Worlds of power & impossibility — taking children’s history seriously

Grenfell scholars on a Bird Day picnic, c. 1934, sent to Cinderella by Maisie Matthews PXA 1165-1049

Wattle fairies, talking magpies, excursions to the South Pole, unbreakable dolls, flesh-eating monsters, toddler kings, and underground playgrounds. Is there anywhere the childhood imagination cannot take us? It is, and has always been, a seemingly infinite world of power and impossibility.

Ella McFadyen knew this better than most when she began editing the Sydney Mail’s children’s page in January 1920. Writing under the penname ‘Cinderella’, she encouraged her young readers to ‘strike out quite boldly on ideas of their own’. Then she filled the columns of her page with the stories of their lives, and they adored her for it. If you ‘find a small corner to publish this letter,’ declared ten-year-old Henry Rogan, ‘I will love you all the rest of my life.’ She did not let him down.

Writers & artists: a rising generation

As the years went by, Ella McFadyen’s postman was increasingly weighed down by the bundles of letters addressed to ‘Cinderella’ of the Sydney Mail. And Ella herself was sometimes kept awake into the early hours of the morning penning her replies.

The democratisation of writing and education in Australia at the turn of the century gradually provided more young people than ever before with access to the world of print. From the inner-city suburbs of Sydney to bush schools in the West Australian Wheatbelt, children were dipping their nibs in ink and filling the blank pages of exercise books and letter pads. They wrote short stories, compiled scrapbooks, assembled poetry anthologies, entered essay competitions, established pen and press clubs, joined children’s pages, maintained elaborate pen pal networks, and edited family magazines and class journals.

It is the spectacular array of records that were produced by this newly empowered generation of writers and artists that is at the heart of my new book Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood.

Two of the many postcards, photographs and letters delivered to ‘Cinderella’ in the 1920-30s. Mitchell Library, PXA 1165 Box 9.

Reimagining Australian history

For nearly a century, the adult imagination has prevailed as the governing lens through which Australians have written and understood their history.

Playtime disrupts that hegemony. It reinterprets a formative period in the country’s history—the half century between 1890 and the Second World War—through the lens of the childhood experience and imagination, bringing age to the centre of analysis as a critical category alongside class, gender and ethnicity.

Children under the age of sixteen represented a significant demographic group throughout this period, comprising more than a third of the Australian population. They were workers and consumers in the national economy, volunteers and advocates for political causes, newspaper subscribers, published writers, criminals and troublemakers, churchgoers and cultural knowledge holders. Their stories matter.

Play, folklore & children’s imagination

Emily Gallagher is a historian at the Australian National University.

If we are to take children seriously as historical subjects in their own right, we must recognise the importance of play, not only as one of the major preoccupations of childhood, but as a vital form of self-expression, meaning-making, and shared endeavour.

Children’s folklorists such as Brian Sutton-Smith and the late June Factor have long celebrated children’s play, in particular its social and verbal dimensions. They have also celebrated its deep connections to the adult world. June herself saw children’s folklore as a ‘subculture’, firmly embedded in time and place, and nearly always interwoven with adult culture and the world children shared with their elders.

Playtime similarly elevates the importance of play and its entanglements in a longer, shared history. The book explores six imaginative worlds of Australian childhood — amateur journalism, junior bird loving, war and adventure, dolls, the future, and monsters and fairies.

Together these worlds capture the richness of children’s play and imaginative lives. They are also vital in showcasing some of the many and complex ways young people have contributed to Australia’s social, political, economic and cultural life. By delving into the world of junior bird loving, we gain a deeper understanding of the role that children played not only in the environment movement but as part of the setter colonial project. Elsewhere, we see doll owners exert their demands on a rapidly evolving consumer economy, child ‘soldiers’ bring faraway wars to local town playgrounds, and young dreamers foretell radical utopian futures. In the interwar artworks of Western Arrarnta children, we witness the creative resistance of First Nations children, who used art to reimagine and preserve their own culture.

Notwithstanding the important contributions children’s history has already made to public debate, especially in the realm of Aboriginal history and social welfare, children have occupied an uncertain place in the Australian historiography over the last fifty years. Do we dare hope, in this moment of crisis for the humanities, that it might help to bring historical research to new audiences? Childhood is after all a universal experience, and one that ultimately has the potential to connect us all.

A book launch of Playtime: A history of Australian childhood by Emily Gallagher will be held at Harry Hartog ANU on Monday 22 September, from 6pm. Register here.

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