectivity as well, but. Back then, I guess there wouldn't have been, not necessarily a lot, but it would be necessarily more noticeable if you had a missing leg, or you weren't working, or you were held up for summons and that every couple of weeks.
8:45 Speaker 04 One of the reasons that the crutches were probably there is amputations due to small-scale infections in limbs that wouldn't lead to amputation these days.
8:55 Speaker 03 Historian Brendan Gleeson has researched the lives of physically disabled and working class people in late Victorian era Melbourne, and can provide some context for why there might have been so many one-legged men hanging around North Melbourne in the late 1800s.
9:11 Speaker 04 Rickets, which bent the body, vitamin deficiency and led to people having to use crutches and things. So it was much more prevalent, even down to the small scale, people that wouldn't necessarily consider themselves disabled, but they might have had a crook hand or something.
9:27 Speaker 03 How do you think all of these disabled men found each other? And it's a specific disability too, they're all amputees.
9:34 Speaker 04 I think it was North Melbourne, which is where we're talking about, where the crutches were, was one of the most densely populated parts of any Australian city in the 1890s. And I think people were just on top of each other there. And it wouldn't have been hard for them to find each other. And then within the larger context of the larrikin gangs and pushers, which were huge around that area of North Melbourne. And they had a big war with the Salvation Army that could be talked about separately. I've looked into that, why the youth gangs pushed back against the Salvos who were coming in to claim all the souls of the Irish Catholics in North Melbourne. Anyway, a lot of biff. It was quite a violent place. And men and women, if we look at the crutchy push gang,
10:19 Speaker 04 which got together, there's a sort of a focus on the 12 to 15 blokes getting around with their crutches. But they also had what was called the flash donors, the girlfriends, who were, that's a term that was used for the young women that hung around with the larrikin youth pushers. And we know that the leader, Valentine Keating, had, Harriet Adley has his... Girlfriend, and so.
10:47 Speaker 03 And literally, like they say on Tinder profiles these days, partner in crime.
10:52 Speaker 04 Partner in crime, but you've got this gang of young men amputees, you know, lost their legs. Later in life, when they started to get jailed and they tried to recruit some more, they recruited a few. It sounds like, almost reluctantly, young men with an arm missing.
11:07 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:07 Speaker 04 And their weapon. So the crutches used the crutch as a weapon, right? And you can imagine, wow, and very deftly.
11:14 Speaker 02 The crutch is at once the crutch's mainstay, his breadwinner and his weapon. With its assistance, he can perform miracles.
11:27 Speaker 04 All the police reports and newspaper reports of the time, it was a fearsome weapon and they could use it.
11:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:33 Speaker 04 To assert themselves and, as you said, you know, using that term earlier, agency, you know, their presence in the public realm. Right? Not hidden away. I mean, because some of our researchers looked at what happened to particularly crippled children, using that term again. In poor working class families in inner Melbourne during that time. And there's some heartrending stuff, you know, both parents had to go out to work and the crippled. Child would be put in the chicken coop during the day so that they knew the child would not, you know, come to. Very obvious harm, but that's, and it was written about at the time, the chicken coop children, so. But here you have this gang of young men out in the public domain, you know, causing mayhem, basically.
12:18 Speaker 03 Tansy Bradshaw and I sat on the curb of Bailey Street, North Melbourne. A street that Valentine Keating and his gang had walked along with their crutches 120 years ago. And we talked about how it feels to learn this history as disabled people ourselves. Is there something about Valentine's personal story that sort of?
12:39 Speaker 03 Like sang out to you particularly?
12:42 Speaker 05 I may not have the same disability, but I know what it feels like. I know the connotations of having that society look at you different and all that.
12:55 Speaker 03 I think there's something really audacious about Valentine Kidding, which even though I wouldn't necessarily like put him up as a role model, there's just learning about disabled people behaving badly in history, especially in my local history, right, right here in Melbourne. It makes me happy.
13:12 Speaker 05 Very much so. And one of the reasons why I want to write about them is apart from me being disabled and me part being part of that long disabled narrative. As someone who was grown up with the ideas that disabled people have to be meek, quiet, not heard from and be wrapped up in cotton wool. No, the crutchy push were loud, boisterous and went into pubs and yelled that they wanted free food.
13:40 Speaker 03 Which, I mean, like, let's bring it back.
13:46 Speaker 05 Very much, especially when a paper described a scene, I can't remember which pub it was, but they basically described how a bunch of the gang, the crutchy push on crutches hauled into this pub because they wanted free food. But they were led by the one gang member who had two legs, but had bricked down his missing slave of his arm and managed to swing it over his head.
14:17 Speaker 02 Stalwart policemen versed in the methods of crutchy warfare have been knocked out three at a time by a solitary cripple who has gone his way filled with the spirit of triumph and the beer that awaits the brave. The Evening Star newspaper, 14 May 1912.
14:40 Speaker 03 How are disabled people left out of history?
14:45 Speaker 04 Well, yes, I mean, that's a big question for other historians as well, of course. In my own investigations, starting with my doctoral thesis in the 90s, was to look into the situation of physically disabled people in 19th century Melbourne and also feudal England. I just did a comparison of the two situations and looking at various records and all that. But it's clear that, I mean, disabled people were in and out of the record in a way, right? So I'll give an instance. When I look back into the feudal era and we think about paintings and famous paintings, Bruegel's very famous painting, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, which is a sort of a social depiction of what society looked like in the Netherlands
15:30 Speaker 04 in the mid 16th century. Right in the middle of all this sort of representation of villages and all this is a group of disabled, of crippled. We wouldn't comfortably use that term in that way anymore, but that's the way it was used. But they were right in the centre of Bruegel's depiction of what society looked like. And there's a sense in which, in the older history, people with disabilities, physical and mental, but particularly physical, were included in the social mindset. But come, you know, the Industrial Revolution and all the changes, 19th century into 20th century, and people with disabilities going into institutions, there's a sense in which they disappeared from social life.
16:12 Speaker 04 And there's all sorts of explanations and reasons about that. But, yeah, and now we live in an era where there's much more recognition and embrace and acceptance. But I do think we certainly went through a long period where people with disabilities were pushed outside the social consciousness.
16:29 Speaker 03 I would love to get more of a picture of, from you, of what you think it would have been like to have been physically disabled in 19th century Melbourne, specifically, I guess, North Melbourne.
16:39 Speaker 04 Well, one of the first things, and this certainly came out through my scholarship to note, is it would have been very difficult to be in paid employment. In the 19th century, we get the separation of home and workplace, right? With the rise of the factory. And I certainly, I looked at some of that in Melbourne. It was clear that... People had to travel considerable distances because of the spatial dislocation of home and workplace. So that became a problem for people with physical disabilities. So in a way, the crutches are showing, how do you get on in life in that social order? Well, you go in and you, you know, they described as a standover gang.
17:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:16 Speaker 04 Right? And I even think that's a fascinating term, one-legged men being standovers.
17:21 Speaker 03 Maybe criminalised work was the only avenue left to a disabled working class man like Valentine Keating.
17:27 Speaker 05 Before he went into prison, I know that he stole a lot of stuff that they were just trying to make buy. He did have odd jobs like a hawker or a stone cutter or all that, but he didn't have necessarily what, even in the sense of, okay, if he had those jobs, but what accommodations could be made or how well could he have done the job before they basically either said that he was no good or he turned back to crime.
18:02 Speaker 04 When we think about disability, and I think this still resonates today, you're disabled if you can't, like me these days, if you can't perform salary to income, right? That's such a harsh definition, right?
18:15 Speaker 03 Yes.
18:16 Speaker 04 And there's been some great work in the disability literature to push back against that, about work ableism, right? To say, well, why is that the definition of disability, right?
18:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:26 Speaker 04 It could be all sorts of social contributions people can make, right? But still, that's the lineage, very, very harsh, you know, people, a lot of people, I mean, we're talking about the, you know, somewhat humorous story, these guys that fought back, but a lot of people just lived short brutish lives.
18:44 Speaker 03 The crutchy push ran North Melbourne for 10 years, from 1895 to 1905, but their reign couldn't last forever.
18:51 Speaker 04 In the end, what brought them undone was a vicious attack on a policeman off Errol Street in central North Melbourne, which led to the jailing of Keating and Harriet Adley. You know, one of the Flash Donors, his girlfriend was part of the beating as well.
19:09 Speaker 03 It's September 1904. Senior Constable John Mulcahy stops Valentine Keating at the front gate of a house on Bailey Street, North Melbourne. The constable is responding to reports of a disturbance at this address.
19:24 Speaker 06 Who are you?
19:25 Speaker 02 I don't see why I should tell you my name.
19:27 Speaker 06 I asked you a question. What are you doing here?
19:31 Speaker 02 I can stay here as long as I bloody well like. That's enough.
19:35 Speaker 03 Valentine's crutch skitters away out of his reach. The constable stands over him.
19:39 Speaker 06 You would better get a way out of here.
19:41 Speaker 02 Go to hell. I always did as I liked in North Melbourne, and I will show you that I will bloody well do so.
19:48 Speaker 06 I will have to arrest you for using obscene language.
19:53 Speaker 03 Senior Constable Mulcahy wrestles Valentine to the ground, knocking his crutch away, trying to get handcuffs on him. Valentine grabs Mulcahy around the legs and bodily pulls him down, pinning him to the ground. Valentine yells out to his fellow Crutchy, John Collins.
20:06 Speaker 02 Come on, Cole. Crutch the bugger.
20:09 Speaker 03 Rhino, Val. John Collins raises his crutch to strike.
20:19 Speaker 03 In this brutal bashing in North Melbourne in 1904, Senior Constable John Mulcahy wound up in the gutter with his face covered in blood and bruises. He had a broken tooth and needed multiple stitches to his head wound. Valentine Keating, his girlfriend Harriet Adderley, and fellow Crutchy push member John Collins were taken to Melbourne Supreme Court for the assault. All three of them were sentenced to long stints in the notorious Old Melbourne and Pentridge prisons.
20:49 Speaker 02 The stern yard of Melbourne Jail in Pentridge always contains three or four uni-peds, making a pretense at work. The Evening Star newspaper.
21:01 Speaker 04 Keating gets five years and his girlfriend, she gets one year.
21:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, Keating and Jog Collins, I think his right-hand man.
21:08 Speaker 04 That's right, or right-legged man.
21:12 Speaker 04 Oh, well, you've got to have a laugh because I'm sure they had a laugh, right?
21:15 Speaker 03 Oh, I'm sure. Can you imagine the banter that would have been going on between these guys? And girls. It's hilarious.
21:22 Speaker 04 I mean, I think you've got to have a... When thinking about disability, I know this is a complex thought, but we've also got to have a laugh as well. Right? It's the human body, right? We're all gonna... You know, all of us are gonna, as we were talking before. Again, we're all gonna face one form of this or another, you know? Some people earlier in life, but most of us, you know, we're in a queue, it's gonna happen.
21:45 Speaker 03 That's right. They say it's the only marginalised group that you can enter at any time. Anyone can become part of it at any time.
21:52 Speaker 02 I always did as I liked in North Melbourne and I will show you that I will bloody well do so.
21:58 Speaker 04 The Crutchy Push were certainly, I think, almost globally for the time, significant gang. I mean, it's quite an extraordinary story, that pushed back against that social order and insisted on disorder and their agency.
22:13 Speaker 03 Perhaps in telling the story of the Crutchy Push, we're recovering a disabled history in Australia. The public may not have heard of them for 100 years, but it's not too late to reclaim Valentine Keating and the Crutchy's. Historian Brendan Gleeson often writes poetry inspired by his North Melbourne neighbourhood. And now the Crutchy Push are commemorated in a specially-written piece of verse.
22:39 Speaker 04 I just want to explain, there's a... "Held yer wish'd" is a term that comes into this short poem. And in Scotland and Ireland, people would know that today, they use that term, I've lived over there. That means "hold yer tongue" or "shut yer gob". "The Crutchy Push meets its match near Errol Street, 1897. A mob of dangerous amputees, uncrippled by their tenacities, is coming to a corner near you. The coppers have shot through. Only Mrs O'Keefe with a fire poker fronts the chief joker, who says, 'Mammy, held yer wish'd', while the boyos disappeached."
23:18 Speaker 03 Yes! I love that.
23:26 Speaker 01 The Cratchit Push was written and produced by Kaitlyn Blythe and the sound engineer was Matthew Crawford. And you can check out ABC Listen for more stories related to International Day of People with Disability. I'm Kirsty Melville and I'll catch you next time for another deep dive into the past here on the History Listen. See you then.
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