Digging deep: playing at war in Australia, 1914-1939

Abstract

The history of children’s war play in Australia during and after the First World War remains largely unexplored. Recognising the importance of play in understanding the lives and experiences of children, this article examines memoirs, oral histories, photographs, newspapers and children’s letters published in the provincial press to explore how young people used their play to promote, participate, preserve and even subvert national war culture. Although children were physically, economically and culturally mobilised for the war – the scale of child-orchestrated knitting and fundraising and the swelling of anti-German sentiment suggest as much – many accounts reveal that aspects of wartime mobilisation were not easily dismantled in the interwar period. In a process that was more akin to a renovation than a reversal of wartime mobilisation, changes to children’s war play traditions were not necessarily reversed, but renegotiated and preserved within a longer tradition of pre- and post-war games.