Flashmobbing: No. 12 in an occasional series entitled 'Harmless Hobbies for Mad Old Bags'.

Forget all those people suddenly gathering, unheralded, to walk invisible dogs, manifest like zombies or pay tribute to some unsavoury dead pop star... forget those people in undies on that commuter train somewhere in deepest America, who thankfully disappear as quickly as they came ...  the real Flash Mob originated with wicked women convicts at the 'Female factory' in Tasmania, Australia :-  

'The Flash Mob was a sub-culture of the female convicts, most noticeably in the female factories.  
Bethell referred to the Flash Mob in his writings about the LAUNCESTON FEMALE FACTORY  in The Story of Port Dalrymple.

There was, however, a hard core of those who were irreclaimable.  They were known as the "Flash Mob" and, if rumour spoke true, owing to the negligence of turnkeys they often slipped out of the factory at night to roam the town.  However badly these women behaved, little could be done to punish them.  Arthur had abolished the spiked iron collar, common in Sorell's day, and had substituted a yellow garb and the shearing of the hair.  This punishment, though unpopular, had little effect.

James Bonwick, in his Curious Facts of Old Colonial Days, gives us a Hogarthian word-picture of these women, of the horrors of the sea-voyage and of their moral abandonment.  In the factories, he says, the atmosphere was polluted by the fumes of tobacco-smoke and the walls echoed with the shrieks of passion, peals of foolish laughter and oaths of common converse.  

 

OK all you Mad Old Bags out there (that's MOBs right?) - no need to act as if we're still prisoners, maybe it's time to get out there and galvanise the gals into a bit of whatever takes your fancy ... mass yellow garb wearing?  foolish laughing? Perhaps reclaiming the spiked collar and shearing of the hair might be taking things a leetle bit too far ...better steer clear of the oaths too, we don't want to get arrested. 

Just remember the Shrew says 'if you can't keep it nice, keep it legal .' (These ARE Harmless Hobbies, after all.) 

The wonderful illustration (above) gives you a bit of an idea. It's from the MyWord Tasmania site. Why not go there and purchase your own print and get your official yellow convict garb too!