Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a waiter at a tea-garden [he ‘hops across the grass’].

1873		Sl. Dict. (5th edn).
1895		Crowe Aus. Sl. Dict. 33: Grasshopper, a waiter at an open-air picnic.

2. a thief [? he ‘hops’ from theft to theft].

1889		Clarkson & Richardson Police! 345: Gunners and grasshoppers sneak about watching their opportunities to get up the ‘dancers’.
1893		Pall Mall Gazette 2 Jan. 4 col. 3: Quite a ‘school’ of youthful grasshopppers are in possession of one corner of the ice [...] [F&H].

3. (Aus.) a waiter at a picnic [he ‘hops across the grass’].

1941

Baker Popular Dict. Aus. Sl.

4. (Aus.) a tourist, esp. one who is visiting Canberra [they descend on a town or tourist site like a plague of hungry insects].

1952		Argus (Melbourne) 9 Jan. 5/3: The annual influx of ‘grasshoppers’ (Canberra’s words for tourists) has included many motor-cyclists, some of whom have brought girls on their pillion sea.
1965		Sydney Morning Herald 3 July 5: A full bus-load of ‘grass-hoppers’ (the Canberra term for tourists – ‘they eat everything in sight and never have a drink’) [GAW4].
1976		C. Forsyth Governor-General 117: He picked his way past a group of tourists de-bussing [...] Grassies, short for grasshoppers, they were called in Canberra because of their habit of descending on the national capital in plague proportions [AND].
1985		T.A.G. Hungerford A Knockabout with a Slouch Hat 136: In straggled a party of rubber-necking tourists of the sort known to the Canberra safari bus drivers as ‘grasshoppers’.

5. (Aus.) a girl who tricked men into accompanying them to somewhere, e.g. a park, where they could be robbed by male accomplices.

2023

A. Nette Orphan Road 87: ‘A lot of the Australian broads, we used to call them “grasshoppers”, they’d take us GIs down to the big park in the centre of Sydney, where they’d have a friend or two waiting to roll you’.