'Jonah, born a hunchback, is feared and revered in equal measure as the ruthless leader of the Push, a violent gang that terrorises the slums of Waterloo. Chook, a fellow member of the Push, is Jonah's loyal best friend. But after a chance encounter with his son, the result of a casual affair, Jonah decides to abandon the larrikin life and settle down. He marries Ada, the mother of his child, and takes advantage of an opportunity to open his own business. Chook, too, leaves the Push and finds love in the arms of factory worker, Pinkey. But can either man escape his awful past?'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Text Publishing edition).
Jonah
( dir. Eric Tayler
)
1982
Australia
:
Australian Broadcasting Commission
,
1982
Z869032
1982
series - publisher
film/TV
A young boy living on the streets at the turn of the twentieth century decides to make something of his life. The Australian Women's Weekly describes the program as 'detailing the rise of a hunchbacked 1900s larrikin gang leader from the gutter to the respectability of owning a shoe emporium' (Wed. 24 June 1981, p.118S).
For a detailed, episode-by-episode synopsis, see Film Details.
Writing Disability in Australia:
See C.A. Cranston's dissertation 'Deformity as Device in the Twentieth-century Australian Novel'.
'While significant Australian literary mythology surrounds the bushman and masculinity in rural settings, this chapter focusses on the larrikin in fiction around the turn of the twentieth century to examine how an idealised, nationally distinctive character type was imagined in the city as part of an evolving urban Australian culture. From the 1870s, the larrikin symbolised the violence of the working class in its most threatening and sinister guise. However, several decades later, Ethel Turner’s The Little Larrikin (1896) and Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911) contribute to the ‘rescue’ of the literary larrikin in their attempts to show the figure as endearing, distinctly Australian, and ground down by poverty. Both novels present redeeming depictions of larrikin figures, one a small middle-class boy who has pretensions to becoming a larrikin, and the other, an orphaned ‘hunchback’ who gradually builds his own fortune and progressively leaves behind the pull of the ‘push.’'
Source: Abstract
