Convicts of the early colony had their own ‘flash’ language, made up of slang words developed by criminals in London.

Outsiders couldn’t understand the language, so convicts were able to undermine the authorities with their words.

Convict James Hardy Vaux documented these words in 1812 in his A vocabulary of the flash language, published in 1819. The following is a selection of words from Vaux’s dictionary, and other words in use in the early colony, that relate to the lives of the 50 Hyde Park Barracks convicts in the ‘Lags & Swells’ interactive at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum.