Carla Pascoe

Be Home By Dark: Childhood Freedoms and Adult Fears in 1950s Victoria

Abstract Oral history narratives construct the 1950s as a time of immense freedom for Australian children; roaming the streets happily and safely until night-fall. These idyllic recollections are framed by a set of contemporary concerns about the over-protected twenty-first century child. And yet the introduction, by a range of government agencies, of a variety of strategies to protect juvenile safety suggests that adult fears for children existed in the post-war years. This paper explores the seeming contradiction between the existence of such restrictions and the memories of carefree youth in 1950s Victoria.

Home Is Where Mother Is: Ideals and Realities in Australian Family Houses of the 1950s

ABSTRACT Following the austerity of war, Australians in the 1950s were keen to pursue their inter-related ambitions of building families and homes. Architectural design was heavily influenced by modernism and focused particularly on the perceived needs of mothers and children, imagined to be ever-present in the home. Architects recommended modernising and centralising the kitchen so that the mother could efficiently complete chores while supervising her children. They advised designing children’s bedrooms to provide privacy and stimulate creativity, as well as incorporating indoor and outdoor play areas. While these ideals were promoted in housing magazines, analysis of other sources reveals that the reality of 1950s housing was more complex. Many Australians lived in dwellings representing the design conventions of previous eras. For those building new houses in the 1950s, postwar shortages and personal finances often constrained aspirations. Others disliked the fact that modernism challenged traditional spatial and social precepts. Even for that minority residing in newly constructed, architecturally designed housing, families did not always inhabit domestic spaces in the manner anticipated by architects. Attention to a range of historical sources allows a fuller understanding of the broad spectrum of postwar housing and the diverse ways in which 1950s Australian families dwelt in their homes.

Children of Empire

At first glance, Kenyan students, Indian caregivers and British child evacuees might seem to have little in common. But, a sweeping new volume on children and youth in the British Empire reveals some surprising connections between disparate groups of imperial subjects. Edited by Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight, the book comprises 15 chapters, which together span a time period from the mid-eighteenth century to today. The chapters traverse many corners of the former British Empire, including parts of Asia, Australia, Canada, England, India, Kenya, New Zealand, Tanzania, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Childhood remains deliberately undefined in the volume, but encompasses a wide age range from the South African babies raised using mothercraft methods in S.E. Duff’s chapter to Australian youths on the cusp of adulthood in Yorick Smaal’s chapter on ‘homosex’ around the turn of the twentieth century. Such diversity in an edited collection can yield mixed results. On the one hand, wide-ranging contributions can sometimes feel like they bear little in common with one another. Yet, the editors have dealt with the challenge adroitly through their chosen structure and an opening chapter that contextualises and synthesises the chapters that follow. Divided into six parts, the book’s sections cover children and adults; rites of passage; indigenous experiences; literary childhoods; youth and sexuality; and children’s empires and material cultures. In a substantive and persuasive introduction by Sleight and Robinson, the editors assert the volume’s historiographical contribution as occurring at the intersection between two fields of history. At a time when imperial histories are enjoying a revival and histories of children and childhood are gaining ground, this volume is the first work to look carefully at histories of children and youth in the British world. Whilst previous work has analysed the racial and gendered implications of empire, this volume shifts the focus to age as a category of analysis. There are three particular strengths of the book. Firstly, the volume illuminates connections between and across points of empire, demonstrating the ways in which people, ideas and objects moved between different nodes of the British world. In Ellen Filor’s chapter, she charts the upbringing of several mixed race children through letters sent between Scotland and Madras in the early nineteenth century. Mary Clare Martin studies the journey of the Girl Guide movement from the United Kingdom to far-flung imperial outposts,

A ‘Discreet Dance’: technologies of menstrual management in Australian public toilets during the twentieth century

Across the twentieth century, the technologies available to Australian women for managing menstruation were transformed. Products for staunching blood flow changed from bulky, re-usable rags to ‘invisible’, disposable pads and tampons. Disposal facilities changed from the humble waste bin, through to incinerators, and eventually to specialised, antibacterial ‘sanitary disposal units’. The greatest impact of these shifts was felt in public toilets: places where women must deal with private bodily functions in semi-public, communal environments. Promotional materials for menstrual products and disposal facilities promised that use of their technologies would obviate age-old menstrual taboos, emancipating women from the anxiety and mortification long associated with menstruation. This paper draws upon oral histories to argue that by the close of the twentieth century the reverse was true. Increasingly efficacious and convenient menstrual products meant that Australian women could more convincingly maintain ‘menstrual etiquette’ by keeping their monthly bleeding almost completely concealed.

Mum's the word: advice to Australian mothers since 1945

ABSTRACT Mothers of today have available to them an unprecedented quantity and variety of information concerning the process of conceiving, bearing, birthing and raising a child. Yet it is only a little more than half a century ago that mothers were firmly convinced of the authority of maternal instinct. From experiential knowledge shared verbally amongst female relatives and friends, to a profusion of ‘expert’ information accessible virtually and instantaneously, the ways women learn about mothering have shifted dramatically over the past 70 years. Drawing upon oral history interviews and historical child-rearing material, this article illuminates shifts in the source, content and transmission of advice to Australian mothers since 1945.

Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914

from a variety of historical sources, Bottoms does so: For instance, demonstrating how devastating settler retribution was for settler deaths, his estimate is that Aboriginal people were killed at a ratio of 19:1 in response to the murder of whites by Aboriginals at Cullinla-Ringo Station in 1861 (53). In the final chapter on Queensland’s “disreputable reputation”, he revisits Raymond Evans’s assessments of violence on Queensland’s frontiers to concur that settler vigilante action was likely responsible for at least an equal number of Aboriginal deaths as the Native Police force (181). This is a powerful history of Queensland’s “killing times”, and towards the end of the book, Bottoms raises some of the issues for why this colony’s history was as violent as it was. The explosion of settlement in Queensland after its separation from NSW occurred on a large and rapid scale, its settler population increasing by almost 200% in its first five years, and the unchecked violence of the Native Police no doubt gave confidence to settlers that they could practice their own forms of “frontier justice” with impunity (179, 186). At the same time, the power of this history might have been enhanced by a stronger focus on how the history of Queensland figures in the wider history of Australian colonisation. Although there is occasional comparative reference to what was happening in other Australian colonies, Conspiracy of Silence does not set out to explore patterns of similarity and difference with other Australian frontiers in a way that would draw out parallels with Queensland’s case, or highlight its uniqueness. This might be something of a missed opportunity, especially given the author’s aim to contribute to revising the national story (8). Nonetheless, this work does not claim to be other than a history of Queensland’s frontiers. What it clearly demonstrates is that a shocking degree of settler violence was carried out in the campaign for land, and it was enabled over decades through the collusion of settlers and the neglect of government. As the author compellingly argues, this violence was “real, ubiquitous and demands recognition” (181).

City as Space, City as Place Sources and the Urban Historian

As historians, the sources that we use affect the way we view the city in the past. Documentary sources composed by experts on the city such as urban planners are generally useful ways to understand urban ‘space’: the city viewed as an abstract physical entity. But we need human stories also to understand urban ‘place’: the lived experience of a locality. This paper draws upon research into Melbourne’s urban environment in the 1950s which compares the ways in which urban planners viewed the city and the ways in which children experienced the city. Urban planners tended to talk about the city in quantifiable terms, mapping school locations, administrative boundaries, traffic routes and recreational spaces. People who were children in the 1950s were more likely to describe their neighbourhoods in social, emotive and phe-nomenological terms, for these are the types of associations which embed memories. For urban historians, our choice of sources fundamentally shapes the ways in which the historical cityscape can be remembered and recreated. This article has been peer-reviewed.