This week, James Morton files his musings from Down Under

There’s something of a furore going on in Queensland, where a defendant has been sent to the cells twice for contempt for calling the magistrate ‘mate’. I’ve heard judges called a lot of things in my time, but given the informality for which the country is renowned, ‘mate’ would actually seem to be pretty innocuous. What would the beak have made of the defendant who, on his regular appearances in a Nottinghamshire court, when asked how he pleaded, invariably replied, ‘Not guilty, me duck’? That should have been worth three months for openers.

English, or should that be ‘strine’ in this case, is a living language, and it is interesting to see how many words in the Australian criminal lexicon have come and gone. ‘Grass’, as in informer, seems to be on the sidelines, with ‘dobber’ and ‘fizz’ the current favourites. Fizz comes from fizz-gig – a phrase we can’t have used here since the 19th century. My favourite, ‘shelf’, and the verb to go with it faded away in the 1970s.

Back in 1990, one of Melbourne’s master criminals of the 1990s was the robber, drug dealer and murderer Dennis Allen. He was the first of 10 children of Kath Pettingill, known as ‘The Matriarch’, and the body count of his victims must have at least tallied that. Three of her sons, including Dennis, died early in their careers. One of them tried to blow up the Melbourne coroner’s court and another, later shot dead, was acquitted of the murder of two police constables. At the time of Allen’s death, he was on bail for an amazing total of 60 charges, which leads one to think he might have been a dobber himself.

Allen was quite capable of killing anybody who looked twice at him, and he did so regularly, but he had one failing which might be seen as fatal in his calling. He could never get rid of the bodies – something that, to use a modern expression, he tasked to his brother Victor. After Allen’s death, the coroner’s court bomber paid an oblique tribute, saying while his brother was a good killer, he wasn’t a ‘disposalist’.

Back to intriguing turns of phrase – I particularly liked the first ground of appeal once put forward by one of Allen’s friends, acting in person after a conviction. ‘Mr Smith shambolised my defence’, he wrote of his barrister. Apparently it did him no good with the Court of Appeal, but at least he ought to go straight into any updated dictionary of the Australian language.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor