The Childhood Imagination in Australia, 1890-1940

Abstract

This thesis explores the imaginative lives of children growing up in Australia in the half century between 1890 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The very act of imagining, whether it is the subtle embellishment of reality or the invention of an entire fantasy world, has long been one of the major enterprises of childhood. Yet although historians of Australia have readily embraced the imagination as an interpretative paradigm, little research has considered the imaginative lives of children. Focusing on children's play, writing and art, this thesis examines six imaginative worlds of Australian childhood. These are the worlds of amateur journalism, bird loving, war and adventure, dolls, the future - especially as it relates to a new aerial modernity - and monster and faery folklore. By focusing on children's own processes of meaning-making, and engaging with an older body of scholarship on children's folklore, this thesis enriches and unsettles a historiography that has long privileged the voices and experiences of adults. It reveals a wealth of children's own documentary records and recognises children as cultural, social and political actors, while also paying close attention to how their imaginative lives were connected to the adult world. At a time when the social value and material condition of children's lives were undergoing significant change across the Western world, Australian children were often acutely aware of the politics of age. They were attentive to the webs of dependency that structured their everyday lives as well as the emancipatory power of the imagination. It was a power that both settler and Aboriginal children used often and freely, and it was one of the ways they made meaning out of dynamic social change and exerted control over their lives. By charting a history of children's imaginative lives during the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, this study uncovers a shared world of meaning and experience that sheds new light on the history of modern Australia and childhood. It also offers a deeper understanding of the double helix of children's play and imaginations: one strand representing the universal and ubiquitous aspects of children's imaginative lives and the other the particular forms of imagining that are shaped by circumstances and cultures. Often negotiating a complex set of social and cultural expectations, children embraced the creative and contradictory power of the imagination, crafting new ways of seeing and belonging in a settler society and increasingly globalised world. Show more