TREK BY GIPSIES

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 January 1941, Page 9

TREK BY GIPSIES

GATHERING IN SYDNEY. SYDNEY, December 29. Congregating by previous arrangement—or by some queer nomadic influence which puzzzles the police— Australia’s gipsies are staging another of their periodical reunions in Sydney’s western suburbs. Whatever influence impels the foregathering of the Romanies, it is not always an harmonious one, for the gipsy men and women—and children and dogs, too —frequently clash In combat so violent that police are rushed to separate them. For years the bands of gipsies wandering about Australia in their horse-drawn caravans have figured in sporadic battles with local townspeople. But, until about four years ago, they seemed united among themselves. In . their periodical reunions in Sydney their children played together, and gipsy men and women danced, in the light of fires and lanterns, folk-dances hundreds of years old. Gradually, appearances in police courts brought the gipsies into disfavour. Some of them were fined for fortune-telling, others for stealing and for offensive behaviour. Ten years ago three of them left) Australia—two men and a woman, and were shortly afterward convicted of bank robberies in English country towns. Police evidence was that the woman would “tell the fortunes of the bank tellers, while her confederates. with specially constructed fishing n ‘ds, would lift bundles of banknotes froin the preoccupied staff.”