Oh, I love fill in the blanks! Or the instances when you find out that later writers have substituted words for the original obscenity. During the Jerilderie raid in 1879, bushranger Ned Kelly snapped at one of his gang members, Steve Hart, calling him (according to early published versions) a "bloody thing". Steve then had a grumble to some of their hostages, expressing his admiration for Kelly but also having a good old rant about why he shouldn't have been called a "bloody thing". It's a bit hard to appreciate why Hart took it so hard until you find out that, of course, the word was not "thing" at all, but rather something that would still cause resentment in most of those on the receiving end of it today.
And then there's what Aaron Sherritt said he would do to another gang member, former friend Joe Byrne, if he caught him - kill him for a start, and then something else that was a rather graphic. Saying it to Byrne's mother, mind you, was not a good move - once Byrne heard about it, it pretty much sealed Sherritt's fate. It's only very recently that the phrase has actually been widely published - in earlier literature it was referred to in the most tantalisingly vague way. But these were pretty rough rural Australians!
Our ancestors were certainly very earthy - Lincoln had a bawdy joke or two, and at least one that dealt with the subject of flatulence. It's possibly a good thing that schoolkids don't know that their sense of humour has such an illustrous 19th century precedent- they don't need the encouragement.