Parliamentary papers, newspaper articles, and police records dating from the 1870's indicated Australian urban society was under a threat from "larrikin" gangs of working class youth organized along paramilitary lines. The social outrage over larrikinism was of middle class design, however, and did not actually exist to the extent portrayed. Rather, the articulation of a working class youth culture in gang-related terms was the way middle class commentators such as journalists, evangelicals, and politicians came to describe behavior they perceived to be threatening. Working class young people experienced the streets of their cities and towns as multifunctional streets, as places for socializing and for traveling from one point to another. The moral panic about larrikins was not due to a change in the behavior of working class youth but rather to a change in bourgeois notions about what the street was for, and lingering on the street was viewed by the middle class as inherently dangerous and immoral. Fear of the multifunctional street's revolutionary potential, combined with the new importance of the orderly footpath in commercial activities and spectacle-based consumerism, created the "folk devil" of larrikins. 11 references and 1 figure