Until Peter Carey’s 1985 novel Illywhacker, the term illywhacker was fairly rare in Australian English. The earliest, and most detailed, account of the word occurs in Kylie Tennant’s 1941 novel The Battlers:

Peter Carey’s illywhacker is of very much the same ilk: ‘ “What’s an illywhacker?” … “A spieler … a trickster. A quandong. A ripperty man. A con-man”.’  Quandong is literally the small Australian shrub and its fruit, and the transferred sense ‘a person who exploits or imposes upon another’ is also first recorded (this time in 1939) by Kylie Tennant: ‘In this crowd of low heels, quandongs and ripperty men, she looked at her ease and yet not of them.’ Interestingly, ripperty man (one assumes it means ‘a person who rips off another’) is recorded only by Kylie Tennant and Peter Carey. We therefore have a number of Australian terms, including illywhacker, that have a very narrow range of published evidence, concentrated especially on Kylie Tennant and Peter Carey.

What is the origin of illywhacker? Kylie Tennant provides a clue when she refers to a man ‘who wacks the illy’. The illy appears to be a fraudulent device (as in the shonky dart board made of steel), or the actual process of trickery.

Sidney Baker in the second edition of his Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang (1943) gives eeler-spee ‘a trickster or spieler’, and illywhacker ‘a trickster or spieler’, indicating that eeler-spee and illywhacker are synonymous.

In his Australian Language (1945) Baker gives four synonyms for ‘various sharpers, tricksters and others who live by their wits’: spieler, eeler-spee, eeler-whack and illywhacker. He also explains that synonyms two to four are pig-Latin-type variations of spieler ‘swindler’.

Gary Simes in A Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang (1993) cites a New South Wales prisoner, writing in 1955, who knows Baker’s comments on eeler-spee, and who gives the spelling variant heelie. The prisoner says that the term means: ‘The ballast in loaded dice, the brake on the crooked roulette wheel, the pea in the thimble game: any contrivance geared to “give a pat result”.’ All of this evidence indicates that the illy of illywhacker is indeed an alteration of spieler, and that the illywhacker is a person who uses some kind of illegal or unfair device or ruse.

Although the term illywhacker has never been widely used in Australian English, it has received some impetus since the appearance of Peter Carey’s novel: ‘Australians used to be champions in the art of bulldust, lords of the tall story, illywhackers of stature and bearing. How low we have sunk. If there’s something wrong with this country, it’s got to be the poor standard of lying’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August 1995); ‘Carmel Bird once noted that “the writer is a kind of confidence trickster whose job it is to get the reader in”. All fiction is an artifice, and a good writer is by definition convincing, but the idea that the reader needs to be gulled is rather curious. Perhaps it is because Bird likes to play with the fantastic that she feels like an illywhacker’ (Age, 21 March 2004).

It would be a great pity if such a delightful word were lost from Australian English.