Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914 9781409432449, 9781409432456, 2012046555, 9781472402899

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

Simon Sleight

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

Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present Series Editor: Claudia Nelson, Texas A&M University, USA This series recognizes and supports innovative work on the child and on literature for children and adolescents that informs teaching and engages with current and emerging debates in the field. Proposals are welcome for interdisciplinary and comparative studies by humanities scholars working in a variety of fields, including literature; book history, periodicals history, and print culture and the sociology of texts; theater, film, musicology, and performance studies; history, including the history of education; gender studies; art history and visual culture; cultural studies; and religion. Topics might include, among other possibilities, how concepts and representations of the child have changed in response to adult concerns; postcolonial and transnational perspectives; “domestic imperialism” and the acculturation of the young within and across class and ethnic lines; the commercialization of childhood and children’s bodies; views of young people as consumers and/or originators of culture; the child and religious discourse; children’s and adolescents’ self-representations; and adults’ recollections of childhood. Also in the series Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 Shih-Wen Chen Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture The Emergent Adult Edited by Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 Kristine Moruzi The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation From Snow White to WALL-E David Whitley Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the “Twilight” Series Edited by Anne Morey

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

Simon Sleight King’s College London, UK, and Monash University, Australia

© Simon Sleight 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Simon Sleight has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sleight, Simon. Young people and the shaping of public space in Melbourne, 1870–1914. – (Ashgate studies in childhood, 1700 to the present) 1. Sociology, Urban – Australia – Melbourne (Vic.). 2. Youth – Australia – Melbourne (Vic.) – Social life and customs – 19th century. 3. Youth – Australia – Melbourne (Vic.) – Social life and customs – 20th century. 4. Public spaces – Australia – Melbourne (Vic.) – History – 19th century. 5. Public spaces – Australia – Melbourne (Vic.) – History – 20th century. I. Title II. Series 307.7’6’083’099451-dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Sleight, Simon. Young people and the shaping of public space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 / by Simon Sleight. pages cm — (Ashgate studies in childhood, 1700 to the present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3244-9 (hbk: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4094-3245-6 (ebk.)—ISBN 978-14724-0289-9 (epub) 1. Cities and towns--Australia—Melbourne (Vic.)—History. 2. Public spaces—Australia— Melbourne (Vic.)—History. 3. Youth—Australia—Melbourne (Vic.)—History. I. Title. HT169.A82M459 2013 305.235’099451—dc23 2012046555 ISBN: 9781409432449 (hbk) ISBN: 9781409432456 (ebk) ISBN: 9781472402899 (ePUB)

IV

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Text Foreword   Acknowledgements   Introduction   1 Growing Up with the City  

vii xiii xv xvii 1 23

2 The Metropolitan Youthscape: Making Space and Seeking Autonomy   49 3 Getting and Spending: The World of Outdoor Work and the Beginnings of the Youth Market  

87

4 Interstitial Acts: Urban Space and the Larrikin Repertoire  

131

5 ‘For the Sake of Effect’: Youth on Display and the Politics of Performance  

171

Conclusion  

213

Appendix   Bibliography   Index  

225 235 267

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List of Illustrations I.1

Map of Melbourne in 1890. Reproduced from J.G. Bartholomew, The Royal Atlas & Gazetteer of Australasia (London, 1890), p. 13. Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

20

I.2

Albert Charles Cooke, Melbourne (1871). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

22

1.1

Becoming space: four views of emergent Melbourne. Featured images: Charles Nettleton, View from Observatory in Flagstaff Gardens (2) (albumen silver, 1866); Charles Nettleton, Elevated Views of Melbourne Buildings (albumen silver, c. 1870); The Supreme Court During Construction, Showing Corner Little Bourke and William Streets, Melbourne (not attributed; albumen silver, c. 1875); Charles Nettleton, St. Patrick’s Cathedral (albumen silver, c. 1866). All four images courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

24

1.2 American & Australasian Photographic Company, Flinders Street West Showing Customs House Under Construction with Hoardings Covered in Theatre Posters; and Yarra Family Hotel, Melbourne (glass photonegative, c. 1870–75). Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ON 4 Box 63 No 539

27

1.3

View of Collins Street East, Melbourne, North Side (not attributed; albumen silver, December 1885). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

28

1.4

Thoroughfare or urban playground? American & Australasian Photographic Company, Looking East Along Little Bourke Street West from Stephen Stapleton’s Harp of Erin Hotel and F. Opitz’s New Excelsior Hotel, Melbourne (glass photonegative, 1875). Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ON 4 Box 65 No 581

30

1.5

‘Lord John Taking the Measure of the Colonies’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 18, 15 February 1850, p. 75. Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.,

36

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

1.6

‘An Old Cruelty Revived’, Life, with which is incorporated Australian Tit-Bits, 24 March 1887, p. 9. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

37

1.7

‘A Palpable Hit’, Melbourne Punch, 8 March 1860, p. 6. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

40

1.8

Good material: a group of Gordon Boys amidst the building blocks of the city. Reproduced with permission of the Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office Victoria, Australia

46

2.1

Children Playing in a Melbourne Street (not attributed; gelatine silver stereograph, c. 1900–1910). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

56

2.2

Street Children at Play, Gordon Boys, July 1906, p. 10. Courtesy State Library of Victoria

57

2.3

Public information poster advertising Melbourne City Council initiative to reduce damage in parks (1891) (printed on canvas, 42 x 30 cm). Reproduced with permission of the Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office Victoria, Australia

62

2.4

Arthur Streeton, Evening Game (1889) (oil on cardboard, 13.3 x 23.3 cm). Private collection, Sydney. Courtesy National Gallery of Victoria

66

2.5 Chinese Figures in a Doorway (not attributed; c. 1900). Courtesy Chinese Museum Collection, Museum of Chinese Australian History

73

2.6

Elaine Macdonald (not attributed). Courtesy Royal Historical Society of Victoria

79

3.1

Flinders Lane Looking West from Swanston Street (not attributed; albumen silver, 1895). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

93

3.2

S.T. Gill, Doing the Block (1880) (pencil and Chinese white on buff paper, 24.6 x 34.0 cm). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

103

3.3 ‘Temptations’, Australian Boys’ Paper, 1 January 1902, p. 117. Courtesy State Library of Victoria

113

List of Illustrations

3.4 Paterson Bros., Looking East Showing the Eastern Market Sheds, Princess Theatre and St. Patrick’s Cathedral (albumen silver on mount, 1875). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

ix

116

3.5

Eastern Market scenes in 1908 (not attributed). Reproduced from Colin E. Cole, Melbourne Markets 1841–1979: The Story of the Fruit and Vegetable Markets in the City of Melbourne (Melbourne, 1980), p. 45 119

3.6

Promenading on the Esplanade in St Kilda, c. 1908 (not attributed). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria 124

4.1 Nicholas Caire, Swanston Street Looking South (albumen silver print, c. 1880). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

144

4.2

Postcard of Smith Street, Collingwood (c. 1906–1911). Courtesy Royal Historical Society of Victoria

145

4.3

Enlarged details from Figures 4.1 and 4.2

146

4.4 Mug shots of larrikins serving time in Melbourne’s prison system, 1870–92. Top row: John Kenworthy; George Jenkins; John Nash. Middle row: James Nesbitt; Patrick O’Connor; James Duggan. Bottom row: Alfred Moran. These images are © State of Victoria 2012. Reproduced with permission 4.5

Ambrose Dyson, ‘Bugs O’Mara’, Bulletin, 1900. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

4.6 ‘The Latest Thing in Pads’, Melbourne Punch, 30 June 1892, p. 403. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

152 154

155

4.7 A Will Dyson illustration of the larrikin girl from Edward Dyson’s novel Fact’ry ’Ands (Melbourne, 1906), facing p. vi. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection 160 5.1 Charles Rudd, Procession in Honour of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee 1897. Looking South West from the Corner of Swanston and Bourke Streets (printing out paper, 1897). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria 5.2

James Fox Barnard, Boys Playing Soldiers (glass negative, 1900). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

177 180

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

5.3

George Rose, At the Junction, St. Kilda (albumen silver stereograph, 1900). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

5.4

James Fox Barnard, Relief of Mafeking, Procession, Melbourne (glass negative, 1900). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria 182

5.5

Ready to march – a young boy conveys a temperance message. (Not attributed; albumen silver carte de visite, 1872. Original dimensions 10 x 6.5 cm.) Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

181

185

5.6 Children’s tableaux for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Weekly Times, 3 July 1897, p. 11. Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria 191 5.7 Children’s tableaux for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Weekly Times, 3 July 1897, p. 11. Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria 192 5.8

Federation Ballet, Weekly Times, 25 December 1897, p. 10. Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria. Placard right of centre reads ‘Unity is Strength’

5.9 The Royal Review at Flemington Race-course. Cadets Marching Past (not attributed; gelatine silver, 1901). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

193

195

5.10

State School Fete, Exhibition Building: Maypole Dance Opposite the Royal Box (not attributed; gelatine silver, 1901). Courtesy National Library of Australia, PIC/3341/1-21

196

5.11

Children’s Tableau in Half Circle. At the Exhibition Building, Melbourne, 1901 (not attributed; albumen silver, 1901). Courtesy National Library of Australia, PIC/13117280-8

199

5.12 Fancy Dress and National Costume, Melbourne Federation Celebrations (not attributed; albumen silver, 1901). Courtesy National Library of Australia, PIC/13117280-22

200

5.13

203

A break from the city: newsboys about to depart for their annual picnic in 1908. Courtesy Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria

List of Illustrations

xi

5.14 The Ragged School Children’s Picnic (Weekly Times, 2 December 1899, p. 10). Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria

204

5.15

Reformed, remade and ready for departure – Alfred Sullivan as child and man, c. 1900. Courtesy Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria

207

5.16

Australia’s Young Army: conscripted cadets turning into Collins Street in September 1913 (Age, 22 September 1913, p. 12). Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria

209

5.17 ‘Were These Not Worth Saving?’: the national imperatives of child rescue, as perceived by Melbourne’s Gordon Institute, Gordon Boys, December 1916. Courtesy State Library of Victoria 210 C.1

Thomas Kennington, Homeless (1890) (oil on canvas, 165 x 151 cm). Picture held in Collection at Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria (purchased 1906). Courtesy Bendigo Art Gallery

213

C.2

Jeff Carter, Young People Idling on the Steps at Flinders Street Railway Station (gelatine silver, c. 1990–99). Courtesy Jeff Carter Estate and National Library of Australia, PIC/9828/42

223

C.3

Yesterday’s games? Chalked hopscotch grids in Melbourne’s Fawkner Park, 11 March 2007. Photographed by the author

224

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Notes on Text Abbreviations used Australian Dictionary of Biography: ADB Australian Natives Association: ANA Member of the Legislative Assembly: MLA Member of the Legislative Council: MLC Public Record Office Victoria: PROV Royal Historical Society of Victoria: RHSV State Library of Victoria: SLV Victorian Parliamentary Debates: VPD Victorian Public Record Series (for files held at PROV): VPRS Conversion factors In this period £1 was equal to 20 shillings (s.), and 1 shilling was equal to 12 pence (d.). 1 yard is equivalent to 0.9 m, and 1 mile to 1.6 km. Use of spelling Many sources quoted in this book use spelling, punctuation and styles of abbreviation (such as ‘&c’ for ‘etc.’) which vary from present-day norms. In order to maintain the integrity of these quotations, no attempt has been made to enforce standardized grammar, and the use of ‘sic’ has generally been avoided. Internet resources Unless stated otherwise, all web pages referenced in this book last accessed 20 February 2013.

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Foreword ‘In Australia a model child is an unknown quantity’, wrote the celebrated children’s author Ethel Turner. ‘There is a sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and mischief in nature here, and therefore in children.’ In her classic Seven Little Australians (1894), Turner celebrated the freedom of childhood in a democratic land of wide horizons and endless sunshine. Not all her contemporaries were as sanguine. Australia’s cities were often seen as relics of an Old World of mean streets and cramped horizons. ‘In modern city conditions’, Enid Lyons, wife of an Australian Prime Minister, warned, ‘large sections of the population find it impossible to do justice to their children.’ Protecting the young nation’s children meant saving them from the city. The fear of the child-devouring Australian city is one of the myths dissected in Simon Sleight’s fascinating foray into metropolitan space. He looks beyond contemporary models of the good or bad child to reveal the lived experience of young Melburnians at work, home and play. In his deft hands, they become a known quantity: faces in the street rather than stereotypes, personal narratives rather than statistical abstractions. This is history written from below the threshold of adulthood and informed by a keen sense of the social geography of the colonial city revealed in contemporary photographs, newspapers, municipal and charitable archives, factory and school inspectors’ reports and a precious cache of diaries and memoirs by young Melburnians themselves. As a demographically young, prosperous and highly urbanized society, colonial Australia, Sleight suggests, may have been among the first to manifest the stirrings of a modern ‘youth culture’. Seen through the eyes of its young people, the streets of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Melbourne were places of ‘adventure and excitement’ rather than danger and depravity. Its spacious suburbs, linked by trams and trains, and interspersed by creek valleys, beaches and vacant allotments, permitted its young people to roam far beyond the eyes and reach of their elders. As bootblacks, messengers and street sellers, they enjoyed a degree of economic independence signified by their title as ‘little merchants’. The child-saving reformers who sought to save them from the dangers of the street may have curtailed their independence as workers at the very moment when their spending opportunities in the city’s burgeoning youth consumer market were rising. Contemporary fears of ‘urban degeneration’ focused on the gangs of ‘larrikins’ or street roughs whose theatrical displays of disrespect excited ‘a sort of mania’ among their elders and social betters. Was larrikinism a sign that ‘young Australia’ was on the road to ruin, or – as Ethel Turner suggested in her novel The Little Larrikin (1896) – a benign manifestation of the democratic spirit of the young nation itself?

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As in England, where the Boer War elicited fears for the military fitness of citybred youth, Australian statesmen embarked on a vigorous campaign to discipline the city child. The rising tide of processional events at Federation, Mafeking and Empire Day culminated in the introduction in 1911 of compulsory military training. By 1916, many of Melbourne’s young men had exchanged the occasional risks of gang violence in the city’s backstreets for the deadlier hazard of life in the trenches of the Western Front. As a young English-educated historian, Simon Sleight approaches his subject with a freshness of perspective informed by his own encounters with Melbourne’s contemporary youthscape. Melbourne is now one of the most suburbanized cities in the world. Its school children seldom walk to school, as their grandparents did, stopping along the way to collect emperor gum moths, bird’s eggs or to sail paper boats along drains and creeks. They no longer swing on and off trams selling newspapers or rise in the early morning to deliver them by bicycle. The streets are no longer for walking but for the cars in which their parents ferry them from school to sport, music and swimming lessons and the hundreds of other programmed and protected occasions that define their growing up. They will achieve more learning, acquire more skills and reach measurable goals more quickly, but, as this perceptive study suggests, they may know less of the ‘joyousness, rebellion and mischief’ that marked Australian urban childhoods a century ago. Graeme Davison Emeritus Professor of History, Monash University August 2012

Acknowledgements I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to several individuals and institutions for their assistance in the writing of this book. For advice based on a close reading of this text in its various guises, firstly let me thank Graeme Davison, Christina Twomey and Frank Bongiorno. Their knowledge of Australian history and its international contexts has proved invaluable, and their encouragement and willingness to ask tough questions is greatly appreciated. Andrew Davies, Mark Finnane, Selina Todd, Paul Readman, Melissa Bellanta, Michael Roper and Hilary Emmett have also been generous with their time, offering ideas and suggesting source material. Of my former colleagues at Monash University, Barbara Caine, Mark Peel, Seamus O’Hanlon and Rosemary Johnston merit special mention for their assistance in the formative stages of research. I am similarly indebted to Carl Bridge and Ian Henderson, current colleagues at King’s College London, for their enthusiasm and friendship. I have been particularly fortunate in the assistance freely given by a small army of librarians, archivists and digital specialists. Richard Overell and Brian Gerrard in the Rare Books Collection at Monash University Library facilitated access to their wonderful collection of nineteenth-century material by retrieving items, pointing out interesting documents and affording me the privilege to browse the stacks myself. Particular acknowledgement must also go to Kevin Molloy and Judy Scurfield at the State Library of Victoria, the former for digitizing the May Stewart diary and the latter for her help with maps of Melbourne. Tim Sherratt (of WraggeLabs Emporium) worked wonders with the Trove newspaper database, and the results of his text-mining expertise are discussed in Chapter 4. To all the patient archivists at Victoria’s Public Record Office – who pulled out scores of files and boxes, one by one, on my behalf – my thanks again, particularly to the ever-helpful Pam Sheers. Staff in the images departments at the National Library of Australia, State Library of Victoria, State Library of New South Wales, Museum Victoria, Public Record Office Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Chinese Museum in Melbourne, Bendigo Art Gallery, Punch archive and the estate of Jeff Carter have assisted greatly in supplying high-quality reproductions of all the period photographs, paintings and cartoons featured in this book. I trust readers will enjoy seeing the fruits of their labours. Volunteers at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, especially Richard Barnden, warrant further praise; likewise library staff at University College London for their encouragement. Every best effort has been made to contact copyright holders concerning image permissions, and the author welcomes clarification from interested parties. Without the generous financial assistance offered by the Northcote Trust in Britain, this study could not have been undertaken. Carl Bridge first alerted me to the benefits of the scheme during my early contact with the Menzies Centre

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for Australian Studies in London, and the Trust’s sponsorship eased the burdens of research. A bursary offered by the School of Historical Studies at Monash was also gratefully received; my thanks here to Bain Attwood. I was the fortunate recipient, in addition, of research and publication money associated with the Australian Historical Association’s 2010 Serle Award. I am indebted to the judges of the Award, Stuart Macintyre and Julia Martinez, for their belief in the merits of my scholarship. At Ashgate, my editors Claudia Nelson, Ann Donahue and Seth F. Hibbert have impressed me with their consistent professionalism and sound advice. I am delighted to have my book appear in their ‘Studies on Childhood’ series, and thank them and my anonymous readers wholeheartedly for their guidance. Earlier iterations of two sections of the current work appeared in Australian Historical Studies and History Australia, and I am grateful to the editors of those journals, Shurlee Swain, Penny Russell and Richard White (as well as to Taylor & Francis), both for granting permission to use similar material here and for their editorial comments. Requisite to any scholarly undertaking is one’s peer group and family, and in this regard providence has again been kind. During the final phases of my research, Elizabeth Avram provided regular and constructive feedback on my ideas. Catie Gilchrist and Maria John were gracious in casting their eyes over my drafts, and offered further useful suggestions. The editorial skills of Hayley Maher were generously given and received with particular gratitude, not least because Hayley is my wife and has hence shared closely in the agonies and ecstasies of the research process. As a small measure of compensation, I endeavour to continue my writing on subjects that necessitate enjoyable research trips overseas for us both. From afar and on my trips back ‘home’, my parents, Brian and Diana Sleight, have provided unstinting moral support, no doubt relieved that this particular project was not attempted under their roof. I hope that what I have produced merits their continued faith in their absent son. My final acknowledgement is equally personal. My grandmother, Mary Bowley, now well into her late 90s, is proof positive of the wisdom acquired through lifelong learning. The summer holiday afternoons that I spent as a child with her in the back garden, drinking lemonade and struggling with the Times crossword, helped open my eyes to the beauty of language and kindled a passion for reading. Researching the lives of the children of Melbourne’s gold rush migrants – many of whom never knew their European grandparents – reminded me of the value of cross-generational relationships, and has made me even more grateful for the time we have shared. Simon Sleight King’s College London (Department of History and Menzies Centre for Australian Studies) and Monash University (School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies)

Introduction In August 2007, a fractious encounter between a group of young skateboarders and the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne attracted intense media scrutiny.1 Secretly-filmed camera footage showed the Dean, Monsignor Geoff Baron, forcibly ordering around a dozen teenagers to leave what he referred to as ‘the property’ – a series of paved areas flanking the church buildings. To Baron this space was sacred ground; to those he confronted it represented a skateboarder’s paradise of steps and edges. As seen in the film, the skateboarders were hardly innocent parties, taunting the Dean in the ensuing exchange and pushing him on the shoulder. Signs in the vicinity also stated that skateboarding was not allowed around the Cathedral. But compared with Baron’s behaviour, the young people occupied the moral high ground. Baron resorted to a string of homophobic and racist slurs to goad the skateboarders, struck one individual and kicked a bottle towards another. Faced with the intensity of this tirade, the skateboarders are shown retreating from the scene. That, though, was not the end of the matter. Transposed from the shared space of the Cathedral grounds to the privacy of their own bedrooms, the teenagers accessed the virtual domains of MySpace and YouTube to expose the affair.2 When the YouTube footage reached traditional media outlets, the tide of public opinion ran strongly against Baron. Many of those expressing a view felt that he had been pushed into his moment of madness, but the majority found the Dean’s behaviour inexcusable and he was subsequently stood down by his superiors.3 While most respondents limited their assessments to pithy appraisals of the personalities involved, a comment posted on the online discussion page of the Australian newspaper cast the episode within a wider context. Linking the presence of young people around the Cathedral to changes in Melbourne’s urban fabric, ‘Bostwick’ stated that:

1 The story topped the bill of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s evening television news programme and received considerable press attention in all the major Australian newspapers. 2 Film of the episode can be seen in multiple locations on YouTube. By early 2013, one post, ‘Angry Catholic Priest vs Skateboarders’, had been viewed well over two million times (mostly in Australasia, North America and Britain), attracting over 31,000 comments. See: (last accessed 20 February 2013). 3 Concentrated pro-Baron commentary featured in responses to Andrew Bolt’s Herald Sun blog. See: . Note Bolt’s description of the skateboarders as ‘underparented and feral’.

2

Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914 Without wanting to justify the behaviour of the skateboarders (or God forbid that of the Priest), there used to be a park in the city for the use of skateboarders. Then it was turned into the QV shopping Centre (because we REALLY needed one more of those!). Society is all about taking away the public space which I used to enjoy when I was a kid. We seem to want them to be locked away and quiet until they reach adulthood. We constantly criticise them for being young and boisterous. And if they don’t go out, we knock them for sitting around playing video games all day. Let the kids be kids, and give them space to do it in public. That way, we’ll demonstrate the tolerance we’re asking of them.4

Melburnians may well remember the skate park to which the correspondent referred: until April 2001 it operated on the site of the old Queen Victoria Hospital, near the intersection of La Trobe and Swanston Streets in the heart of the city. According to a council review, 168,000 people made use of the facility’s ramps and half-pipes in the year before its closure.5 An alternative venue was eventually provided across the Yarra River in the Alexandra Gardens, but the setting lacks the public visibility and ease of access that skateboarders used to enjoy. In addition, City of Melbourne regulations declare 18 public spaces and streets around the city ‘sensitive sites’ unsuitable for skating, and prohibit the pastime in daylight hours on three major thoroughfares.6 For young people wanting to pursue their passion, it does indeed seem that finding space in the city to do so legitimately is becoming increasingly difficult. The efforts of authorities to confine the activity to increasingly commercial venues can also be seen as part of a more general international trend where young people are ‘islanded’ to specific locations rather than encouraged to use the whole city as a resource.7 Little wonder, then, that the series of cascading steps outside St Patrick’s (a location not included on the Council’s prohibited list) proved so alluring. In a city providing few areas for young people outside the realms of retail, young Melburnians must risk antagonizing others to create spaces of their own.

See . Comment posted 3 August 2007 at 3.46 pm; last accessed 15 August 2007. Printed copy in author’s possession. 5 Herald Sun, 9 May 2001, p. 15. 6 ‘No-Go Zones for Skaters’: (last accessed 1 February 2008). A ‘Skate Safe Code of Conduct’ further stipulates that skaters ‘avoid sessioning in the CBD and Docklands (keep it for the skate parks)’. In 2008, 78 per cent of those interviewed were unaware of the code. See and, for the survey: . 7 John R. Gillis, ‘Epilogue: The Islanding of Children – Reshaping the Mythical Landscapes of Childhood’, in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2008), pp. 316–30. 4

Introduction

3

The confrontation between the Dean and the skateboarders sets the tone for many of the incidents discussed in this book, and serves as a reminder that in understanding any society the category of age is just as important as class, ethnicity or gender. A universal phenomenon, age structures everyday experience in overt and subtle ways. To be sure, not all encounters are quite so dramatic as that on the steps outside St Patrick’s Cathedral. But in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Melbourne – the historical setting for this study – a generation gap similarly occupied the minds of contemporaries and gave rise to many parallel exchanges. At that time the colony of Victoria was home to a far greater proportion of young people than is the case today. Whereas census officials identified 18.6 per cent of the population in the 0–14 age category at the 2011 count, in 1871 some 42.2 per cent were aged 14 or under: a statistic reflecting the influence of a baby boom in the wake of the gold rushes during the 1850s.8 As the nineteenth century progressed, adult commentators became acutely aware of the presence of such a high ratio of young people in their midst and began to debate how best to meet the challenge. Frequently they lapsed into despondency, viewing the young colonists as a burden, not a blessing. In 1862, the Illustrated Melbourne Post stated that local youth were ‘becoming a kind of fifth estate’ – a separate group in society.9 Eight years later, in 1870, an editorial in a rival Melbourne newspaper lamented that ‘Young Victoria is not in good odour at present’ and summarized as follows the broad sway of criticisms levelled at the rising generation: The ‘colonist boy’ is regarded as quite an enfant terrible, and the ‘colonial girl’ is painted in colours the reverse of flattering. No class among the young Caucasian natives is exempted from the sweeping censure in which the critics are now indulging. The bedouins of the streets are simply irreformable miscreants … The youth of a higher class are nobler-drinking, tobacco-smoking, casino-loiterers, who presume the pretensions of gentlemen without possessing a single quality that the gentleman would deem desirable. The girls are demonstrative dolls, whose mental powers are exhausted in their efforts to bedizen themselves in imitation of the pictures in the fashion-books …10

Yet despite all this, the writer concluded, ‘the accusation is not true’. Whilst a proportion of the population was identified as manifesting the ill-effects of ‘deficient parental training’, ‘the mass of young colonists [bade] fair to become steady and intelligent members of society’.11

8 Calculated from Australian Bureau of Statistics figures; see . For Victorians aged 0–19, the respective figures are 25.1 per cent (2011) and 49.6 per cent (1871). 9 Illustrated Melbourne Post, 25 April 1862, p. 27. 10 Australasian, 15 January 1870, p. 80. 11 Ibid.

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

A few years later and the editor might have been less inclined to moderation. As we shall see, it was during the 1870s that the fear of ‘larrikins’, or young street rowdies, spread through popular consciousness and concern began to centre on the question of whether or not Victorian-born children would prove worthy of their inheritance. It is in the late nineteenth century, too, that the stirrings of a youth culture in Melbourne can be perceived, a phenomenon underpinned by the youthful structure of the population at this time, and located within the context of discussions portraying Australia as a young country. As a place of settlement, moreover, Melbourne itself was also relatively ‘young’ in the late-Victorian era, with a European history of less than four decades in 1870, and a characteristic air of incipience that is discussed further in the chapters that follow. Here a youthful native-born population grew up in the midst of newly developing urban spaces and achieved numerical prominence at the expense of those born overseas. That prominence, it must be stressed, also occurred to the detriment of the area’s Indigenous inhabitants. In the 1840s, the offspring of artist and diarist Georgiana McCrae played with Aboriginal children camped along the Yarra River,12 but by the early 1850s the Kulin peoples had for the most part been pushed out of what was now central Melbourne, living at first in a number of camps on the outskirts of the city grid before being confined to remote mission stations including Coranderrk, some 47 miles (75 kilometres) east of the metropolis.13 As imagined, discussed and experienced in Melbourne, ‘Young Australia’ was a profoundly white phenomenon, existing uneasily with the facts of Indigenous dispossession and the arrival – as is noted in Chapter 2 – of Chinese gold-seekers. Examining more fully the interrelationships between a place regarded as youthful, the young people rapidly acquiring such attention within it, and a contemporaneous discourse of youth is a central aim of this book. To understand this interaction, I have chosen to focus on the outdoor city. I contend that it is all too common for historians, guided by coherent bodies of institutional evidence, to re-imagine young people trapped indoors in past times in spaces providing few avenues for agency.14 Recognizing educationalist Kim Rasmussen’s important observation that ‘places for children’ are only seldom the same as ‘children’s 12 See Penelope Edmonds, ‘The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces around Early Melbourne’, in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, ed. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 132–3. 13 Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver and Toronto, 2010), see pp. 140–41; 162–3; 167. ‘[T]he urban frontier was largely a psychic one by the 1860s’, Edmonds observes (p. 167), ‘ – there were few Aboriginal people left in Melbourne.’ A government census in 1863 noted only 33 Aboriginal people in the Melbourne district (ibid., p. 163). In 1881, a similar count found just eight Aboriginal residents (see for details). 14 A parallel observation for the field of anthropology is made in Karen Fog Olwig and Eva Gulløv, ‘Towards an Anthropology of Children and Place’, in their edited book, Children’s Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (London and New York, 2003), p. 7.

Introduction

5

places’,15 this study moves outside and takes to the streets for its inspiration. Here Melbourne’s public spaces are explored from the point of view of the city children who played, worked, spent money and encountered one another within them. Interweaving into my historical analysis critical insights generated by geographers, sociologists and anthropologists, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach in examining youthful public experience. In 1890, the definition given to ‘a public place’ within Victoria’s Police Offences Act was wide, taking in streets, parks and wharves, as well as markets, railway property and locations including theatres and billiard rooms where patrons paid for entry.16 My classification is similarly encompassing, lending itself to my overriding aim of contributing to what has been termed a ‘social heritage of public space’: a history that reads into the built environment of the city ‘a set of social practices and possibilities which over time, both in their performance and regulation, have been quintessentially related to the ongoing meaning, integrity, indeed viability, of the city centre’.17 Like one of the speakers at the Child Welfare Exhibit held in Chicago in 1911, I am not satisfied with a definition of the street – and by extension public space – as ‘a merely physical factor in our midst’. Rather, I agree that: The street is the real commons and it is psychic. By it every home is extended and all homes meet ... Look at it from the point of view of physical danger, and it is one of the most potent arguments for life insurance; look at it with the hopeful eyes of youth, and it is ‘Youth’s Happy Hunting Ground’.18

With its distinctive population structure, fast development and sense of newness, turn-of-the-century Melbourne has provided a prime location in which to explore this ‘hunting ground’, to examine, in other words, the interface between 15 Kim Rasmussen, ‘Places For Children – Children’s Places’, Childhood, 11/2 (2004): 156–66. 16 See Victorian Police Offences Act 1890, s. 2 and 27. The inclusion in the definition of billiard rooms and similar locations accessed from the street conforms to Henri Lefebvre’s theorization (later taken up by Mary Ryan) of ‘semi-public’ spaces and justifies the inclusion of venues such as Melbourne’s Theatre Royal within my analysis. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991 [originally 1974]), p. 363. 17 Andrew Brown-May, ‘A Blast from the Past: Towards a Social Heritage of Public Space’, Historic Environment, 11/1 (1994): 19. Also see Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1995), pp. 9–15. Please note references in this book to Andrew Brown-May and Andrew May refer to the same person. 18 Allan Hoben, ‘The City Street’, in Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, The Child in the City: A Series of Papers Presented at the Conferences Held During the Chicago Child Welfare Exhibit (New York, 1970 [originally 1912]), p. 451. For a British comparison, similarly asserting the importance of lived public spaces, see Octavia Hill, Our Common Land (and other Short Essays) (London, 1877).

6

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

young people and the urban outdoors. As one of the world’s largest cities in this period, Melbourne represents a case study in ‘explosive colonisation’, a supercharged metropolis to be ranked alongside Chicago in terms of its rapid growth.19 Understanding the ways in which young people shaped emergent Melbourne through attempting to impress upon the city their own desires has implications not only for the way in which histories of this particular place are written, but for the manner in which scholars approach the presence of youth in other urban contexts. Hence my aim to achieve that ‘extra dimension’ in urban history writing advocated by David Hamer: not only describing something that happened within an urban setting but also defining its significance in relation to issues concerning the character of towns or cities as an environment within which people live and work.20 If Melbourne can indeed be regarded in this period as ‘a precinct of the global city’,21 understanding the interface between urban locale and youthful activity in this historical setting promises to yield insights – or at least pose questions – for scholars working on other locations which shared aspects of a wider urban culture.22 Inspired by French theorist Henri Lefebvre and others to collapse the distinction between the spatial and the social,23 I read space as ‘produced’ at an individual level. In my analysis, and following the lead of Yi-Fu Tuan and Tim Cresswell, place is space made meaningful.24 The study of place (or what Lefebvre refers to as ‘social space’) promises to enhance historical understanding of the ways in which

See James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford and New York, 2009), pp. 356–9, 1–4, 9 and 178– 209, and further discussion in the following chapter. 20 David Hamer, New Towns in the New World: Images and Perceptions of the Nineteenth-Century Urban Frontier (New York, 1990), p. 4. 21 Andrew Brown-May, ‘In the Precincts of the Global City: The Transnational Network of Municipal Affairs in Melbourne, Australia, at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000, ed. Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen (New York and Basingstoke, 2008), p. 32. 22 The classic starting point here is Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), an analysis which includes Melbourne as the case study of ‘a Victorian community overseas’. Also see, among many other books, Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London, 1989) and Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010). 23 See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 85–94, 101, 110 and 190–91 for a detailed exposition of this concept. 24 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, 1977), pp. 6 and 136; Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, Oxford and Carlton, 2004), p. 7. 19

Introduction

7

people and settings interact.25 In this conceptualization legal definitions co-exist with social practice. Spaces and spatial conventions hence anticipate behaviour,26 while the users of space mould its form and manipulate its meanings. Such a reading allows the city – a location exemplifying the work of time in space27– to be regarded as an intersecting and overlapping network of socially constituted places: places actively made and used by city dwellers. Facilitated by many and varied forms of social document from the period, what follows reveals how young people adapted (and adapted to) the world around them. Such an analysis helps fill a gap in urban history. As Catherine Robinson has observed: [T]he ways in which street-frequenting young people understand and construct space have not been given the focus they deserve. There has tended to be an emphasis on the ways in which young people enter and threaten or contest already constructed spaces with their own meanings or spatial requirements. This is a view which potentially (re)produces street-frequenting young people’s marginalization in hegemonic space, as young people are effectively located outside the processes through which space is produced.28

Speaking principally in terms of recent work within the fields of youth studies and geography, this assessment holds doubly true for the discipline of history, where spatial approaches to the past have been slow to embrace the lives of the young. A concise overview of these approaches helps emphasize the possibilities of space for histories of youth. Since the publication in 1974 of Lefebvre’s La Production de L’espace (translated as The Production of Space in 1991), space is no longer generally regarded within the academy as an empty tabula rasa or a purely geometrical form. Instead, as stated above, space is often considered to be socially produced and to play an important part in the construction of identity. This link with identity is significant. In historiographical terms, it meant that an interest in the spatiality of everyday life, further emphasized in the mid-1980s by Michel Foucault,29 soon became entangled with second-wave feminism – a fruitful 25 ‘Man does not live by words alone’, Lefebvre declares; ‘all “subjects” are situated in a space in which they must either recognize themselves or lose themselves, a space which they may both enjoy and modify’ (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 35). 26 On this, see Edward Soja, ‘Writing the City Spatially’, City, 7/3 (2003): 275: ‘… the historical development of human societies does not just take place in cities but is also, in significant ways, generated FROM cities’. 27 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago and London, 2006), pp. 150–51. 28 Catherine Robinson, ‘Creating Space, Creating Self: Street-Frequenting Youth in the City and Suburbs’, Journal of Youth Studies, 3/4 (2000): 430. Emphasis in original. 29 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16/1 (1986): 22–7.

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

engagement spawning the publication of trailblazing texts including Mary Ryan’s Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (1990) and The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women by Elizabeth Wilson (1991).30 These works identified the sexual ‘asymmetry’ of historical cities, the strategies that were used to justify the male domination of the public realm and the ways in which women were able to contest the status quo. Gender analysis of this order allowed the urban environment to be viewed from the perspectives of the disempowered and for the city to be seen in vivid terms as a mosaic of gendered territories, locations produced by the powerful, maintained by regulation and convention, and yet simultaneously remade in the course of tactical transgressions. Scholars interested in issues of sexuality and race further broadened the scope of spatial interpretation from the mid-1990s. George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994) revealed the hitherto hidden history of Manhattan’s ‘sexual topography’ and its production by gay men.31 The author discussed the ways in which his subjects were able to build a sense of community in the face of overt hostility from other city users and the authorities, who viewed themselves as moral police tasked with the duty of upholding normative ‘heterosexist’ practices. Stepping back inside the bathhouses, cafeterias and other centres of a discrete gay world enabled Chauncey to show his readers a side of New York life often rendered invisible to the uninitiated, while from the author’s historical explorations of the city’s parks and open areas it emerged that for many gay men ‘privacy could only be had in public’.32 Importantly, Chauncey argued that it was not essential for gay men to organize politically in order to defy oppression. Instead, systems of subcultural codes and strategies of everyday resistance allowed a subtle form of bricolage to be played, a game often sufficiently sophisticated to remain undetected by outsiders.33 How, one wonders, might the activities of young people, playing or posturing in city spaces, be understood from equivalent perspectives? Operating with very different terms of reference to Chauncey, Denis Byrne and Maria Nugent in Mapping Attachment: A Spatial Approach to Aboriginal Post-Contact Heritage (2004) nonetheless also draw attention to the importance

30 Publication details: Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore and London, 1990); Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991). Also see Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (Chicago, 1992). 31 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994). 32 Ibid., see pp. 151–225 and p. 202 for the quotation. 33 Ibid., see pp. 271–329, and pp. 25 and 187–9 for the theory and practice of bricolage.

Introduction

9

of space for social action.34 They show how Indigenous peoples in post-contact New South Wales continued to live their lives through the landscape despite the upheaval caused by the arrival of white settlers. As well as utilizing resources such as lakes and estuaries that did not fall within a new framework of private ownership, local Aborigines maintained their spiritual investments in the spaces around them, spaces theoretically ceded to the newcomers but in practice still of active importance to the Indigenous community.35 Interviews and in-thefield research undertaken by the authors further revealed the ‘geo-biographies’ of specific individuals, the access routes maintained by community members down to the present, and the use of memory and stories to mentally chart contested terrain.36 If childhood can be seen similarly – and following American author Michael Chabon – as ‘a branch of cartography’, with mental maps of pathways and destinations endlessly embellished through experience,37 Mapping Attachment offers one methodological starting point for writing histories alert to geography. These pioneering works serve as theoretical ballast for the spatial explorations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Melbourne in this book. George Chauncey’s analysis, for instance, of how the ‘gay city’ could function ‘in the midst of, yet often invisible to, the dominant city’ has influenced my conceptualization of the use of metropolitan space by young people.38 In similar fashion, Byrne and Nugent’s contention that heritage workers should think in terms of landscapes rather than discrete sites has helped reaffirm my decision at the outset not to focus too narrowly on particular locations.39 Though Melbourne’s young people attempted to make specific places their own, this study shows that their activities were not confined to isolated islands of urban space but instead extended across the whole city – a large shared domain over which they roamed and within which they played, worked and established senses of self. Sometimes their intentions for the city clashed directly with those of other city users; at other times young people’s activities within the public realm passed largely unnoticed. Street games and street trading, for instance (both prime space-producing pursuits) might provoke angry reactions from inconvenienced citizens or instead be regarded with tolerance and treated as intrinsic, even valuable, facets of city life.

Denis Byrne and Maria Nugent, Mapping Attachment: A Spatial Approach to Aboriginal Post-Contact Heritage (Hurstville, 2004). 35 Ibid., pp. 16, 82–3, 119 and 127. 36 Ibid., pp. 1, 74, 137 and 179. There are links here to the psychogeographical approaches of Guy Debord, Iain Sinclair and others. For an introduction, see Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden, 2010). 37 Michael Chabon, ‘Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood’, New York Review of Books, 56/12 (2009): 17–18. 38 Chauncey, see pp. 179–80. 39 Byrne and Nugent, pp. 73–4, 123 and 126. 34

10

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

Poets of urban living have long asserted that the young possess unique insights and perspectives. In 1863, for example, Charles Baudelaire stated that ‘The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk’.40 Walter Benjamin, by contrast, argued in the 1930s that it is the child who ‘grows up in closest proximity to the city’.41 And more recently geographer Yi-Fu Tuan suggested with characteristic lyricism that ‘unburdened by worldly cares, unfettered by learning, free of ingrained habit, negligent of time, the child is open to the world’.42 Physically closer to the ground than adults, for children the surface texture of space takes on a heightened importance, while sensory perception is demonstrably experienced most keenly at the beginning of the life-cycle.43 Tuan considers these attributes and observes a history of special acquaintances between young people and urban space. On the darkened thoroughfares of eighteenth-century London, for instance, he records the presence of ‘link boys’: children utilizing topographical knowledge and the light cast by flaming torches to guide disoriented pedestrians through the warren of streets.44 Because they spent so much time outside, exploring the neighbourhood through work and play, it seems youngsters were ideally suited to this task. Tuan’s example serves, however, as an exception to a rule. For while many geographers have long been interested in studying the relationship between youth and space, and a select group of historians have conducted detailed research into youth and the outdoor city, nearly all geographical works concentrate on the present and provide little or no reference to the past, while historical accounts by and large ignore geographers’ insights into young people’s spatial behaviour.45

40 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London and New York, 2001 [originally 1863]), p. 8. 41 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, ed Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999), p. 595. 42 Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1974), p. 56. 43 Ibid., see pp. 56–7 and also Sarah James, ‘Is there a “Place” for Children in Geography?’, Area, 22/3 (1990): 280–81. 44 Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘The City: Its Distance from Nature’, Geographical Review, 68/1 (1978): 10. For an illustration of the pursuit, see James Donald, ‘Metropolis: The City as Text’, in Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, ed. Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson (Cambridge, 1992), p. 420. 45 The ‘silenced spatiality of historicism’, more broadly, was the subject of Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York, 1989), a book which helped introduce the ideas of Lefebvre (then only available in French) to the English-speaking academic community. As argued above, historians of youth have been among the slowest to answer Soja’s challenges. Simon Gunn’s otherwise fine historiographical essay, ‘The Spatial Turn: Changing Histories of Space and Place’, in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City Since 1850, ed. Simon

Introduction

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Youth as a category of historical analysis has not, therefore, been adequately ‘spatialized’. This is not to say that histories of young people’s activities within cities lack merit; on the contrary, David Nasaw’s Children of the City: At Work and At Play (1985), set in the American context, and British-based studies by Colin Ward and Anna Davin – The Child in the City (1978) and Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (1996) – are foundational texts.46 In Australia, Andrew Brown-May’s Melbourne Street Life: The Itinerary of Our Days (1998) is another important work also attuned to the presence of young people outside in the city, and exhibits a greater awareness of spatial theory.47 Brown-May’s study relates the evolution and decline of street ‘social space’ in Melbourne across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and assesses the official statutes and unwritten conventions between which a broad cross-section of street users were forced to mediate. As its title suggests, however, the purview of Melbourne Street Life is confined to the streets of the city, and more precisely to the inner-metropolitan street grid first outlined by surveyor Robert Hoddle. Its remit, as a result, does not include city parkland, waste ground or other urban spaces where young people also congregated. Nor is Brown-May’s principal concern with the discrete experiences of young people or with discussions about youth. Rather the book’s great accomplishment is to open up the city to a new form of social history, to repopulate impersonal structures with everyday actors, and to inspire further investigation by researchers interested in similar urban terrain.48 Geographers, too, have now produced a valuable body of scholarship addressing contemporary concerns about the place of young people in cities. Doreen Massey’s work on gender and space helped kindle current interest in the subject by recognizing the nexus between the control of space and the process of defining youth, while David Sibley has considered the predicament of modern adolescents – too young to gain entry to pubs; too old for playground equipment –

Gunn and John Morris (Aldershot, 2001) is an example of this ‘silenced spatiality’ for the histories of youth, a category not included in his discussion. See p. 9. 46 David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (New York, 1985); Colin Ward, The Child in the City (New York, 1978); Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London, 1996). Nasaw (see p. 39) and Ward (see p. 106) confine their accounts to working-class experience; Davin (see pp. 1–2) takes a slightly broader bottom-up perspective that is nevertheless also concerned predominantly with working-class childhood. I am more inclusive in my focus here, and incorporate rich and poor alike into my analysis. 47 Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life: The Itinerary of Our Days (Melbourne, 1998), see pp. 78, 84–5, 110, 113, 129–33 and 147–9. 48 An earlier elaboration of Brown-May’s theoretical approach can be found in his article ‘Structures with Actors: An Approach to the Historical Experience of the Street in Melbourne’, Melbourne Historical Journal, 18 (1987): 9–24.

12

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

and theorized the distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ public spaces.49 Writings in Australia also explore similar themes for recent years.50 Part of the rationale for the current study is to cast these geographical analyses into historical relief; that way it becomes possible to better understand the forces shaping urban environments both past and present and sponsoring exchanges like that between the skateboarders and the Dean. In turn, this project reveals a new layer of city life: the presence in Melbourne of an active outdoor youth culture in an era long pre-dating that of the much-observed ‘bodgies’ and ‘widgies’ of the late 1940s and 1950s.51 Historians have barely surveyed such terrain – particularly in the Australian context, where histories of childhood have tended to concentrate on adults’ views of children rather than children’s experiences52 – yet the mapping of Melbourne’s territories of youth has implications not just for the history of this particular city but for the ways in which scholars approach the presence of youth in other urban contexts. Hence although this book addresses debates in urban social history through a local study, many of the techniques of analysis and findings relate to the presence of young people in other historical settings. While youth serves here as a metonym of new world urban culture, other scholars, similarly spurred to address the still neglected factor of age in historical analysis, may produce findings for different regions in different periods that challenge or confirm the conclusions drawn here. It may be the case, for example, that the developing physical structure of some cities afforded less freedom to young people than was experienced in Melbourne, that ethnicity structured youthful practice more overtly Doreen Massey, ‘The Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures’, in Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, ed. Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine (London and New York, 1998), pp. 121–9; David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London and New York, 1995), pp. 34–5 and 79. Also see Gill Valentine, Public Space and the Culture of Childhood (Aldershot, 2004). 50 See for instance: Karen Malone and Lindsay Hasluck, ‘Australian Youth: Aliens in a Suburban Environment’, in Growing Up in an Urbanising World, ed. Louise Chawla (London and Sterling, 2002), pp. 81–109; Robinson, ‘Creating Space, Creating Self’; Karen Malone, ‘Street Life: Youth, Culture and Competing Uses of Public Space’, Environment and Urbanization, 14/2 (2002): 157–68; Hilary P.M. Winchester, Pauline M. McGuirk and Kathryn Everett, ‘Schoolies Week as a Rite of Passage: A Study of Celebration and Control’, in Embodied Geographies: Spaces, Bodies and Rites of Passage, ed. Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather (London and New York, 1999), pp. 59–77. 51 On these groups, see Jon Stratton, The Young Ones: Working-Class Culture, Consumption and the Category of Youth (Perth, 1992). Graeme Turner asserts in his cover notes for the book that bodgies and widgies represented ‘the first truly modern moment in the history of Australian youth sub-cultures’. Stratton also stated in a subsequent radio interview that with the emergence of post-war subcultures, ‘For the first time in Australia … there was a public visibility of working-class youth’ (The Young Ones – Bodgies and Widgies, produced by Michelle Rayner for Hindsight series, ABC Radio National, 19 March 2000). Such assertions are contested here. 52 Carla Pascoe, ‘The History of Children in Australia: An Interdisciplinary Historiography’, History Compass, 8/10 (2010): 1145. 49

Introduction

13

in cities with a greater diversity of inhabitants or that urban scale is all-important in shaping young lives. Facilitated by some of the analytical approaches and interdisciplinary methods proposed here, fertile ground exists for exciting new histories of people and place. Five main chapters and a conclusion follow. Chapter 1, ‘Growing Up with the City’, juxtaposes impressions of colonial Melbourne as ‘youthful’ with the concerns of contemporaries about the place of young people in the urban milieu. The rapid growth of the city in the nineteenth century is charted, the rhetoric of ‘Young Australia’ introduced and acquaintance made with some of the individual city-dwellers who feature in later sections. Arising out of this contextual understanding, due consideration is also given to the definition of historicallycontingent terms including ‘young people’, ‘youth’ and ‘childhood’. Much is known about the urban landscape shaped by Melbourne’s city fathers, yet little about the spaces colonized and crafted by its youngest inhabitants. Chapter 2 corrects this imbalance by establishing whereabouts in the city young people gathered and played, investigating how they used their time to carve out spaces of their own, and considering what factors affected their ability to access the public domain. The chapter theorizes the concept of the ‘youthscape’ and employs it to re-enter the world of young Melburnians. Metropolitan police files, personal reminiscences, and the detailed correspondence of Edmund FitzGibbon and John Clayton, Melbourne’s long-serving town clerks, are among the sources drawn upon here in beginning to reconstruct a lively outdoor urban scene. An extraordinary, though now forgotten, attempt by Members of Parliament to shut the city to younger children in 1900 rounds out the analysis. Chapter 3 reveals the patterns of young people’s street work, efforts to regulate it and the consumption practices of city youth before 1914. Young Melburnians engaged in all manner of outdoor pursuits at this time, ranging from opportunistic service provision to the semi-legal collection and sale of discarded items. As the century progressed, questions began to be asked ever more often about whether young people’s street work was for good or ill. These discussions are analyzed here, before attention switches from methods of income to modes of outlay. Revisiting city locations including Bourke Street and the Eastern Market, the analysis outlines the spending habits of a section of society seldom given due credence as active consumers at this time. Discussion of the hectic diary of May Stewart, an 18-yearold shop assistant, casts light on the importance of the public domain in the social life – including the love life – of young women, and the chapter concludes by asking what psychological effects were visited upon young people embracing a new consumerist ethic in the hope of extending their autonomy. The next section reassesses a well-known Australian urban type, the ‘larrikin’ or street tough. The identification and labelling of the larrikin from 1870 represented a fundamental challenge to contemporary understandings of public order and agerelated behaviour for a society in which the concept of a transitional phase of ‘adolescence’ had yet to coalesce. Previous studies have tended to skim over the intimate relationship between larrikin activities and the city spaces in which they

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

occurred, thus missing the link between Melbourne’s developing urban frame and the disorderly youths who made specific urban locations their own. Focusing on elements of the larrikin’s unsanctioned public activities, this chapter assesses the larrikin’s distinct repertoire through the lenses of youth, space and gender. The impact of larrikinism on discussion about ‘Young Australia’ is also considered, and the story told of the attempted literary recuperation of this intrinsically public figure. From the 1870s onwards, young people in Melbourne were increasingly called upon or conscripted to take part in street parades and public events. Chapter 5 assesses the meanings of these occasions and the political motivations that lay behind them. As well as outlining the trajectories of young people’s orchestrated appearances from the nineteenth century onwards, case studies of particular episodes including the 1897 royal jubilee and Federation in 1901 flesh out the analysis. In contrast to previous chapters where young people’s self-generated activities in the public domain were often seen as disorderly, the occupations of urban space assessed in this section were highly regulated, designed to serve a variety of institutional goals. Contemporary photographs compose a particularly important part of this analysis, helping to tell in vivid terms a story of the nationalizing of public displays and the privileging of national and imperial themes in the years leading up to 1914. The transition between chapters in this book is thematic rather than temporal. The urban exploits of individual historical actors including Frank Matthias and Elaine Macdonald – who both wrote accounts of their youth in this period – often stretch over several sections as I explore different aspects of their experiences in order to survey the scene from multiple angles. To an extent, readers will watch these characters mature: discussion of play activities of Chapter 2, for instance, is largely related to young people either under 13 or just entering their teens; the street-based occupations examined in Chapter 3 engaged Melburnians aged predominantly in their mid-teens, and the focus of Chapter 4 falls in the main on urban youths (‘larrikins’) slightly older once again. Throughout the analysis, antecedents for initiatives like the Children’s Court (1906), the introduction of compulsory military service for boys (1911) and the thoroughgoing legislative treatment of juvenile street work (1925) can be perceived. Existing phases of scholarship have addressed the impact of these developments, and others inclined along similar axes, but have generally failed to take notice of the earlier period in which precedents were set. Historians are guided by sources. Even if as adults ‘we are all exiles from childhood’,53 this does not alas equate with limitless supplies of archival material from which to mine information on upbringings, especially in the case of the working classes. When the voice of vanished youth is heard from beneath a pile of old newspapers or government records it really is a treasured moment; more 53 Elizabeth Jolley cited in Autographs: Contemporary Australian Autobiography, ed. Gillian Whitlock (St Lucia, 1996), p. xxv.

Introduction

15

commonly researchers listen out for echoes and follow footsteps. In this pursuit, the historian of youth must read across a daunting range of evidence in the hope of catching glimpses of young people, glimpses often filtered through adult perceptions. There is no easy solution to this difficulty. Autobiographical accounts of childhood and similar ‘ego documents’, as a case in point, cannot provide a panacea, for they are coloured by the forces of nostalgia and often in addition present only narrow viewpoints.54 Such accounts are relatively common and rich in detail, yet memoirs recounting childhood experiences suffer the disadvantages of distance from the upbringings they narrate and a bias towards recording middleclass experience. Transcripts of oral testimony are by contrast scarce for the period examined, relating only to the very final years of the nineteenth century onwards, and, of course, to the questions asked in interview. Diaries kept by young people in Melbourne in this era are also rare objects, and often – but not always – lacking in the depth of description needed for a thorough analysis. Circumspect handling and careful consideration of provenance is essential with each of these types of evidence. Nevertheless, personal narratives are particularly valuable in revealing the connection between memory and setting,55 and in helping to test the impact of societal forces upon individual agency. Such sources ‘show how individuals strategize and act, not alone, but rather always embedded in social relations, in institutions, and in history’.56 Aside from the careful employment of these personal accounts, two further types of historical material have proved especially important in researching young people’s outdoor activities, and merit special mention. Firstly, the files of Melbourne’s town clerks present a treasure trove of information.57 Andrew BrownMay, who ventured deep into this archive, describes the office as that of a ‘municipal magpie’.58 Correspondence from all the citizens of Melbourne about anything to 54 Hugh Cunningham, ‘Growing Up: Histories of Childhood’, Cultural and Social History, 6/3 (2009): 369. Also see Carla Pascoe’s discussion of freedom and nostalgia in ‘Be Home by Dark: Childhood Freedoms and Adult Fears in 1950s Victoria’, Australian Historical Studies, 40/2 (2009): 221–4, 230–31, and Ann C. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke and London, 1998), pp. 107–15. 55 Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900, translated by Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006) is a classic example in the field, at once poignant and insightful. Also see Sophie Watson, City Publics: The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters (London and New York, 2006), p. 123. 56 Mary Jo Maynes, ‘Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1/1 (2008): 119. Also see Paula S. Fass, ‘Childhood and Memory’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 3/2 (2010): 155–64. 57 FitzGibbon occupied the office from 1856 to 1891, and John Clayton from 1891 to 1915. Their files are now held at Victoria’s Public Record Office. 58 Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, p. xx. David Dunstan also acknowledges the importance of the office, stating that the Town Clerk served as ‘the chief instrument of local power in Melbourne’, controlling agendas, directing correspondence and compiling

16

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

do with the operation of local governance – from complaints concerning refuse to calls for street lights to discourage loitering prostitutes – passed across the desk of the Town Clerk. Each item received due consideration before being either referred to another department, addressed in writing or simply filed for future reference with related material in subfiles such as ‘Parks’, ‘Nuisances’ and ‘Markets’. The archive provides a rich resource for social history,59 following the contours of urban change across a period witnessing the dramatic physical and demographic growth of Melbourne. Interestingly, while the overwhelming majority of correspondents’ concerns in the 1860s relate to the stressed fabric of the city (with a plethora of letters about floods, dirt and the state of the streets), from the 1870s onwards there is a marked increase in the number of citizens writing to complain about each other. Among these many thousands of items are many hundred pertaining to the activities of the gold rush baby boomers and, in turn, their offspring. Thus we find weary adults protesting about noisy youngsters disturbing the peace, shopkeepers casting aspersions about the behaviour of young newsboys and flower girls and the heads of charities seeking permission to parade young people through the streets en route to the annual picnic. Read against the grain, and without losing sight of the potentially jaundiced motivations of complainants, the best of these letters provide priceless insights into the whereabouts of city youth, their activities, and their physical attributes. In helping to understand young people’s place-making, these files are integral. Another rich resource facilitating the socio-cultural and spatial approach taken in this study is the body of extant photographs from the era. Collections of these images offer windows to another world, windows framed by their original makers and coloured by their subsequent histories yet luminous nonetheless. Influenced by the work of Jane Lydon, my analysis issues a riposte to historians who locate photographs solely within disciplinary frameworks.60 Lydon’s examination of photographs taken at the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station outside Melbourne demonstrates compellingly that however powerful the white administration, the

by-laws. See David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis: Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City: Melbourne 1850–1891 (Melbourne, 1984), p. 93. 59 Melbourne’s municipal archive is particularly detailed, but similar material also exists for other cities. See for example the fascinating selection of letters sent to the various mayors of New York in Matthew Bakkom (ed.), New York City Museum of Complaint: Municipal Collection 1751–1969 (Göttingen, 2009). 60 Refer, for instance, to John Tagg’s statement that photography’s ‘status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest in it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work … It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such’. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London, 1988), p. 63. Individuals captured on film in this schema are rendered mute and unable to command meaning.

Introduction

17

colonial vision could still blur.61 She argues that Aboriginal photographic subjects became skilled in modifying their presentation before the camera, expressing aspects of Indigenous heritage and individual personality. Station residents were not passive victims but rather active participants in their own depictions, thus creating a space for agency within the confines of the frame.62 The relationship between the photographer and the people photographed was one of ‘mutual regard’ – a two-way visual exchange, conditioned by different cultural practices or what Lydon refers to as ‘looking relations’.63 Seen in this context, posture, dress and eye contact (or lack thereof) mattered enormously. Similarly, whether photographed as part of institutional procedure or included in depictions of streetscapes by accident, Melbourne’s young people were both positioned and self-presenting in front of camera. Their clothes, postures and group arrangements are assessed in what follows. Photography’s ‘hidden aesthetics’ – the necessary theatricality of all framing, the orchestrated or unconscious choreographing of any grouping – are significant of course, and I have been alert to Raphael Samuel’s call to place ‘quotation marks’ around old photographs.64 Nevertheless, rigorous criticism, alert to such issues, can be wedded to the social historian’s desire to recover forgotten faces. Victor Burgin contends that photographic subjects are situated in an ‘unending process of becoming’,65 a suggestion with special relevance to photographs of young people, arrested momentarily in their pursuit of growing up, and in this instance living in a place such as Melbourne, itself seen as youthful. Photographs of young Melburnians help to show the range of childhoods that children knew, the undertakings in which they engaged and the circumstances in which they might find themselves. And here on film, captured by the camera’s steady gaze, are traces of personality and agency that often belie the photographer’s purpose and haul us, as viewers, into the picture. Autobiographies; diaries; municipal correspondence; photographs: these are some of the principal sources that underpin this study. Interwoven with them, the reader will also find here many references to newspapers, journals and magazines of the era, to period novels, travelogues, statistical data, parliamentary debate and legislation, cartoons, police files, prison registers, departmental annual reports, 61 Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham and London, 2005). 62 Ibid., see Preface and Introduction. 63 Ibid., see pp. 242–3. 64 See Raphael Samuel, ‘The Eye of History’, and ‘Scopophilia’, in his Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London and New York, 1994), p. 329 and p. 364, respectively. 65 Victor Burgin, ‘Looking at Photographs’, in his edited book, Thinking Photography (London, 1982), p. 145. The emphasis is his. In a similar vein, Roland Barthes suggests that the photograph is a continuous message bearing no single meaning. See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), p. 17.

18

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

committee minutes, the archives of child rescue agencies, as well, of course, as to much ‘secondary’ material.66 Though these genres also reveal as well and conceal, by delving into such a diversity of evidence, reading material against the grain and juxtaposing qualitative and quantitative approaches, it is hoped that a system of checks and balances has been established, with individual biases and institutional prejudices blunted in the final analysis. Like the young city-dwellers who form the subjects of this book, I try to live in the historical moment, whilst also employing the historian’s prerogatives for hindsight and an awareness of the longue durée. Stepping out into Melbourne’s spaces in my research and analysis, I thus assess the scene with greater critical distance in drawing my conclusions. *** Melbourne, I feel it relevant to note, is not the place of my childhood. To get to grips with its urban intricacies, I have addressed an extensive range of archival sources and benefited from the wisdom of other scholars who have gone before. My own explorations of Melbourne on foot have also proved rewarding, opening up the city and allowing me to see in today’s street grid, parklands and other public spaces traces of the city’s past. With each consecutive outing, incremental increases in my own spatial abilities – learning the route from the State Library to the cafés of Fitzroy’s Brunswick Street, for example, or realizing a shortcut through one of Melbourne’s many laneways – have provided comparable experiences to the steady accumulation of topographical knowledge by children for whom the city is, or once was, home. Anyone fortunate enough to have been afforded early tastes of independence will readily recall the joys and hazards they encountered in the public realm, though probably not the subconscious process whereby they constructed mental maps with which to navigate. To children and newcomers alike, such expeditions are tremendously important in turning space into place and making the world beyond our front doorsteps feel like a community. For others new to Melbourne, I have included two maps to assist with orientation and to help readers visualize the correlation of many of the urban settings mentioned throughout the book. Depicting, on the left-hand side, what would now be referred to as Melbourne’s inner suburbs, and on the right the central city grid, a reproduction from The Royal Atlas & Gazetteer of Australasia (1890) illustrates the area covered by this study (Figure I.1).67 Though it does not feature the full extent of Melbourne’s inner-metropolitan laneways, it serves as a On the justifiable place of literary and artistic evidence alongside statistical and documentary material in writing urban history and geography, see Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 80–112. 67 Full reference: J.G. Bartholomew, The Royal Atlas & Gazetteer of Australasia (London, 1890), p. 13. 66

Introduction

19

topographical snapshot of my terrain, and features in addition several buildings and parklands of note. A lithographical rendering of the central city area from 1871, the beginning of my period, is also included (Figure I.2).68 Whilst this lacks the purported accuracy of the 1890 map, it does at least depict something integral to city spaces: people. What follows likewise represents my attempt to repopulate the spaces of the past – to humanize the urban scene, if you like – and gain new perspectives by considering the city from the vital perspective of youth.

68 This image is reproduced from Albert Charles Cooke’s drawing, Melbourne, first published as a supplement to the Illustrated Australian News in October 1871. The image depicts Melbourne’s central streets looking north from the south side of the Yarra River.

20

Fig. I.1

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

Map of Melbourne in 1890. Reproduced from J.G. Bartholomew, The Royal Atlas & Gazetteer of Australasia (London, 1890), p. 13. Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

Introduction

Fig. I.1 (cont).

21

Fig. I.2

Albert Charles Cooke, Melbourne (1871). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

Chapter 1

Growing Up with the City Perceptions of Place Age is a lens through which both cities and the people who live within them are viewed. A city, of course, is seen to age at a far slower rate, and so it was that Melbourne, the settlement first established on the banks of the Yarra River during the winter of 1835, could still be described as young long after its founders had gone to their graves. In 1872, visiting English novelist Anthony Trollope observed Melbourne ‘in all the pride of youthful power … boasting to herself hourly that she is not as are other cities’.1 Similarly, historian Henry Gyles Turner, reflecting in verse on 50 years of urban expansion in the 1880s, recalled the early days of the ‘infant’ community, its subsequent ‘schoolboy growth, illformed but strong’, and a later ‘infusion of strong manhood’s prime’ with the onset of the gold rush.2 Melbourne’s maturation then slowed, Turner stated, with the city retaining as abiding characteristics ‘Youth, beauty, grace, radiance’ and a halo of ‘perennial brightness’.3 A refraction of that youthful glow is captured in photographs from the period. Compositions by Charles Nettleton, for example, document the freshness of city spaces dotted with saplings or newly planted shrubs and chart the construction of important civic institutions (see Figure 1.1). Nettleton, then approaching his 30th birthday, arrived in Victoria from northern England in 1854.4 By contrast with the heavily industrial cities of his youth, and by pointed comparison with ‘old London town’, Melbourne’s parklands, public buildings and general dynamism must have

1 Anthony Trollope, Australia, ed. P.D. Edwards and R.B. Joyce (St Lucia, 1967 [originally 1873]), p. 375. A decade earlier, future British Prime Minister William Gladstone similarly invoked the category of age in describing booming Middlesbrough as ‘an infant Hercules’ (Times, 11 October 1862, p. 7). 2 Henry Gyles Turner, ‘The Seven Ages of Melbourne’ in Jill Roe, Marvellous Melbourne: The Emergence of an Australian City (Sydney, 1974), p. 97. Also see BrownMay, Melbourne Street Life, p. 20, for comments made in 1889 by James Francis Hogan likening Melbourne’s street grid to its apparent youthful, ebullient character, and drawing the comparison with Sydney where an older and more irregular street pattern was regarded as indicative of a staid mindset. 3 Turner, ‘Seven Ages’, p. 98. On ‘personalization’ and city growth, also see Hamer, pp. 113–38. 4 See Nettleton’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB): .

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

Fig. 1.1

Becoming space: four views of emergent Melbourne. Clockwise from top left: Charles Nettleton, View from Observatory in Flagstaff Gardens (2) (albumen silver, 1866); Charles Nettleton, Elevated Views of Melbourne Buildings (albumen silver, c. 1870 [featuring the Treasury Building on Spring Street]); The Supreme Court During Construction, Showing Corner Little Bourke and William Streets, Melbourne (not attributed; albumen silver, c. 1875); Charles Nettleton, St. Patrick’s Cathedral (albumen silver, c. 1866). All four images courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

seemed both marvellous and modern in the decades after his arrival.5 In the sense of its perceived attractiveness, and also by virtue of incipience, sojourners and settlers like Trollope, Turner and Nettleton present an image of Melbourne as ‘becoming’. An air of imminence pervades their characterizations of the colonial capital. The depiction of Melbourne as a becoming city was double-edged, however. Rendering a city youthful implies promise and energy, but also suggests that it is London-based journalist George Augustus Sala famously deemed Melbourne ‘marvellous’ during a visit in 1885. The sobriquet ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ soon gained currency in the city. For further details, see the entry in Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain (eds), The Encyclopedia of Melbourne(Cambridge, 2005), p. 446. 5

Growing Up with the City

25

a work in progress, prone to ‘growing pains’. Indeed, several writers of the period commented that Melbourne appeared ‘unfinished’ and that the city lacked the solidity of longer-settled Sydney.6 Gaps in the city grid troubled English journalist Richard Twopeny, for instance, who observed in 1883 that despite Melbourne’s overall ‘metropolitan’ feel a ‘rather higgledy-piggledy look’ remained, with the settlement ‘constantly outgrowing the majority of its buildings’ and featuring ‘gaps in the line of the streets’.7 Twopeny enjoyed a measure of critical distance in passing his judgements, posing as an outsider looking in, but his sentiments were not confined to visitors. The persistence with which new arrivals were cajoled into giving an opinion on the city (‘If I was asked once, I was asked twenty times what I thought of Melbourne before I had been twelve hours in it’, grumbled one newcomer in 18808) implies that at least some Melburnians also felt anxious about the processes of placemaking, and required external validation for their city-building efforts. With rapid change all around, some commentators even harboured associated fears that the city was simply growing too fast for its own good. Seen from this perspective, rampant urban development was a curse and not a blessing, with the city’s chance of potential greatness jeopardized by relentless construction.9 Melbourne’s expansion was indeed striking: after more than an eightfold increase in the number of residents during the 1850s and 1860s (a surge associated with the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851), the population of Melbourne at the census in 1871 stood at 191,449. Ten years later, 262,389 people resided in the city, with a further 200,000 added in the go-ahead 1880s to produce a total of 474,440 at the 1891 count.10 At that time, an associated boom in property prices placed the city behind only London and Glasgow in terms of rateable value within the British Empire.11 Thereafter severe economic depression intervened and population growth ebbed,12 but the city was still pushing towards 6 Henry Cornish, Under the Southern Cross (Melbourne, 1975 [originally 1880]), p. 93. Also see Tim Flannery (ed.), The Birth of Melbourne (Melbourne, 2002), p. 363, and compare with Hogan’s reading of Sydney (see footnote 2). 7 Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, ed. Michael Cannon (Melbourne, 1973 [originally 1883]), pp. 2, 4. 8 Cornish, pp. 87–8. Also see Hamer, pp. 55–7 for further examples. 9 ‘A nation will never become great by adding house to house and street to street’: E.W. Beckett cited in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), p. 315. Bella Guerin, the first woman to graduate from the city’s university, expressed a parallel concern, lamenting the want of ‘thoroughness’ in the colony (Argus, 10 July 1886, p. 4). 10 Figures from Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics (Sydney, 1987), p. 41. Raw figures for Melbourne’s historical population are a subject for debate: see Peter McDonald’s entry on ‘Demography’ in the online Encyclopedia of Melbourne: . 11 Asa Briggs, ‘Melbourne: A Victorian Community Overseas’, in Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 285. 12 The impact of the slump is well described in Belich, pp. 359–63.

26

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

a total of nearly half a million inhabitants at the turn of the century.13 This rise to prominence positioned Melbourne at the forefront of the nineteenth-century ‘Anglo explosion’ identified by James Belich.14 A metropolis of international standing, Melbourne overshadowed similar settler cities like San Francisco, and many older conurbations, including São Paulo and Rome. In this, the ‘upstart’ city,15 the provision of infrastructure could not initially keep pace with such population increases. Douglas Gane found Melbourne’s road surfaces ‘execrable’ in 1885, for example, noting in addition that open gutters were still being used to carry away excess water and effluent in the absence of adequate drainage and a sewerage system (Figure 1.2).16 A growth spurt in utility provision from the 1880s addressed some of these problems (see Figure 1.3), establishing extensive networks of public transport and gas provision (with the unintended effect that supply outstripped demand), and ensuring that by 1897 the city was at last satisfactorily sewered.17 But still the complaints continued. ‘No new city can dower its streets with the sentiment of historical associations’, wrote an irritated ‘Democritus’ in 1899, ‘but it should be able to better in material beauty and every day convenience the thoroughfares of cities that have been busy haunts of men for a thousand years.’18 At century’s end, Melbourne’s urban fabric seemed still to exemplify the awkwardness of adolescence. The interplay between young Melbourne – in all its pride and with its various problems – and the young people growing up there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a central theme of this book. I argue that historical city space and the ‘space’ of life we refer to as youth merit study on their own terms, not merely to reveal antecedents for subsequent phases. Such study can deepen understanding of the temporally specific experiences of young people in urban settings and help us comprehend more fully the forces that have shaped the built environment. Expressed another way, there is an intrinsic value in regarding young people as young people, rather than as proto-adults, and the city of yesteryear – in 13 Melbourne also increasingly dominated the colony in terms of proportion. As a percentage of the total Victorian population, Melbourne’s population at the censuses of 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911 stood, respectively, at 22.8; 26.1; 30.4; 41.9; 40.4 and 44.7 per cent. (Figures calculated from table in Vamplew, p. 41.) 14 Belich, pp. 1–9; 356–9. 15 A comment on Melbourne by surveyor Robert Russell in the late 1830s. See Paul de Serville, ‘Nineteenth-Century Melbourne: Ambition, Progress, Phantasmagoria’, in The Sydney–Melbourne Book, ed. Jim Davidson (Sydney, London & Boston, 1986), p. 55. 16 Douglas Gane, New South Wales and Victoria in 1885 (London, 1886), p. 36. Also see Twopeny, p. 5, for similar observations. 17 Graeme Davison, ‘Public Utilities and the Expansion of Melbourne in the 1880s’, in Australian Capital Cities, ed. J.W. McCarty and C.B. Schedvin (Sydney, 1978), pp. 86–101. 18 Age, 1 April 1899, p. 2. Age was no excuse, the writer stated: ‘Melbourne, though still among the youngest of great cities, is now old enough to regard itself no longer as justified in excusing its deficiencies on the score of youth’.

Growing Up with the City

Fig. 1.2

27

American & Australasian Photographic Company, Flinders Street West Showing Customs House Under Construction with Hoardings Covered in Theatre Posters; and Yarra Family Hotel, Melbourne (glass photonegative, c. 1870–75). Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ON 4 Box 63 No 539

this case Melbourne, one of Asa Briggs’s ‘Victorian Cities’ and a place sharing characteristics including rapid nineteenth-century expansion with many other settlements – in its own right.19 Thus the concern in this study is as much with being (that is, the historical moment or the experience of being young) as with the notion of becoming (historical processes or the journey through the life cycle).20 Of course factors of change, the currency of historical enquiry, cannot be forgotten.

Briggs, pp. 285–319. A conception part inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s discussion, ‘First Series of Paradoxes

19 20

of Pure Becoming’, in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, 1990 [originally 1969]), pp. 1–3.

28

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

Fig. 1.3

View of Collins Street East, Melbourne, North Side (not attributed; albumen silver, December 1885). Photograph shows preparatory work for the laying of tram tracks. Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

To this end, I regard the city as a process, or a series of spaces forever in the making, and similarly consider growing up as a process of perpetual evolution.21 This approach runs against the overwhelming trend in the colonial era to consider young people solely from the standpoint of their future prospects. It also calls into question current beliefs which demand metropolitan spaces be regulated by adults for the principal benefit of other adults.22 Nevertheless, to see age as a structural factor in society allows for alternative assessments to those yielded by analyses of class, ethnicity or gender, and for scholars of Melbourne to survey the urban scene from new perspectives. The remainder of this chapter dwells further on the link between the youthful city and its young people, broadening out to consider the demographic and discursive contexts within which the latter were situated. On (city) space as a process, see: Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, 1994), p. 265 – ‘Seeing space as a moment in the intersection of configured social relations (rather than as an absolute dimension) means that it cannot be seen as static’ – and Allan Pred, ‘Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the TimeGeography of Becoming Places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74/2 (1984): 279–97. 22 For supporting material see Gill Valentine, ‘Children Should be Seen and Not Heard: The Production and Transgression of Adults’ Public Space’, Urban Geography, 17/3 (1996): 205–20. 21

Growing Up with the City

29

Making Streets and Making Citizens For any historian of youth and the city, to study coming of age in a location itself widely regarded as nascent is an enticing prospect. Although no previous histories have explicitly drawn together discussions about youth and the experiences of young people in this way,23 contemporaries in late-Victorian Melbourne did grasp the link between the circumstances of their city and the children in its midst. In August 1900, J. Hume Cook, Member of Parliament and prominent nativist,24 introduced a deputation to the Brunswick municipal council calling for better facilities to be provided for city youth. Perceiving the relationship between creating new infrastructure and building new citizens, he reminded councillors that ‘although it was important that they should make their streets, it was also important that they should look after the growing manhood under their care’.25 Similarly, in December 1891 a fellow politician defended the use of parliamentary time to debate juvenile street trading, stating his belief that there was ‘no more important measure on the notice paper … not even the Railways Bill’.26 Such associations between city space and city youth were not unusual during this period, with one newspaper, assessing the perceived problems of vagrancy and ‘the growing spirit of “independence” among young people’, lamenting in 1886 that ‘Melbourne streets are … an open-air factory for the production of an outcast class’.27 At large on those streets the young subjects of these anxious discussions were getting on with their own affairs, making the most of opportunities – and spaces – presented to them by their developing city. In the 1890s, one young Melburnian and his circle of friends approached with delight the drainage channels perceived by Douglas Gane a decade earlier as blots on the city landscape. Sensing an occasion to utilize the landscape for the purposes of play, Frank Matthias later recalled that ‘After rain had ceased small pieces of wood (boats) would be raced down the flowing gutter to the drain to see who would win’.28 It appears that the gutters of Little Bourke Street, through which water gushed after a heavy downfall, were a favourite location for the pursuit, with children betting pennies Ken Inglis, however, expressed an awareness of the issue at the end of a 1979 paper: ‘Young Australia 1870–1900: The Idea and the Reality’, in The Colonial Child: Papers Presented at the 8th Biennial Conference of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Melbourne 12–13 October 1979, ed. Guy Featherstone (Melbourne, 1981), pp. 20–23. 24 A term referring in the Australian context to one who champions local white sentiment. See below for discussion with reference to Australian Natives Association. 25 Age, 7 August 1900, p. 6. 26 See Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), Session 1891, Vol. 68, p. 3,035 (debate on the Local Government Act Amendment Bill). Comment by Sir Frederick Sargood, member for South Yarra. 27 Argus, 22 November 1886, p. 6. 28 See Frank Richard Matthias, ‘This Journey of Mine’ (ed. Gayle Hardie, 1985), State Library of Victoria (SLV), MS 12532, box 3404/4, p. 4. Matthias was born in 1891. 23

30

Fig. 1.4

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

Thoroughfare or urban playground? American & Australasian Photographic Company, Looking East Along Little Bourke Street West from Stephen Stapleton’s Harp of Erin Hotel and F. Opitz’s New Excelsior Hotel, Melbourne (glass photonegative, 1875). Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ON 4 Box 65 No 581. Note the gradient of the gutters, the vacant corner block and the small notice beneath the Excelsior Hotel sign. The notice reads ‘NO NUISANCE’: possibly a direction to local children inclined to gather at this location

on the outcome of contests.29 Elsewhere across the city other youngsters played on vacant lots left behind during Melbourne’s rapid outward expansion, their impromptu games further evidence of the interaction between city youth and an emergent metropolis.30 29 As described in a newspaper cutting dated 8 April 1899 (cuttings book of Melbourne’s Newsboys’ Society, SLV MS 10034, Melbourne Newsboys’ Club Foundation, box 1602, p. 71). The practice is also noted in Try Excelsior News, September 1896, p. 10. 30 Discussed, for example, by Grace and Jim Hocking in Collingwood History Committee, In Those Days: Collingwood Remembered (Melbourne, 1979), p. 24, and in a news clipping dated 1 June 1899, SLV MS 9910, archive of William Forster Try Boys Society, box 41, cuttings book (1883–1906).

Growing Up with the City

31

And there were certainly no shortages of playmates in this city, for underpinning the discursive construction of Melbourne as youthful stood powerful demographic props. In 1870, the journalist, budding author and self-styled ‘peripatetic philosopher’ Marcus Clarke was passing down a Melbourne laneway when he found his progress blocked by a crowd. Relating the scene to his readers with characteristic flourish, he observed: The whole place was boiling with boys. Boys occupied the steps, clung to the railing, stared into the bullseye window, and danced upon the pavement. A tide of boys surged madly into the street, and ebbed and flowed with hoarse murmur in the narrow passage. It seemed as though the bottle-neck was a sort of terrible blowhole, through which the torrent of boyhood spouted and bellowed … At the window the grey head of an old man appeared from time to time, and was with withdrawn as soon as seen … Terrified and astonished, I turned to seek an explanation for the marvel. What did I behold? Far as the eye could reach the city swarmed with boys. From the populous height crowned by Scott’s and the new Council-chamber, from the wilds of the market and the parts about the telegraph-office, a black-capped torrent rushed down the hill … Melbourne was perspiring juvenile humanity, and from every pore of the sweating mass of brick-and-mortar exuded a youth of tender age.31

Extravagant as Clarke’s exposition was, his observations of ‘a resistless flood of boys’ were grounded on substantive facts. At the census in 1871, boys and girls aged 14 years and under comprised 42 per cent of the white Australian population, with the largest concentration based in Victoria and its capital city, Melbourne.32 The goldfields had lured tens of thousands of prospectors to the colony during the 1850s, and the legacy of this influx – as the migrants settled and married – was a population boom. In the 1850s and early 1860s Victoria’s population profile was ‘waist-like’, with the middle of the population pyramid overhanging the base: a reflection of the fact that most migrants were aged in their twenties and

31 Marcus Clarke, ‘What to Do with our Boys’ reprinted in A Colonial City: High and Low Life – Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, ed. L.T. Hergenhan (St Lucia, 1972), pp. 72–4. (Originally published 5 March 1870.) 32 A statistic noted by Kim Torney in Babes in the Bush: The Making of an Australian Image (Fremantle, 2005), p. 69. Indigenous people were not counted by census administrators at this time. The proportion aged under 14 was higher in South Australia (45.1 per cent) than Victoria (42.2 per cent), but the corresponding population was fractional. See for data. In England and Wales, a lower proportion, 36.1 per cent, were aged 14 and under in 1871. Indeed, in no census year between 1841 and 1901 did the proportion in England and Wales exceed 36.4 per cent. See Pamela Horn, The Victorian Town Child (Stroud, 1997), p. 211.

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

thirties.33 Thereafter, in the 1870s and 1880s, the base (the youngest sector of the community) dominated, with the waist – marking another substantial influx of migrants in the 1880s and the growth to adulthood of the children of the 1870s – returning again in less pronounced fashion during the 1890s. Distributed by colony, Victoria was home to the largest number of under 14s between the 1860s and the 1890s. In 1861, 42.8 per cent of all the white children on the continent lived there, with 31.2 per cent residing in neighbouring New South Wales. A decade later, a time at which it may well have seemed that ‘Melbourne was perspiring juvenile humanity’, an astonishing 44.1 per cent of Australia’s youngest lived in Victoria (with just 30 per cent in New South Wales). Percentage figures for the succeeding censuses ran as follows: 1881: Victoria 37.9 (NSW 34.1); 1891: Victoria 33.8 (NSW 36.8); 1901: Victoria 30.9 (NSW 36.7); 1911: Victoria 29.6 (NSW 37.0).34 As these figures attest, by the dawn of the new century New South Wales and Sydney could claim to have appropriated the mantle of youth. But in the decades leading up to Federation, Melbourne possessed a preponderance of children and young adults, sources of inspiration and exasperation for more senior members of society. ‘The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green’ Flowing on from the pronounced concentration of young people in Victoria, heated exchanges on the subject of ‘Young Australia’ took place in Melbourne’s literary circles. In fact, Melbourne generated the most serious engagements in this debate,35 with journals including the Melbourne Review and Victorian Review hosting ongoing considerations of such topics as ‘the Coming Australian’ and the especially contentious question of how Australian climatic factors might affect local physique.36 ‘“[T]he coming man” in Melbourne will be a sorry affair if he is a 33 See A.R. Hall, ‘Some Long Period Effects of the Kinked Age Distribution of the Population of Australia 1861–1961’, The Economic Record, 39/85 (1963): 43–52. The percentages of those aged 14 and under for Victoria are: 1861: 33.2; 1871: 42.2; 1881: 38.5; 1891: 34.7; 1901: 34.2; 1911: 30.3. Also see Peter F. McDonald, Marriage in Australia: Age at First Marriage and Proportions Marrying, 1860–1971 (Canberra, 1974), pp. 86–95, and Vamplew, pp. 32–9. 34 Percentages calculated from census data in Vamplew, pp. 32–41. 35 On concerns for future development in racially-charged Queensland, see Shirleene Robinson and Emily Wilson, ‘Preserving the Traditions of a “Great Race”: Youth and National Character in Queensland, 1859–1918’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 94/2 (2008): 166–85. 36 See for example: Marcus Clarke, ‘The Future Australasian Race: Our Children’, in A Marcus Clarke Reader, ed. Bill Wannan (London, 1964 [originally 1877]), pp. 26–30; Anon, ‘Will the Anglo-Australian Race Degenerate?’, Victorian Review, 1 (November 1879): 114–23; James Francis Hogan, ‘The Coming Australian’, Victorian Review, 13 (November 1880): 102–9; Henry Ling Roth, ‘A Few Words in Reply to Mr. Hogan’s “Coming Australian”’, Victorian Review, 15 (January 1881): 313–15; George Meudell,

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pure development of what the boy is now’, worried the evangelical John Cromack in 1874; a year later Judge Redmond Barry launched an inquiry to determine whether ‘the race in its transplantation to Australian soil retains undiminished the vigour and fire and stamina of the strong old fire of which it is an offshoot’.37 Any findings for the inquiry – assuming locals felt energetic enough to collate them – have since been lost to history, but the terms of the investigation exemplify the tone of an anxious discussion. Stephen Alomes observes the apparent paradox of Sydney holding ‘a strong sense of Australianness in culture’ at this time (with the presence there of the nationalist Bulletin journal and the nationalist poets Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson) while Melbourne served as the main forum for analysis of the ‘Australian type’.38 The paradox is explained, I think, with reference to the flowering of ‘nativism’ in Victoria during this period, and also by recognizing the colony’s notable age structure and shorter history of settlement. Whereas some commentators in Sydney had nurtured native white sentiment since at least the 1820s,39 ‘Melbourne’s currency lads took longer than the accepted generation of 25 years to make themselves heard’, Marian Quartly argues, ‘because the first generation of native-born were completely swamped by the flood of older gold-seeking migrants in the 1850s … As a result this first generation left almost no mark upon the Victorian scene.’40 By the late 1870s, however, a second generation was beginning to reach maturity and to assert tentatively a special and privileged relationship with the local soil. Moreover, a momentous shift occurred at the same historical moment whereby the native-born for the first time outnumbered those colonists born overseas.41 This shift, compounded with the distinct demographic ‘Australia for the Australians’, Melbourne Review, 27 (July 1882): 315–24; Samuel Rinder, ‘The “Foreigner” in Australia’, Melbourne Review, 28 (October 1882): 437–42. 37 David Maunders, ‘Providing Profitable and Instructive Amusement: Values Underlying the Development of Youth Organisations in Victoria 1870–1920’, in Mother State and Her Little Ones: Children and Youth 1860s–1930s, ed. Bob Bessant (Melbourne, 1987), p. 39. The inquiry is noted in Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, revised edn. (Melbourne, 2001), p. 120. 38 Stephen Alomes and Catherine Jones, Australian Nationalism: A Documentary History (Sydney, 1991), p. 50. Richard White’s Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney, 1981) also provides insightful analysis of these themes. 39 As a case in point, refer to John Molony’s discussion of poet Charles Tompson in The Native-Born: The First White Australians (Melbourne, 2000), p. 115. 40 Marian Aveling (now Quartly), ‘A History of the Australian Natives Association 1871–1900’ (PhD thesis, Monash University, 1970), pp. 39–40. ‘Currency lad’ was a term at first applied dismissively to the native-born (in contrast with the more dependable ‘sterling’ qualities of their British parents) and subsequently claimed with pride by some in Australia (see Molony, pp. 25–6, 130–31). 41 At the 1881 Victorian census, 59 per cent of the population was born locally, compared with 45 per cent in 1871. See Aveling, pp. 3, 40.

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

structure outlined above, accounts in large measure for a key aspect of this book: Melbourne’s generation gap. Sarah Chinn has recently connected the origins of a similar phenomenon in the United States to the schism, from 1880 to 1920, between immigrant parents and their American-born (or locally raised) offspring.42 Though language differences across the generations were less evident in Australia, a parallel story unfolded in the antipodes, predating America’s generation gap by at least a decade. Founded in Melbourne in 1871, the Australian Natives Association (ANA) enshrined the newfound nativism in concrete terms. Although its growth was at first unspectacular, within 15 years the organization was firmly established in Victoria with nearly 4,500 members (mostly aged in their low twenties) and 58 branches.43 What began modestly as a mutual benefit society with a membership confined to the Australian-born quickly began to engage with ‘national’ concerns, most particularly the movement to federate the Australian colonies. Equally significant, the ANA helped cultivate the generational divide by sponsoring debates on ‘Australian’ topics and, in more radical moments, by alleging that colonists born overseas lacked patriotism and political ability.44 Once the great project of Australian political unity had been agreed towards the end of the century, the ANA transposed its nationalist rhetoric onto other issues, notably the perceived plight of city youth. As is illustrated by the earlier discussion of Hume Cook’s appeal to Melbourne councillors in 1900, and also by the Association’s later sponsorship of legislation to outlaw juvenile smoking, ANA members held the view that national vitality was premised in large measure upon young people’s well-being.45 Press reactions to the ANA and its brand of native expression were initially hostile. In August 1884, Melbourne’s Age newspaper mocked the native as ‘the precocious school-boy type, rather over-educated for his intellect, and thoroughly determined not to be put down’.46 The following year the Old Colonists’ Association, a body of Victorian ‘pioneers’, exhibited its displeasure by sniping that members of the younger generation had yet to add anything substantial to the legislative achievements of their fathers.47 Even in 1892, by which time the ANA was well recognized and widely respected, the conservative Melbourne Punch still 42 Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2009), pp. 4–6. 43 See Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne, 1971), p. 231, and Aveling, p. 414. 44 See chs. 1, 2 and 7 in Aveling, and Meudell, ‘Australia for the Australians’. 45 See VPD, Session 1905, Vol. 110, p. 878 and Session 1906, Vol. 113, p. 655 for direct references to the ANA during debates on the Juvenile Smokers Restriction Bill and the subsequent Juvenile Smokers Prevention Bill. The latter measure also received support from prominent ANA member (and former President) Sir Alexander Peacock, three times Victorian Premier (1901–1902; 1914–1917; 1924). 46 Cited in Aveling, p. 75. 47 Age, 26 November 1885, p. 4.

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‘Lord John Taking the Measure of the Colonies’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 18, 15 February 1850, p. 75. Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.,

portrayed the organization as a grinning child, impudent and ignorant – another instance of youth being employed to suggest immaturity or inexperience rather than potential or wisdom.48 As well as finding expression at a personal level, in conflicts between ‘pioneer’ parents and their self-assured children, generational differences further informed a broader paradigm picturing Australia as a child adjacent to its imperial parent. In visual terms, one of the earliest depictions of this relationship featured in an 1850 edition of the London Punch (see Figure 1.5). Here we see Australia as an oversized lad, standing tall whilst his measurements are taken by John Russell, the British Prime Minister, in his imperial outfitter’s shop. Australia appears pleased: he has outgrown his clothes and new ones are clearly required. The context to this ‘Dignity and Impudence’, Melbourne Punch, 24 March 1892, p. 178. On the factor of youth as either a blessing or a curse in period cartoons, see Simon Sleight ‘Wavering Between Virtue and Vice: Constructions of Youth in Australian Cartoons of the LateVictorian Era’, in Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence, ed. Richard Scully and Marian Quartly (Melbourne, 2009), pp. 5.1–5.26. 48

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

cartoon is the Australian Colonies Government Act, then a subject of debate in the British Parliament. The Act paved the way for the separation of Port Phillip from New South Wales and granted a limited form of self-governance. Van Diemen’s Land, now to be renamed Tasmania, was also to receive a legislature, and hence the smaller figure in the cartoon (already separated from his loftier sibling) prepares to take off his jacket in preparation for new attire. Punch readers who thought that the Australian colonies were now figuratively to ‘come of age’ as maturing democracies would have been disappointed, however. Once established, the trope of Australia as a youth, poised perpetually on the threshold of adulthood, would prove difficult to transcend. The image of the imperial ‘parent’ would also recur; though accommodating Australia’s growing stature with new vestments, Britain urged its precocious offspring to depend upon its imperial tailoring. Figure 1.6 presents similar concerns from an Australian perspective in 1887 – is the powerful child Australia to be stunted by the desires of his British parents or allowed to outgrow the confines of the imperial household? Such images, important elements of what Raphael Samuel refers to as ‘national fictions’, served as mirrors of precepts with common currency in contemporary society and also as components in that same ideology.49 They help reveal some of the contexts within which the lives of real Australian children were discussed. In the colonial era, to clarify, the idea of ‘Young Australia’ became akin to a structure of understanding, something approaching a mentalité. It was a concept, never fully rationalized, that suffused and informed many areas of debate, among them the imperial relationship, demographic shifts and the rise to prominence of the native-born, the apparent precocity of Australian youth and the characteristics of the ‘Australian Girl’, juvenile crime and ‘larrikinism’, education, attitudes towards immigration and race, the depiction of the Australian colonies as a laboratory of social progress, the movement for federation, feminist reasoning and republican sentiment.50 Unlike the ‘Young England’ or ‘Young Ireland’ movements of mid-century, the loosely defined and ever-evolving ‘Young Australia’ phenomenon never coalesced into a comparable political force, although there were clusters of Victorian politicians in the late 1880s and 1890s who acquired the nickname

49 Raphael Samuel, ‘Introduction: The Figures of National Myth’, in his edited collection, Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London and New York, 1989), p. xix. 50 On these topics, see: Times (London), 31 August 1903, p. 10; George D. Meudell, ‘An Australian Protest Against Imperial Federation’, Melbourne Review, 39 (July 1885): 245–54; Ethel Castilla, ‘The Australian Girl’ in The Australian Girl and Other Verses (Melbourne, 1900), p. 2; Charles Gavan Duffy, ‘An Australian Example’, Contemporary Review, 53, (January–June 1888): 3; William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (London, 1902); Marilyn Lake, ‘“Stirring Tales”: Australian Feminism and National Identity’, in The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 78–91.

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Fig. 1.6

37

‘An Old Cruelty Revived’, Life, with which is incorporated Australian Tit-Bits, 24 March 1887, p. 9. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

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

‘Young Australians’.51 Between 1842 and 1845 the ‘Young England’ movement had garnered much attention in ‘the Mother Country’, finding its ultimate political expression in the rise to power of Disraeli.52 Driven by a restorative impulse and fear of the Chartist mob, the movement looked to the past for inspiration, in contrast, on the whole, to the contemporaneous ‘Young Ireland’ and ‘Young America’ movements. The former advocated resistance, repeal and ‘Ourselves Alone’53; the latter (a set of ideas first formulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in ‘The Young American’ in 1844) sponsored capitalistic individualism and aggressive nationalism.54 Charles Gavan Duffy, a prime mover in the ‘Young Ireland’ group, later came to Melbourne, where he chaired a select committee on the subject of a federal union (in 1857) and attained the premiership of Victoria in 1871.55 Originating later than ‘Young England’, ‘Young Ireland’ and ‘Young America’ (and, indeed, Giuseppe Mazzini’s influential ‘Young Italy’, part of a Europe-wide revolution of intellectuals), the closest overseas parallel to ‘Young Australia’ was probably the Wandervogel stage (1896–1919) of the equally nebulous ‘Young Germany’ movement,56 with which it shared a pastoral romanticism, though not the sense of collective revolt against bourgeois respectability. In the absence of a coherent programme, ‘Young Australia’ remained a powerful ideological tool available to whosoever wished to use it: a convenient device in the hands of some for implying rapid ‘national’ progress, whilst an equally handy instrument for others intent on keeping an incipient Australia in its place.57 Among these different configurations, the nationalist employment of ‘Young Australia’ rhetoric is perhaps the most germane to my discussion of youth and the city. Time and again writers of the nationalist school drew the comparison between the world left behind and the world made again, between England’s ‘Old Dead Tree’ and Australia’s ‘Young Tree Green’, or between the ‘old-world wrecks See: Sleight, ‘Wavering Between Virtue and Vice’, pp. 05.8–05.9; Aveling, pp. 197–8; J.A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: A Biography (Melbourne, 1965), Vol. I, pp. 104–5. 52 Richard Faber, Young England (London & Boston, 1987); Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Melbourne, 1970), pp. 45–53. 53 Richard Davis, The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin, 1987); Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, 1840–45 (Dublin, 1884); Denis Gwynn, Young Ireland and 1848 (Oxford, 1949). 54 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Young American’, lecture read 7 February 1844. Available online – see: . 55 On Duffy and the other ‘Young Irelanders’, see Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present (Sydney, 2000 [originally 1986]), pp. 47–51, 205–6; Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, Vol. II (London, 1898). 56 Walter Z. Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (London, 1962). 57 On the conservative possibilities of ‘Young Australia’ rhetoric, see Ken Stewart, ‘The Language of “Youth”’, in his edited book The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture (St Lucia, 1996), p. 5. 51

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which strew the ground’ and the processes by which Australians ‘build anew’.58 Commentary like this inevitably embraced city children and searched for signs of Australian inimitability.59 Hence soon after mid-century, as the effects of the first baby boom began to be felt, images of street children as healthily precocious and sceptical began to appear, even in the conservative press (see Figure 1.7). Quickwitted and lively, these urban ragamuffins were greeted at first as proof of the vigour of the native-born. Schedules and Sequences: Definitions of ‘Youth’ Despite early depictions, as the century progressed the ‘young Australian’ street urchin was slowly re-conceptualized as a problem for society, and regarded either as ‘neglected’ or else as a potential menace.60 Theories of ‘adolescence’61 – first generated in America and Europe between 1870 and 1900 – sparked further shifts in perception when taken up in Australia soon after the turn of the century, with the behaviour of city-bred (and working-class) ‘larrikins’ seen in turn as the playing-out in public of adolescent urges.62 That said, as a phase of life adolescence was initially conceived as a middle-class phenomenon, associated with the implementation of mass state education, a drop in child mortality and scientific discussion of puberty. Working-class children, by and large, and girls generally (described at the time as permanently immature, or burdened at a young age with the role of ‘little mothers’) were less affected by the extended period of dependency that adolescence entailed.63 Quotations from Henry Lawson, ‘A Song of the Republic’ (1887), in Henry Lawson: Collected Verse, Vol. 1 1885–1900, ed. Colin Roderick (Sydney, 1967), p. 1, and George Essex Evans, ‘A Federal Song’ (1891), reprinted in The 1890s: Stories, Verse, and Essays, ed. Leon Cantrell (St Lucia, 1977), p. 131. 59 A search repeated in the early 1960s by nationalist historians Ken MacNab and Russel Ward – see ‘The Nature and Nurture of the First Generation of Native-Born Australians’, Historical Studies, 10/39 (1962): 289–308 – and criticized by Jan Kociumbas in her entry on ‘Australia’ in the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York, 2005), Vol. 1, p. 71. 60 On the processes by which middle-class observers classified the publicly visible poor as a separate entity, see Lynette Finch, The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class and Surveillance (Sydney, 1993), pp. 32–49. 61 John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770–Present (London & New York, 1974); John and Virginia Demos, ‘Adolescence in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 31/4 (1969): 632–9. 62 Note here a 1907 opinion that the larrikin is ‘both interesting and valuable’ from ‘the scientific and psychological points of view’ (Alfred Buchanan, The Real Australia [London, 1907], p. 14, my emphasis). On the arrival of ‘adolescence’ in Australia, see Jan Kociumbas, Australian Childhood: A History (Sydney, 1997), pp. 125–47. 63 Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London, 1981); Ruskin Teeter, ‘The Travails of 19th-Century Urban Youth as a Precondition to the Invention of Modern Adolescence’, Adolescence, 23/89 (1988): 15–18. 58

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Fig. 1.7

‘A Palpable Hit’, Melbourne Punch, 8 March 1860, p. 6. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

By century’s end, however, class distinctions, if not divisions of gender, were melting into a dialogue on adolescence as more broadly experienced, a discussion informed by the early work of G. Stanley Hall.64 Although childhood was by now firmly conceived as separate phase of human life, the absence of a settled – or for that matter a thoroughly psychological – understanding of adolescence Gillis, p. 139. G. Stanley Hall first introduced his ideas on adolescence as a period of ‘storm and stress’ in the Princeton Review in 1882. Twenty-three years later his magnum opus followed: Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York, 1905). 64

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in late nineteenth-century Australia meant that commentators and legislators struggled to come to terms with issues pertaining to colonial youth. Education controversies in the 1860s, the moral panic surrounding larrikin gangs from the 1870s and a succession of novels portraying intergenerational conflict in the 1880s all suggested an obsession with a ‘youth problem’ and a paucity of psychosocial insight with which to find answers.65 In the absence of such insight, commentators often resorted to referencing characters from popular fiction – and from the novels of Charles Dickens in particular – to express their concern or bewilderment about urban youth. So it was that Smike, Jo the crossing sweeper and the malevolent figure of Fagin were all invoked in Melbourne, their unfortunate lives contrasted with that of Cedric Errol, the representational ideal of innocent middle-class childhood, lifted from the pages of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s bestselling 1886 novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy.66 The debates that utilized these stock characters had a peculiar inflection in Australia, however, due to the widespread belief that climatic factors were somehow modifying the life-course and shortening the time taken for children to reach maturity under southern skies. In 1887, members of the Victorian Parliament expressed their opinions that ‘youngsters in this colony [are] much more forward than youngsters in the old country’ and that ‘a youth of 17 in this country was nearly a man; he was as much a man as a youth of 18 or 19 in the old country’.67 Travellers like Max O’Rell, a visitor to Melbourne in the early 1890s, endorsed the view, passing comments including: ‘The children are early developed. I saw … young girls of twelve and thirteen developed like women of twenty, and showing sturdy calves, as they marched with straight and independent tread’.68 With confusion surrounding the issue of age-related behaviour, intense concern centred on the transition to adulthood, or rather the rough and ready manner in which city children were believed either to bear the burden of ‘adult’ responsibilities before their time or else not soon enough. As one anonymous writer summed up the situation in 1868, ‘the transition from boyhood to manhood is an indefinite question … the colonial boy is allowed to draft himself’.69 Elsewhere anxiety was expressed about the gap between leaving school (which usually occurred, in the The neat decadal distribution is Graeme Davison’s. See ‘“Our Youth Is Spent and Our Backs Are Bent”: The Origins of Australian Ageism’, Australian Cultural History, 114 (1995): 41. 66 For example: VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 55, p. 985; Argus, 29 July 1885, p. 10; Argus, 10 December 1873, p. 6; Argus, 17 December 1873, p. 4; Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (London, 1994 [originally 1886]). 67 See VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 54, pp. 501, 502 (opinions of James Patterson [member for Castlemaine] and Samuel Staughton [Bourke], expressed during debate on the Neglected Children Law Amendment Bill). 68 Max O’Rell, John Bull & Co.: The Great Colonial Branches of the Firm: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (London, 1894), p. 108. Also see Cornish, p. 108, and Trollope, p. 455 for similar opinions. 69 Anon, ‘On Boys’, Colonial Monthly (December 1868): 266. 65

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wake of the 1872 Education Act, sometime between the ages of 11 and 13) and the start of gainful employment, a period described in one report as a ‘terrible leakage’, a time when idle hands all too easily turned to mischievous habits.70 Legal definitions of childhood in this period further reveal the changing yardsticks with which the formative phase of the life course was measured. The 1879 Summary Jurisdiction Act defined anyone under 12 as a ‘child’, under 16 a ‘young person’ and over 16 an ‘adult’.71 The partial recognition within the Act of a separate phase in life between childhood and adulthood was not common to other legislation, however. Laws of 1884, for instance, stated bluntly that boys under 12 and girls under 13 could not work in factories, places from which concerned adults were determined to inoculate ‘children’ so defined.72 The 1872 Education Act, by contrast, resolved that ‘The parents of children of not less than six years nor more than fifteen years shall cause children … to attend school for a period of sixty days in each half year’, but even this foundational document did not enshrine this age range as the time of childhood; in practice students often put away their satchels long before their 15th birthdays, and in recognition of this the school leaving age was reduced to 13 in 1890 (before being extended again subsequently).73 Putting these rather bald legal definitions to one side, demographer Ann Larson has observed a subtle shift in late nineteenth-century Melbourne whereby ‘age 12 and perhaps even age 13 and 14’ were coming to be regarded as ‘a time of childhood and dependence, not an age for working full time’.74 Drawing on census material, job advertisements, school registration books and other published sources allows Larson to make this claim with some conviction and to recognize that gender See Ian Davey, ‘Transitions: School and Work in the Family Economy’, Australia 1888 Bulletin, 10 (1982): 50. 71 Sue Fabian and Morag Loh, Children in Australia: An Outline History (Melbourne, 1980), p. 60. Victoria’s census enumerator suggested an alternative scheme in 1881: ‘“Children,” to denote persons of from 1 to 5 years of age; “boys and girls,” from 5 to 15 years; “youths and maidens,” from 15 to 20 years; “young men and young women,” from 20 to 30 years …’ See . 72 Fabian and Loh, p. 72. 73 The Education Act 1872 (Victoria), s. 13. Other legal thresholds are also worth noting. In 1880, the age of consent in Victoria was 12 years old, one year lower than in England and Wales, but two years above that stipulated in many American states. It was raised to 16 in Victoria in 1891 (in line, by then, with England and Wales) and to 18 by 1914 (it is now 16). See Frank Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (Melbourne, 2012), pp. 98–101. Voting rights (operative since 1857) for Victorian males considered British subjects commenced at 21; Victorian females aged 21 and over did not enjoy the same privilege until 1908. Until 1963, marriage involving a male aged 14 or a female aged 12 was allowed in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Federal legislation in 1973 stipulated 18 years as the age of majority for both marriage and voting. See McDonald, Marriage in Australia, pp. 12, 25. 74 See Ann Larson, Growing Up in Melbourne: Family Life in the Late Nineteenth Century (Canberra, 1994), p. 125. 70

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played an important role in constructing childhood, with working-class boys – but far less frequently their sisters – enjoying ‘a time of relative freedom’ between the ages of 13 and 15, a period of semi-dependence when one was not expected to perform adult-like roles.75 G. Stanley Hall’s psychosexual conceptualizations of American ‘adolescence’ are also instructive in this regard. ‘Adolescence is more than puberty’, Hall declared in 1898, ‘extending over a period of ten years from twelve to fourteen to twenty-one or twenty-five in girls and boys, respectively, but the culmination is at fifteen or sixteen.’76 Adolescence might be regarded as a common denominator, then, but from the outset gender would be seen to help determine its timing and duration. In the American context, historian Howard Chudacoff identifies the end of the nineteenth century as an era bearing witness to accelerated activities of age stratification and scheduling, changes driven by developments in education and medical practice.77 In Australia the same tendencies can be seen: grade separation in schools; the birth of paediatrics (from 1870 based in Melbourne at the Hospital for Sick Children, later renamed the Royal Children’s Hospital); and the circulation of advice manuals on child-raising that recommended age-specific care.78 Like the United States, however, age scheduling in Australia was not yet firmly embedded at this point nor a universal experience, especially for those who fell outside the education system or attended only infrequently (and as is revealed in the next chapter, they were many). Historians have long grappled with the language of generation, and there is now general agreement that age is a chronological marker, a subjective experience and a system of power.79 Age is also – like gender, class and ethnicity – a relational category, a factor which has led one historian to use the term ‘pre-adult’ to classify his participants.80 Defining something purely by its obverse is not really satisfactory, however, and the ‘pre-adult’ classification hardly helps with boundary drawing. The lesson here is surely that historians are ill-advised to search for clear edges and wise to adopt an inductive methodology, alert to the historical circumstances of their sources.

Ibid., see pp. 147, 188–9. Hall, quoted in Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York,

75 76

2007), p. 66. 77 See Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, 1989), pp. 29–64. 78 See for instance Philip E. Muskett’s The Feeding and Management of Australian Infants in Health and in Disease (Sydney, 1906 [originally 1888]) and The Health and Diet of Children in Australia (Sydney, 1890). 79 See Steven Mintz, ‘Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1/1 (2008): 91–2. 80 David M. Pomfret, Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint Etienne, 1890–1940 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 3–6.

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This study hence adopts a flexible approach in defining its charges, with considered attention given to factors of context, class, ethnicity and gender. School-age Melburnians plus city-dwellers in their teens compose the approximate core subject group, but I have also been alert to individuals identified as ‘young’ (mainly by virtue of their perceived behaviour) in historical sources. For the purposes of pursuing central ideas and arguments, therefore, figures including Melbourne’s tearaway larrikins – who might range in age from under 10 years old to over 20 – fall within my purview.81 Following the lead of Harvey Graff, the interest is not, in sum, with ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’ or ‘youth’ as separate entities to be treated in isolation, but instead with ‘growing up’ as an ‘integrated human developmental process’, a journey towards adulthood ranging across all these phases.82 When Edith Onians, one of Melbourne’s foremost ‘child rescue’ workers in this period, can refer to her ‘boys’ as aged from 7 to 25, and when one of her acquaintances, a newsboy known as ‘Fiddler’, can declare ‘I’m thirteen and if a bloke can’t look after himself at thirteen he never will’,83 it seems obvious that to impose age boundaries from a twenty-first century perspective would be foolish. Hence the terms ‘children’ and ‘young people’ are used in what follows to refer to Melburnians who fit a category of process: to refer to their becoming and equally to their being. A few of the personalities who populate this study seem to have perceived moments of generational transition within their own lives. In her 1938 autobiography, author Janet Mitchell writes about a ‘terrible experience’ faced whilst playing with a dolls’ house during her early teens: Suddenly I realized that it was a sham. I burst into tears, sat on the floor, and wept till I was exhausted. And then, as if to explain why to myself, I wrote in one of my dolls’ copy-books: “Childhood is the happiest time of life”, and immediately tore it up, lest any grown-up might see it.84

The clarity of Mitchell’s insight regarding a sharp break between stages was not usual, however, nor a luxury often afforded to children of the lower classes. Instead most Melburnians experienced a blurred evolution towards adulthood. Although turn-of-the-century Australia had its markers of transition – putting one’s hair up and abandoning short dresses for girls, casting aside breeches and wearing long trousers for boys – these were not universal and there was not necessarily any

See the later discussion of this issue in Chapter 4 of this book for more details. Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, 1995), pp.

81 82

xii, 4–6. 83 See Edith Onians, Read All About It (Melbourne, c. 1953), pp. 8, 28 (my emphasis). Also see Mary Jo Maynes, ‘Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, And Narratives of Childhood’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1/1 (2008): 114 for a similar self-description by Viennese girl Adelheid Popp (born 1870). 84 Janet Mitchell, Spoils of Opportunity: An Autobiography (London, 1938), p. 26.

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immediate correlation with permitted behaviour or a change in activity. Roles might be rehearsed but performances remained unscripted. To switch focus to the beginnings of childhood, my interest here has been guided by an attempt to discover the age from which children of different classes and genders could gain unsupervised access to Melbourne’s public domain, the setting of the study. Very young children, consequently, have been largely excluded from the scene. As any historian can relate though, archives are wonderful places for surprises which complicate even the most seemingly commonsense decisions guiding research. As a case in point, Elaine Macdonald – a girl whose account of growing up in Melbourne forms an important part of the next two chapters – undertook her first solo exploration of the world beyond the family garden aged just 2, having eluded ‘Addah’ (Aggie), her nursemaid.85 Elaine’s determined entry into the public realm, it transpired, would serve as a foretaste of adventures to come. Adrift in the New Metropolis? Partly because she had been flirting with a postman at the time, but mainly because of the tender age of the child in her care, ‘Addah’ expressed a sense of panic over Elaine’s temporary disappearance. Her fear serves to illustrate a wider set of feelings about cities in the late nineteenth century. In short, the urban environment was conceived as a place of potential and increasing peril to young people of all ages. Indeed, it may well be that in a place like Melbourne, regarded as new, such threats were more keenly felt than elsewhere. Reform-minded adults feared that just as children could be physically lost ‘out there’ in the Australian bush – a traumatic event for all concerned, and one which could summon up deepseated anxieties about belonging in someone else’s land – so too might youngsters become spiritually lost or physically weakened amidst a labyrinth of metropolitan back lanes.86 As Figure 1.8 illustrates, the problems of young people and newly developed cities were regarded as inseparable at this time. Here we see a group of impatientlooking boys situated amidst building materials on an unidentified Melbourne street. Taken from a promotional leaflet advertising the work of the Gordon Institute (an agency licensed to receive children regarded by the justice system as ‘neglected’), it seems this photograph is intended either to trigger pathos or suggest potential. One reading might see the children as underprivileged victims of a city in decline. Another interpretation could perceive a message here that ‘raw material’ is plentiful, but for progress – building work – to continue, time and money are required. Either way the fate of these individuals is portrayed as 85 Elaine Macdonald (Mrs Whittle), ‘Journalist’s Child’ (1945), Royal Historical Society of Victoria (RHSV), MS 198, box 53, p. 49. 86 On bush-lost children, see: Torney; Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge, 1999).

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

Fig. 1.8

Good material: a group of Gordon Boys amidst the building blocks of the city (not attributed). Reproduced from leaflet in PROV VPRS 3181, Town Clerk’s files, Series 1, Unit 89, Charities (1894–1897), item 2141, received 13 June 1896. Reproduced with permission of the Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office Victoria, Australia

linked inexorably to that of their immediate surroundings. We have returned again to the conceptual coupling that prompted Hume Cook to make his appeal to the Brunswick councillors. The task of making new citizens, this image declares, must receive as much attention as constructing new streets. Adults interested in the troubles of city youth preferred to intervene early. Just as altering the shape of a city after all the buildings have gone up is far more difficult than making changes during the first phases of construction, reformers perceived that they had only a limited window of opportunity to remedy the plight of city children gone astray. Selina Sutherland, a key player in Melbourne’s Neglected Children’s Aid Society, was not alone in expressing the conviction that most youths over 14 were beyond reclamation.87 Similarly, George Guillaume, the energetic Secretary of the Department of Industrial and Reformatory Schools from 1881 to 1892, stated his concurrent belief that: the social reformer (like the enlightened modern missionary …) feels that his best hopes of success lie in rescuing and regenerating the young. If the ranks of the criminal and the vicious, whose unchecked growth would imperil the very existence of the commonwealth, are to be reduced, the one effective way 87 Selina Sutherland cited in ‘“So Many Arabs Saved from the Streets”: An Account of Boy Rescue Work’, unpublished paper (n.d.), located in SLV MS 10034, box 1590, p. 3.

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to accomplish this is by getting hold of and bringing under good influences the unhappy children who, if left unaided, must infallibly recruit those classes. The supply should be cut off at the source.88

‘As the twig is bent, so the tree shall grow’ – thus ran the commonplace English proverb, its logic seen as especially significant in the land of the ‘Young Tree Green’ and in Melbourne, identified earlier as ‘the sapling city’ in the minds of many. Yet while the urban milieu was widely regarded by reformers like Sutherland and Guillaume as endangering young people’s future development, other citizens, involved in the day-to-day management of Melbourne’s public spaces, thought that the dangers ran the other way, with young people jeopardizing efforts to improve and beautify the city. As a case in point, John Guilfoyle, Curator of Melbourne’s parks and gardens from 1890, took constant issue with children undermining the efforts of his gardeners to keep the city in bloom. Time and again, in his weekly reports to the Town Clerk, Guilfoyle described boys and girls ‘running riot over the beds’, ‘dancing among the tubers’, damaging newly planted trees, stealing the contents of birds’ nests and destroying introduced songbirds with catapults.89 F.S. Grimwade appeared similarly exasperated in a letter to his brother in 1901, predicting gloomily that although the areas flanking St Kilda Road had been tidied up in advance of the royal visit that year, any attempts to extend civic improvements by substituting the swampy area near Princes Bridge with lawns and flower beds would surely be undermined by Melbourne’s larrikins.90 We shall revisit Melbourne’s green spaces in the following chapter; for now the key point to note is that far from being mere victims of the urban environment, young people in Melbourne were actively using and modifying their surroundings. Put another way, in terms that recall the earlier discussion of spatial theory, young people were ‘producers’ of metropolitan space. If spaces do indeed possess an embedded ‘spatial culture’,91 this discussion has established that for the late nineteenth century in particular (and also to Excerpt from a conference paper read 14 November 1890 by George Guillaume at the first Australasian Conference of Charity; reprinted in Victorian Public Record Series (VPRS) 5690/2, Annual Reports for years 1888 to 1897 (Department of Industrial and Reformatory Schools), Report for year 1890, p. 71. 89 For the reports see PROV VPRS 3181, Town Clerk’s files, Series 1, Unit 753, Parks (1897), item 3556; Unit 757, Parks, (1900), item 4345; Unit 749, Parks (1893), item 5723; Unit 749, Parks (1893), item 4422. Also see Argus, 3 December 1872, p. 5, concerning a court case in which Nicholas Bickford (Guilfoyle’s predecessor as Curator) stated that ‘if boys were not prevented from firing shanghais [catapults] in the public reserves, it would be useless to attempt to acclimatise imported song birds’. 90 Reprinted in Russell Grimwade, Flinders Lane: Recollections of Alfred Felton (Melbourne, 1947), pp. 68–71. 91 Sandrine Depeau, ‘Urban Identities and Social Interaction: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Young People’s Spatial Mobility in Paris, France, and Frankston, Australia’, Local Environment, 6/1 (2001): 85. 88

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a lesser extent for the early years of the twentieth century) a culture of youth characterized Melbourne. Demographic factors played a significant part in this, as did the rapidity of Melbourne’s journey from tents to town halls. This apparent youthfulness, of course, jarred with the dispossessed Aborigines of the Kulin group, whose land this had been for millennia. Scarcely was this relational tension lurking within the age categorization of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ even admitted.92 Instead the youthfulness of the built metropolis was most often contrasted with longer settled cities overseas, especially London, and sometimes places closer to home, usually Sydney. Growing up with the city, young Melburnians ventured out around unfolding city spaces. Doubtless they passed by the clubs and coffee palaces where city fathers debated the relative merits of ‘Young Australia’ and worried about the prospects of the native-born. Here mental space and the space of social practice underpinned, indeed presupposed, each other. ‘It may be that the land and the people are young-hearted together’, wrote nationalist author Ethel Turner in 1894, prefacing her now famous novel Seven Little Australians.93 Exploring the spatial practices of young city-dwellers – activities set within the mental space of imagining outlined in this chapter – is a central purpose in the remainder of the volume. Young Melburnians deserve our attention and promise, in return, to show us new layers of urban life.

On this, see Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers, pp. 142, 159, 173. Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians (London, 2003 [originally 1894]), p. 1.

92 93

Chapter 2

The Metropolitan Youthscape: Making Space and Seeking Autonomy In late December 1900, Melbourne’s Town Clerk received an earnest letter of appeal from the city’s Trades Hall Council. Written by J.G. Barrett, the Council’s Secretary, the letter asserted ‘the necessity of providing healthful recreation for the benefit of the rising generation’.1 Seeking ‘a better and healthier tone in the community’, and noting that ‘the question seems not the cure, but the prevention’, Barrett urged municipal authorities to construct new public baths, gymnasia and other amenities to help occupy the leisure time of young Melburnians. In return for civic investment, Barrett promised his schemes would yield ‘good and useful citizens’, courtesy of the fact, he argued, that ‘profitable recreation … if rightly directed, must be productive of good, not only to the individual, but the State’.2 In the offices of John Clayton, the city’s Town Clerk, the entreaties from the Trades Hall caused little stir. Once he had read and numbered the letter, Clayton passed it on to the Health Committee for consideration before filing it away under the heading ‘Miscellaneous’.3 It would be some years yet before the city’s reformers could hold the attention of government and implement their plans for supervised playgrounds and similar interventionist projects. In the meantime, and as they had always done, Melbourne’s youngest did not wait for the state or anyone else to provide. Long before adults attempted to remake the urban environment for their benefit, children crafted a world of their own. Out and about in the city’s public spaces, young people ranged across the metropolis in search of adventure and play. This chapter assesses the activities of Melbourne’s children at large in the city. Focusing on the period before the onset of the playgrounds movement in Melbourne in 1907,4 I examine the factors affecting young people’s access to, and use of, Filed in PROV VPRS 3181, Town Clerk’s files, Series 1, Unit 639, Miscellaneous (1899–1900), item 4981. J.G. Barrett should not be confused with J.W. Barrett, the prominent urban reformer and – by coincidence – a leading advocate of playgrounds for children in the early twentieth century. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. See instruction notes on file. 4 The display of a ‘model playground’ by the National Council of Women at the Australian Women’s Work Exhibition in 1907 is taken as the formal start of the playgrounds movement in Victoria. Five years later the Guild of Play was formed to lobby for inner-city play areas. See Graeme Davison, ‘The City-Bred Child and Urban Reform in Melbourne 1900–1940’, in Urban Studies Yearbook 1: Social Processes and the City, ed. Peter Williams (Sydney, 1983), pp. 158–9. 1

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urban space. Central to what follows is the contention that young Melburnians were integral actors in the outdoor urban scene. As well as sharing space, I argue, young people actively ‘produced’ their own. Differentials of class, age and gender affected their ability to range across, use and modify the environment, however, and young people often found that their designs for the city ran up against adult wishes. In the face of ever more vocal calls from reformers to control their behaviour, at the beginning of the twentieth century young Melburnians found themselves at a crossroads. Whilst signs of a new autonomy were emerging – benefiting girls in particular – a series of developments threatened to curtail young people’s freedom of movement. The Cradle of Memory In the narratives of childhood which buttress this book it is striking how frequently public space functions as the cradle of autobiographical memory. For Alan Mickle, aged 5 in 1887, the foundational moment was a trip taken along the St Kilda Esplanade, his nurse Peggy as companion and with the promise of a new tricycle at journey’s end.5 Judge Stretton, by contrast, remembered paddling in the bay with his father at Altona, leaving behind the poverty of 1890s inner-suburban Brunswick for a short-lived afternoon among seashells and scuttling crabs.6 An outdoor episode also stuck in the memory of John Webb, a childhood entanglement with a safety barrier during Golden Jubilee festivities ‘[making] me aware for the first time of physical pain … and of something else that was going on beyond my little world’.7 Public experiences conditioned young people’s social education, and thoughts often returned in later life to engagements with outdoor space. Yet despite this emphasis on the public realm, the urban child is all too often re-imagined by historians in indoor settings: at home, at school, confined within institutions. The discrete (if often chaotically organized) bodies of source material generated in these locations have attracted extensive historical analysis in recent times, yielding much valuable information concerning ideologies and intentions, means and methods.8 Whilst it is impossible to deny that institutions are important as sites of social interaction and state intervention, studies of young people in situ and inside generally fail to take account of those out-of-doors experiences Alan D. Mickle, ‘The Late “Eighties”’ (undated), RHSV MS 363, box 127/9. See p. 1. Leonard Stretton, ‘Judge Stretton’s Reminiscences’, La Trobe Library Journal,

5 6

5/17 (1976): 5. 7 John E. Webb, Alms for Oblivion (Sydney, 1966), p. 9. 8 For Australian examples, see: John Ramsland, ‘An Anatomy of a Nineteenth Century Child-Saving Institution: The Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 70/3 (1984): 194–209; Robert van Krieken, Children and the State: Social Control and the Formation of Australian Child Welfare (Sydney, 1991); Nell Musgrove, ‘The Scars Remain: Children, their Families and Institutional Care in Victoria, 1864–1954’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2009).

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so commonly elaborated by young diarists and recalled by adults. In contrast with these indoor histories, the following assessment takes to the streets for its inspiration. Employing the concept of the ‘youthscape’ as an overlapping, underlying and competing city space, this chapter describes the processes of place-making by young people.9 Contrary to the emphasis on indoor sites of social control in most histories of youth, statistical evidence suggests that the shadows cast across children’s lives by institutions were not as long as is commonly supposed. Between 1861 and 1901, inmates of charitable and penal institutions usually constituted less than one per cent and at no time more than two per cent of the portion of the Victorian population aged under 20.10 Compared with contemporary times, moreover, the schoolhouse occupied a far less prominent position in the child’s world of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Melbourne. A close reading by Ann Larson of school attendance patterns reveals that the famous ‘free, secular and compulsory’ Education Act of 1872 had only a negligible impact on numbers drawn into the classroom.11 In 1870, Larson calculates, just half of all enrolled students could be found in attendance on any given school day; 20 years later the comparable figure stood at only 54 per cent.12 Whilst very few children received no schooling, full-time education during the academic year was far from the norm, and in any case children aged 6 to 15 were required to attend no more than 30 days in each quarter.13 Truancy officers, entrusted with enforcing the compulsory clause, presented a litany of complaints regarding its implementation to the Royal Commission on Education in 1884. Policing areas, they stated, were too large, and only 25 officers were employed for the whole of Victoria. Many scholars ‘counted the days’ to fulfil the minimum requirement and then vanished; others were present at registration before absenting themselves for the remainder of the school day. And when approached and questioned about their presence in public, children would frequently offer misleading details and give false names.14 George Guillaume observed ‘swarms of untaught children’ in the city in the mid-1880s, while in 1904 the Age noted that ‘some years ago’ a police count of truants ‘loitering about the streets of the city and suburbs’ between the hours of 10.30 a.m. and 12 noon one Note that my definition here differs to that offered independently in Sunaina Maira and Elisabeth Soep (eds), Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global (Philadelphia, 2005). There the editors address (with a structuring interest in market forces) ‘local youth practices as embedded … within the shifts in national and global forces marking the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ (p. xv). 10 Larson, p. 102. 11 Ibid., pp. 67, 83–93, 98, 182. Also see Kociumbas, Australian Childhood, p. 120. 12 Larson, p. 86. 13 In 1890 the attendance requirement was increased to 40 days per 60-day quarter and in 1901 to 45 days (ibid., pp. 85–6). 14 See the 1884 report of the Victorian Royal Commission on Education, Papers Presented to Parliament, Session 1884, Vol. 3, Part 1, Q. 3006; 3007; 3059; 3765; 3981; 4034; 4156; 4200; 5197; 5789. Truant officers were not hired until 1877. 9

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weekday found 500 individuals.15 Young Melburnians, in sum, were as likely to be found outside the classroom as at their desks during school hours. Anecdotal evidence from autobiographies and biographies backs up these contemporary observations and statistics. While the case of Percy Grainger is exceptional (his mother determined that he receive a total of just three months’ formal schooling), John Webb’s declaration that his schooldays were ‘brief and intermittent’ holds true for a great many children in this period.16 For some children of school age this was a matter of choice: in the late 1860s, for instance, Frank Walker and his friends often played truant in Hawthorn in order to collect tadpoles, climb trees for birds’ nests and raid a local garden for quince.17 Other children were victims of circumstance, however, with economic necessity, family sickness or frequent changes of address forcing the interruption or complete abandonment of their school careers. Due to the diminished financial circumstances of her father, for example, Katharine Susannah Prichard was 12 years old before receiving a systematic education.18 E. Morris Miller’s schooling, by contrast, was cut short by the termination of Victorian Government high school scholarships during the economic downturn of the 1890s.19 Even willing students, then, might find the path to the schoolhouse littered with obstacles, destined in the eyes of educational authorities to be counted alongside serial truants with little desire to learn. Though the classroom beckoned during the school year, the reformatory catered for a tiny minority and the labour market impinged upon free time for those in their teens, at other moments Melbourne’s youngest expressed a preference for the city’s open spaces: areas offering opportunities for friendship, play and mischief.20 Generally cramped housing conditions and the desire for activity also pushed young people out into the open. Contemporary social commentators noted that ‘it is the comfortlessness of firesides which peoples the streets’ and that ‘a small cottage, perhaps a wooden one, with only one sitting room … is no place for [a] lad to see his young companions in, and enjoy that social intercourse which 15 VPRS 5690/1, Annual Reports for Years 1882 to 1887 (Department of Industrial and Reformatory Schools), Report for 1884, p. 9; Age, 16 April 1904, p. 17. 16 John Bird, Percy Grainger (Sydney, 1998), pp. 19–20; Webb, Alms for Oblivion, p. 12. 17 Frank Walker, ‘Victorian Reminiscences of the Sixties’ (1933), RHSV MS 5282, box 130/17, p. 4. 18 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Child of the Hurricane: An Autobiography (Sydney, 1963), p. 51. 19 E. Morris Miller, ‘Growing Up in Melbourne 1883–1899’, ed. Derek Drinkwater, in Victorian Historical Journal, 1 and 2 (1991): 18. 20 Furthermore, Larson argues that between the ages of 13, ‘the de facto end to the school career’ (when most students had reached the required standard to leave), and 15 (when most entered the workforce), ‘working-class boys (and perhaps girls as well) [enjoyed] a time of relative freedom. One was not expected to perform adult-like jobs, prepare for a trade or even be a steady responsible worker’ (Larson, pp. 97, 147). Spaces in the life-cycle, then, supplemented the opportunities afforded by gaps in one’s school career. The implications of this trend will be scrutinized in greater depth in the following chapter.

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is equally good for man, woman and boy’.21 For all but the most privileged, a home life affording ample play space and privacy was inconceivable. Instead these expectations had to be fulfilled outside, in nearby streets and other open areas. Some children could barely contain their desire for such access: Emily Mitchell Kannuluik recalls her brother and cousins determining to use a paddock beyond the confines of their Abbotsford home by digging a concealed tunnel under the back fence. A sheet of flat iron with grass planted on top hid the exit, thus allowing easy admission to a more expansive realm for various childhood exploits.22 By and large lacking the supervised sanctuary of today’s suburban backyard, young Melburnians instead made the entire inner city into a giant playground. By contrast with the social spaces created by other marginalized groups in society – women and gay men, for example – the territories of youth assessed here were based less around fixed locations like the tea-room, department store or bathhouse.23 Compared, moreover, to the ‘sexual topography’ of the city, the youthscape was less furtive, more defiantly public.24 Many youngsters were also blissfully unaware of the social mores that circumscribed women’s use of the city, although as is discussed later, girls were vulnerable when gendered constructions of deportment came into play. Often young people’s activities left no permanent trace on the spaces they colonized; at other times evidence like orange peel, graffiti or damaged shrubbery attested to young people’s public presence.25 This, then, was a highly ephemeral layer of city life, especially susceptible to challenge from annoyed adults and the intentions of other city users. Expansive by day, furthermore, by night the youthscape contracted dramatically as most young people (but by no means all) headed indoors. Seasonal factors and the day of the week also affected the capacity and willingness of young people to make space, as is revealed in what follows.

Argus: 10 May 1872, p. 4; 17 May 1887, p. 10. Emily Mitchell Kannuluik, ‘Reminiscences and Sketches of her Childhood and

21 22

Young Adulthood in Melbourne’ (c. 1983), SLV MS 11680, box 1873/2 (b), p. 9. 23 For further discussion on these parallel uses of the city, refer to the Introduction. 24 On ‘sexual topography’, see Chauncey, Gay New York, and Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge, 2003). 25 See VPRS 3181, Unit 844, Streets (1885), item 1324 for a complaint about children littering the footpath with orange peel outside the Western Market in 1885. VPRS 3181, Unit 849, Streets (1888), item 849 notes the erection of notices outlawing the practice; Unit 554, Markets (1894), item 981 notes the issue of a £5 fine for a young man who threw banana skins on the ground at the Queen Victoria Market. On graffiti, see for example VPRS 3181, Unit 532, Markets (1883), item 1844, containing details of ‘horrid sketches and obscene writings’ left by factory girls in the toilets at the Eastern Market. Reports of damage to trees and shrubs are discussed below.

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Appropriating and Amending the Urban Environment One cannot overstate the importance of play for children. Play helps in the development of social skills, amplifies physical attributes and sharpens cognitive abilities.26 In their seminal anthropological study, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969), Iona and Peter Opie declare memorably that when children play, they do so ‘without reference to print, parliament, or adult propriety’.27 Colin Ward is just as succinct, noting from his extensive observations that ‘children will play everywhere and with anything’.28 In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Melbourne, with its abundant open space and youthful population,29 city children took whatever opportunities they could to substantiate these assertions. Play activities, and the reactions that such practices provoked among older citizens, cast the city’s generation gap in bold terms and presented conflicting views of the purpose of public space. Marcus Clarke, pondering ‘The Future Australian Race’ in 1877, stated his conviction that ‘boys, brought up outside their homes’ four walls, will easily learn to roam, and as they conquer difficulties for themselves will learn to care little for their parents’.30 Although Clarke was thinking principally of children bred in the Australian bush, many of his contemporaries believed that the city-based activities of young people had confirmed the forecasts ahead of schedule. Hence it was commonplace for social observers to damn colonial youth for their apparent ubiquity in public places and their nonchalant attitudes towards their superiors.31 Elite anxieties about metropolitan living fed this discourse. Idling children at play or young people loitering for no apparent reason bucked the strengthening trend towards purposeful circulation in turn-of-the-century cities, and seemed to some adults to

For supporting discussion, refer to Roger Hart, Children’s Experience of Place (New York, 1979), pp. 343–7, and Robin C. Moore, Childhood’s Domain: Play and Place in Child Development (London, Sydney and Dover, New Hampshire, 1986). 27 Iona and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (Oxford, 1969), p. 1. 28 Ward, The Child in the City, p. 86. 29 In 1888, ‘John Freeman’ stated that ‘No city in the world is so well off for “lungs”, as the open spaces have rightly been called, as Melbourne, for they are so numerous and spacious, that, speaking in metaphor, you can throw a stone from one into another’ See ‘John Freeman’ (Edward Oxford), Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (London, 1888), pp. 5–6. 30 Clarke, ‘The Future Australian Race’, p. 29. 31 See for example Harold Finch-Hatton, Advance Australia: An Account of Eight Years’ Work, Wandering, and Amusement, in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria (London, 1886), p. 302. Visiting English journalist Richard Twopeny supplied perhaps the most sustained critique of the colonial child in his collection of letters, Town Life in Australia (1883): see pp. 82–9, 101–2. For further analysis, see Penny Russell, Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia (Sydney, 2010), pp. 218–27. 26

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bear out fears concerning colonial precocity and moral danger.32 Yet, like it or not, young people’s presence in public was a facet of the urban scene, with countless acts of spatial appropriation by young Melburnians helping to maintain the city’s incipient feel. Where, and what, did young city-dwellers play? In terms of easy access and ubiquity, it was hard to beat the street as a playground. Relatively flat and expansive, the street surface lent itself readily to use as a pitch. Games of football (both Australian and British varieties) and cricket proved popular with holidaying schoolchildren and also among young factory hands seeking exercise on their lunch breaks.33 Much to the annoyance of pedestrians and prospective customers forced to ‘run the gauntlet’ to reach their destinations, the police appeared not to take the matter seriously.34 Other amusements caused even greater irritation. In 1880 a West Melbourne resident brought to the attention of the police the matter of young boys opening the rear doors of occupied water closets which backed onto rights of way. Caught indisposed once too often, an infuriated cleric had collared a 10-year-old suspect, marched him back to the boy’s home and then exchanged angry words there with the father. Police enquiries identified three children as responsible for causing the distress, and the reporting officer predicted an end to the practice in light of stern conversations with parents.35 To the south-east in South Yarra, police investigations into two alleged tripping incidents revealed something far more innocuous, if rather cheeky. Following up a letter of complaint regarding ‘young urchins’ stretching string low across a pavement to catch unwary pedestrians, Constable Corby instead discovered a game involving a small parcel left unattended on the ground. Anyone attempting to retrieve the item, he reported, would find it difficult to do so, for from a concealed location boys would tug on an attached 32 See Russell, Savage or Civilised?, pp. 267–71; 299–301; 218–20 and Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life. At its most extreme, the perception of moral danger led to drastic suggestions. In 1909, Victorian Chief Justice Sir John Madden told a large assembly at Prahran Town Hall that he ‘thought it would be well to get the police to patrol the parks, beaches, and public streets, and clear them of the young people’ (Argus, 14 October 1909, p. 8). 33 See, for example: VPRS 3181, Unit 862, Streets (1895), item 2186 (football and cricket in Flinders Lane); VPRS 3181, Unit 868, Streets (1900), item 2557 (regarding biscuit factory workers in North Melbourne); and VPRS 937, Inward Registered Correspondence (Victoria Police), Unit 304, bundle 2 (item unnumbered), letter of complaint (dated 10 June 1881) regarding children playing cricket and football ‘all day and every day’ in Richmond’s Charlotte Street. 34 Ibid., and also see VPRS 937, Unit 304, bundle 2 (item unnumbered), letter from D. McIntyre (dated 1 August 1881) concerning ‘the annoyance & loss I am put to thro’ a number of boys & young men playing handball at the Lonsdale Street end of the right-way immediately about the Robert Burns Hotel’. 35 See VPRS 937, Unit 303, bundle 3 (item unnumbered), dated 21 December 1880 and attached police report (28 December 1880).

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Fig. 2.1

Children Playing in a Melbourne Street (not attributed; gelatine silver stereograph, c. 1900–1910). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

piece of string, ‘the result being a general laugh’.36 In the policeman’s opinion, ‘the occurrence was no more than play and there was no likelihood of tripping up pedestrians’. 37 The complainant, needless to say, disagreed. Figure 2.1 suggests that children drew little distinction in their games between the pavement and the road; when the streetscape was otherwise this empty, there was no need to respect adult demarcations of space. Figure 2.2 illustrates the same point: with no vehicles or adults in sight, a number of children occupy the middle of the street to play marbles, jacks or two-up while their peers – evidently alert to the camera’s presence – hover on the fringes. The purpose of this image is unclear: do these ‘street children’ require ‘rescue’ from the socialization of the streets, or are they to be celebrated for doing what children love to do? Published by Gordon Boys, the official bulletin of the reforming Gordon Institute, it would seem that rescue is on the agenda, but aside from the use of the terminology in the caption there is no conclusive textual support for this interpretation. Additionally, we are entitled to ask what role the photographer played in composing the scene. Was he chance witness or choreographer (as the semi-circular positioning of the children, open to the camera’s gaze, suggests)? Street Children at Play cannot answer these questions definitively. What is certain is that on this day and at this moment, this street space belongs to these children.

VPRS 937, Unit 338, bundle 3 (item unnumbered), dated 3 March 1893. Ibid.

36 37

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Fig. 2.2

57

Street Children at Play, Gordon Boys, July 1906, p. 10. Courtesy State Library of Victoria

Growing up in South Melbourne during the 1890s, Frank Matthias and his young friends also turned to the streets for play. When home life equated with ‘continuous wars … against fleas, bugs, cockroaches, mice and rats’, and sharing a modest house with siblings, parents and grandparents, the spaces beyond the front door must have appeared especially alluring.38 In ‘This Journey of Mine’, his concise autobiographical account, Matthias records for posterity some of the street pastimes of the colonial era. His catalogue warrants extended quotation for its detailed insight: The footpaths and roads around our home were used by ourselves and our friends to play various games. The girls skipped and played hopscotch marked out with chalk on the pavement. ‘Jacks’ was also popular, being played with the knuckle bones saved from Sunday dinners of roast lamb. The game of marbles was played by boys. In fact, two different games were used. In the first game, each boy had to put one or more marbles in the centre of a large ring marked on the bare ground. Some boys had marvellous collections … It was a gambling game, so the expert player scooped the pool.

Matthias, p. 2.

38

58

Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914 The second game was played by first making a series of small holes in the ground at various distances in a long row. Each player was allowed to knock his opponent’s marble out of the way while trying to get his own marble in a hole. ‘Police and Robbers’ was very popular with the robbers running off and after counting up to fifty or so, the police gave chase. (Similar to Hide and Seek but over longer distances.) ‘Leap Frog’ was also played between two sides comprising about six or so boys, not forgetting ‘Kick the Tin’ too. [In another game] ‘Naughty’ boys tied a length of black cotton to the knocker on the door of a house near a corner. The cotton was given a tug and the boys would race off without being seen (what fun)! Most houses had knockers. Cigarette cards was another popular game which consisted of flicking cards towards a wall at a distance of six feet or so. The player’s card nearest the wall collected the losers’ cards.39

Inventive and essentially harmless: such might be a benevolent view of Matthias’s street-based activities. But many Melbourne ratepayers, believing that children should be neither seen nor heard, objected to similar acts of simple occupation and play. In December 1879, for instance, George Wallis, a landlord and cement merchant, passed on to the Town Clerk a grievance from a tenant living on the corner of La Trobe and Sutherland Streets in the city centre. ‘A lot of Youth & Girls’, Wallis had been informed, ‘take possession of the door way & also sit in the window sills’, using bad language and throwing stones if challenged.40 Another resident, E.J. Jubbs, took umbrage at the behaviour of children in Darling Square to the city’s north-east. In June 1897, he complained emphatically that: [On Sunday] during the whole of the afternoon the Gardens are filled with children who simply turn it into a large play ground, and their calls, screams and laughter are a perfect nuisance to residents adjacent to the square … the noise is simply unbearable. Surely when your committee granted the opening of the Gardens, it was never intended that a crowd of unruly children would run wild all over the place in the way they do … 41

Despite these criticisms and a follow-up letter alleging that ‘the week days are now nearly as a bad as the Sunday afternoons’, the local police sergeant and parks

39 Ibid., pp. 3–4. June Factor discusses further examples of colonial play in Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s Folklore in Australia (Ringwood, 1988), pp. 95–120. For comparison with street-based games in London in this period, see Keith Cranwell, A History of Nineteenth Century Organised Children’s Play: Play Organisation and the Outof-School Child in London (1860–1914) (Saarbrücken, 2009), pp. 76–82. 40 VPRS 3181, Unit 662, Nuisances (1878–1879), item 117, letter dated 6 December 1879. 41 VPRS 3181, Unit 753, Parks (1897), item 1954 (9 June 1897).

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curator determined that as no harm was being done, no action was necessary.42 In this instance they sided with the children in determining the park’s proper function. Street games, pranks and acts of spatial occupation did not fundamentally alter the fabric of space itself. Given the opportunity to do so, however, youngsters in Melbourne modified their environment to suit the purposes of play or to carve out enclaves of their own. The laying of tram and train tracks, as a case in point, supplied an abundance of new spaces to colonize. Joice Loch, for instance, recalled how her young brother, encountering the newly installed cable tram system and determined to master its operation, ‘would fling himself down on the tram track and apply his eye to the opening regardless of oncoming traffic’.43 A favourite game, remembered by among others Lou Richards (a Collingwood football captain in his adult years), consisted of looping a piece of string through the tram’s cable, tying it off and watching as the tram moved on dragging jam tins behind. ‘It was nothing to see 20 tins clattering in a long line along Johnston St’, he reminisced.44 With potentially more serious consequences, the future Judge Stretton, then aged 10, bounced up and down on the back of older horse-drawn trams with a group of young companions, trying to make the carriages derail.45 Elsewhere in Melbourne other children simply enjoyed the sense of freedom acquired from riding around the city and encountering new sights. ‘Whipping behind’, or the activity of leaping on and off moving trams, proved one popular method of travel, with James Wicks recalling that in the early 1900s ‘We learned all the different ways of jumping on and off … backwards, frontwards, on your hands’.46 Paying his way, by contrast, in the 1890s, a young Percy Grainger would disappear for hours from his home in South Yarra to ride the trams, making friends with the drivers and on one occasion taking the helm on the Toorak line.47 Perhaps on his trips he passed another young Melburnian, heading the other way and into trouble. Asked why she had stolen money to fund similar explorations around the Ibid., and see VPRS 3181, Unit 753, Parks (1897), item 2202 (letter sent 3 July

42

1897).

Joice Nankivell Loch, A Fringe of Blue: An Autobiography (London, 1968), p. 30. Lou Richards quoted in Collingwood History Committee, p. 51. Also see

43 44

Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Portrait of an Australian Working-Class Community (Melbourne, 1984), p. 65, and James Salisbury, Born with the Century (Melbourne, 1979), p. 26, for descriptions of similar games (referred to by Salisbury as ‘Cable Chase’). 45 Stretton, p. 8. 46 Noted in Elizabeth Loughlin, Among the Terraces: A Carlton Street (Melbourne, 1988), p. 4. The practice was not without its risks. On 19 December 1906, Melbourne’s Age (p. 10) reported a tragic accident which had occurred the previous afternoon. ‘A lad named Albert Roy Pearce, aged ten years … jumped on the front platform while the driver was inside collecting fares. Seeing Ferguson [the driver] about to come outside, the lad jumped off the car, and in so doing fell on the track, the wheels passing over his body.’ Across the period, several similar accidents involving newsboys are also noted. See for instance Argus: 28 September 1893, p. 7; 12 November 1900, p. 6. 47 See Eileen Dorum, Percy Grainger: The Man Behind the Music (Hawthorn, 1986), pp. 22–3.

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suburban network, this individual explained – rather wonderfully I think – that it was her wish ‘Just to see the world’.48 Childhood, it is worth remembering, is the springtime of inquiry – a period when the world seems expansive and actions inconsequential. Unfortunately for this young explorer, Melbourne’s tram lines led not to freedom but to entrapment, and a subsequent spell inside Brookside Reformatory. Trains and train lines also fascinated youngsters. The disused or derelict land alongside the tracks offered the chance to elude adult surveillance, supervision which might have reduced endemic damage to the property of Melbourne’s railway operators.49 Placing objects on the rails was a particularly dangerous pastime, both for the young people involved and equally so for those onboard any onrushing trains. One girl, questioned why she thought her two younger brothers (aged 9 and 10) had placed five stones on the line between Newmarket and Ascot Vale in April 1884, answered that they had hoped ‘to see the train jumping’.50 Potential disaster was averted by a passing railway employee, and the investigating policeman noted that charges were not laid after a contrite father administered ‘a good whipping’ in his presence.51 Future Victoria Cross winner William Joynt, by contrast, was lucky that one of his childhood escapades on the disused outer circle line in Elsternwick remained undisclosed until the appearance of his autobiography decades later. Finding an idle train bogey in a siding, Joynt and his friends had set it rolling. It gathered momentum down a hill, crashed through a set of railway gates and came to rest on the ‘live’ Elsternwick-Brighton line. Railway traffic was disrupted for several hours as a result, and weeks passed before Joynt and his companions dared revisit the scene.52 Similarly alert to the transport changes taking place around them, Noted in an article reprinted from the Age in VPRS 5690/2 (Department of Industrial and Reformatory Schools), Report for year 1889, pp. 50–54. The girl is not named, and is described merely as a ‘mite of a child … with fair hair, blue eyes and an altogether pleasing face’. 49 See for instance VPRS 807/P3, Inward Correspondence Files (Victoria Police), item A2/113 (reporting damage to a train station in December 1893 by 12-year-old Alfred Patterson); VPRS 937, Unit 338, bundle 3 (regarding four boys throwing stones near Northcote train station in March 1893). 50 VPRS 937/P6, (Melbourne) Miscellaneous Inward Registered Correspondence (1884), Unit 4, bundle 1, ‘Children Germaine obstruct railway line’. Stanley Cohen observed in the early 1970s that ‘most railway vandalism (such as putting objects on the railway line) is carried out by young children between ten and twelve years old’, very similar to the age ranges of offenders recorded in police correspondence in Melbourne during this period. See Cohen’s chapter ‘Property Destruction: Motives and Meanings’, in Vandalism, ed. Colin Ward (London, 1973), p. 42. 51 Ibid. 52 W.D. Joynt, Breaking the Road for the Rest (Melbourne, 1979), p. 4. Risky activities such as these cast the recent spate of ‘train surfing’ incidents involving young Melburnians into a longer view. See for example Age, 26 January 2012 (‘Baillieu hints at tougher stand on train surfing’, ). 48

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children at a primary school in Melbourne played a much less hazardous game (simply called ‘trains’) in which ‘the little boys puffed about as engines, and the girls hung on behind them while the engines shunted and galloped wildly from one end of the garden to the other’.53 The appeal of the pastime did not last long for one of its participants, however, with Katharine Susannah Prichard withdrawing from play after squabbles broke out concerning which boy possessed which girl as ‘rolling stock’.54 Just as ‘trains’ had turned a suburban schoolyard into a busy railway, comparable acts of spatial appropriation through play could also take linguistic turns. Dudley Ricketts notes that his friends referred to the four-sided clock which once stood on Princes Bridge as ‘Tommy Bent’s Watch’ (after the notorious former railways minister), and to the thin strip of land at Cathedral Close where he played football as ‘the Cigar’.55 Why respect adult names for spaces and landmarks, he reasoned, when more practical terms offered the possibility of constructing an alternative folk geography featuring the locations which really mattered?56 To name an area is to seize rhetorical possession of it, part of the process of ‘children’s symbolic work and creativity’ that Kim Rasmussen has discussed based on research in Denmark.57 One wonders how many of Rickett’s contemporaries used similar linguistic maps to rival the cartographer’s official image of the city. In Melbourne’s various parklands more literal and substantial adjustments to the environment pushed young people into outright conflict with city fathers. These spaces witnessed the most concerted attempts by the city’s youngsters to refashion the landscape to suit their purposes, attempts that met with determined efforts by trustees to prevent damage. In the perception of children, trees – the principal sources of conflict – were not primarily objects of beauty or indeed edification, but functioned instead as lookouts, hiding places and a malleable resource. Galling as it must have been for gardeners intent on greening the city, trees were just too useful to children to be left alone. Whilst some children broke boughs (or ‘limbs’ as a solicitous John Guilfoyle, the parks Curator, often termed them) through climbing and during games of hide-and-seek, others snapped off branches for use as fishing rods, hockey sticks or, as one lad explained, to make a ‘shinty’.58 The Prichard, p. 30. Ibid. 55 See Ricketts, ‘My Story’ (c. 1981), RHSV MS 621, box 7/4, Part B, p. 2 and 53 54

Part A, p. 2. 56 On renaming tactics and ‘folk geography’ more generally see Allan Pred’s Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late NineteenthCentury Stockholm (Cambridge, 1990). For 1850s Melbourne, imaginative play – including the game ‘lucky diggers’, inspired by the gold rush – and linguistic appropriation are noted in British Australian and New Zealander, 22 January 1944, p. 19 (‘Reminiscences of an Early Colonist’). 57 Rasmussen, pp. 157–9. 58 See VPRS 3181, Unit 757, Parks (1900), item 4852 (concerning a game of hideand-seek also featured in Table A.1, Appendix); Unit 755, Parks (1898), item 4269 (theft

62

Fig. 2.3

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

Public information poster advertising Melbourne City Council initiative to reduce damage in parks (1891) (printed on canvas, 42 x 30 cm). Located in PROV VPRS 3181, Town Clerk’s files, Series 1, Unit 747, Parks (1891). Reproduced with permission of the Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office Victoria, Australia

damage became so persistent that in June 1891 the Parks and Gardens Committee offered a reward of £5 for information leading to convictions for property damage (see Figure 2.3).59 Constables on the beat responded zealously to this opportunity for a salary top-up, and an increased number of youngsters appeared before the Bench as a result. Such was the concerted response to the scheme that by December that year the reward had been reduced to £1 and a letter dispatched to the Chief Commissioner of Police requesting that in light of an excessive number of claims of birds’ nests and collection of material for use as fishing rods; case also features in Table A.1); Unit 752, Parks (1896), item 1747 (tree branches broken to make a hockey stick); Unit 752, Parks (1896), item 2067 (destruction of trees to make a den). The ‘Parks’ and ‘Streets’ subsets of the Town Clerk’s files also contain several dozen similar reports across the period. 59 Refer to VPRS 4032/1, Parks and Gardens Committee Minutes 1884–1891, 7 May and 2 July 1891.

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involving minimal damage, the Town Clerk should be consulted before any legal proceedings commenced.60 Aside from intensifying surveillance in Melbourne’s parklands, the episode had another lasting effect. In an effort to take a more active role in disciplinary proceedings, the Parks and Gardens Committee established a procedure whereby they, rather than the criminal courts, would effectively try cases of petty vandalism involving children in parks.61 Parents were called to appear before the Committee, listen to the explanations of their offspring, and if deemed appropriate pay fines and issue admonishments. This parallel, albeit ad hoc, justice system was designed to keep young people from contact with the adult criminal process, and prefigured the Children’s Court by over a decade. As Guilfoyle explained in writing to the Town Clerk, ‘this method of dealing with children, especially first offenders, is far preferable to taking them to court, which is very distasteful to me’.62 The procedure was also in step with similar experiments undertaken at the behest of the Chief Secretary. George Guillaume and J.B. Whiting, successors as Secretaries of the Department of Industrial and Reformatory Schools, had long recommended that a special magistrate hear children’s cases and that a probationary system be introduced. In 1893 the Chief Secretary acceded to the advice, instructing that in future all children be dealt with in a private room of Justices at the Court House, and if possible that this occur before normal court business. Anyone under 17 was also to be remanded in a juvenile receiving depot instead of a gaol.63 Through a series of moves anticipating the changes to come in the early 1900s,64 children so defined were beginning to occupy spaces in which adult contact was minimized. Breaking boughs, so it transpired, could have far-reaching consequences. The most striking instance of young Melburnians altering the environment in this period also occurred in one of the city’s green spaces. Sitting down to compose his weekly report in late November 1896, the tireless Guilfoyle commenced with a familiar refrain. Doubtless with a hint of resignation by this stage, he noted that during the recent holidays ‘much damage has been done to trees in Carlton

60 A similar letter was sent to the Commissioner in 1893 shortly after the third reward application from Constable Cahill was received for activities considered ‘trifling’ by Guilfoyle. See VPRS 4032/2, Parks and Gardens Committee Minutes 1891–1902, 7 December 1893 (and also 3 December 1891). Three years later the Town Clerk again intervened and sent a letter, with Guilfoyle noting on the file that ‘discretion is necessary to define the paltry from the serious’ (see VPRS 3181, Unit 752, Parks [1896], item 2067). 61 This appears to have commenced in 1892. 62 Noted in VPRS 3181, Unit 749, Parks (1893), item 5723, 16 December 1893. 63 See VPRS 5690/1 (Department of Industrial and Reformatory Schools), Report for year 1884, p. 6; VPRS 5690/2, Report for year 1889, p. 9; and ibid., Report for year 1893, p. 5 (the last for the Chief Secretary’s instruction). 64 On the origins and early activity of Melbourne’s Children’s Court (established in 1906), see Jaggs, Neglected and Criminal: Foundations of Child Welfare Legislation in Victoria (Melbourne, 1986), pp. 96–106.

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Gardens by the children climbing and swinging on the branches’.65 Some things, it seemed, never changed. What he had witnessed next, however, surprised him. Returning to the park to make further assessments, Guilfoyle observed that: During Cup Day, & Prince of Wales Birthday, not a single instance [of damage] came under my notice although there were hundreds of children in the Gardens. The attraction was the timber laid along the line of a proposed fence at the back of the Exhibition, which they turned into seesaws, and it was indeed a pleasant sight and suggested a means of giving pleasure to the children and protecting the trees by providing boards + blocks for their amusement.66

He wondered if the Parks and Gardens Committee might approve for the wood to be left there permanently, and predicted that an outlay of £5 would cover the associated costs of new materials for the fence.67 Reading Guilfoyle’s report, the Committee considered the suggestion and did indeed sanction the request.68 In sight of the Exhibition Building – a material expression of confidence associated with the boom times of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ – the city’s youngsters had fabricated something of their own. Built by the kids themselves, this was Melbourne’s first adventure playground. Rhythms of the City As well as adapting their pastimes from place to place and to the materials at hand, young people’s outdoor activities also reflected the rhythms of the seasons, the time of day and the day of the week. Climbing trees in search of birds’ nests or taking flowers from parks, for example, were springtime pursuits, whilst bathing in the Yarra River proved especially popular in the summer months.69 Writing somewhat apologetically about his sons’ academic progress to their teacher in 1884, Andrew Newell lamented that ‘These long summer days their mother finds it very difficult to make them leave off play and allow sufficient time for the preparation of their lessons before bedtime’.70 Would their schoolteacher have more success, he wondered, in instilling a sense of academic industry? The desire to make the most of the longer evenings and escape the oppressive summer heat – which can reach over 40 degrees Celsius in Melbourne – probably forestalled any attempts in this direction. Indeed children’s determination to cool off regularly 67 68 65

See VPRS 3181, Unit 752, Parks (1896), item 4194. Ibid. Ibid. See VPRS 4032/2, Parks and Gardens Committee Minutes (1891–1902), 3 December 1896. 69 Refer, for example, to Table A.1 and the bathing case noted in footnote 94, below. 70 Quoted in Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe, ‘Locating the Colonial Child’, Interlogue, 5 (1994): 53. 66

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resulted in arguments with other residents and the authorities. Splashing around in the water from drinking fountains was a favourite practice, as was the action of pulling out street plugs.71 In mid December 1873, ‘Anti-Waste’ of Emerald Hill observed angrily that: In walking through two of the principal streets early yesterday morning and late evening I saw no less than four plugs in full flow; the water covering the footpaths and flooding the channels for a great distance, and crowds of boys dabbling, splashing and playing in it, with evident enjoyment. As in the morning I had to dispense with my bath from the scarcity of water, and in the evening I could hardly obtain sufficient for even a partial wash, this gross waste was particularly tantalising to me, and I trust that efforts will be made to put an immediate stop to it.72

Here was a classic case of civic conflict, children’s irrepressible demand for play and refreshment clashing with a ratepayer’s desire for order and regularity. In terms of time, the school lunch hour appears to have caused particular concern to adults in the early 1880s, with park authorities deeming it prudent to station an attendant on guard in Yarra Park to protect flower beds and saplings from the expected influx of children.73 Weekends and school holidays, of course, also saw increased numbers of young people heading out into the open, while according to one witness at the 1884 Royal Commission on Education, Fridays were particularly bad for truancy.74 Determining the conclusion of the day’s outdoor activities was, by contrast, a more strictly class-bound phenomenon, with parents deciding the appropriate hour for children to conclude their play and come inside. In her portrait of Edwardian Richmond, historian Janet McCalman observes that: Most respectable families insisted that their children be off the streets and in bed by 9 o’clock; the over-burdened and the unrespectable were more lax. Jean Fowler and her eight brothers and sisters ‘used to chase around the street under street light until 11 o’clock at night; we used to have a marvellous time’…75

Hauled before the Parks and Gardens Committee in 1900, the father of 10-yearold John Stott revealed his own rules concerning the limits of play, asserting that 71 See for instance a letter written in January 1900 requesting the removal of a drinking tap in West Melbourne (VPRS 3181, Unit 868, Streets [1900], item 26). Street plugs sealed water mains, allowing quick access in the event of fire. 72 See Argus, 11 December 1873, p. 6. 73 VPRS 3181, Unit 739, Parks [1882], item 65. 74 Evidence of Edwin Parnell, headmaster of Latrobe Street State school – see Papers Presented to Parliament, Session 1884, Vol. 3, Part 1, Q. 5785: ‘many [schoolchildren] think that as Saturday and Sunday have to pass over, no notice will be taken of it by the teacher’. 75 McCalman, p. 64.

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Fig. 2.4

Arthur Streeton, Evening Game (1889) (oil on cardboard, 13.3 x 23.3 cm). Private collection, Sydney. Courtesy National Gallery of Victoria. Children race the failing light to complete the last game of the day. Note the female figure in the foreground, inviting participation in the evening’s activities

‘It has always been my rule to never allow him out of the house after his tea’.76 For some young Melburnians dusk heralded an extra slice of play time, then; for others, lengthening shadows meant it was time to vacate the public arena, and wait till morning to renew acquaintances and continue half-finished endeavours. Figure 2.4 captures the dwindling possibilities for play as the sun sets across city parkland. As several of these examples attest, for young people public space was characterized not just by freedom but also by boundaries. Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 perhaps best expresses this ambivalence for this period, with the author portraying liberation and entrapment as characteristic – and interdependent – facets of children’s urban experiences.77 Similarly, in Henry Handel Richardson’s Melbourne-based (and semi-autobiographical) novel, The Getting of Wisdom (1910), protagonist Laura’s days are punctuated by moments of intense yearning for exploration, periods of virtual incarceration within the grounds of her boarding school, and fleeting trips into Melbourne’s

See VPRS 3181, Unit 757, Parks (1900), item 4933. Also see the advice concerning children aged 10 and under in Argus, 26 November 1913, p. 6: ‘I think 3 to 6.30 or 7 p.m. a better time [than 4 to 8 p.m.] for a small children’s party. They should all be in bed by 8 p.m. If the afternoon is fine, they could play out-of-doors until tea-time – about 5.30 p.m.’. 77 Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, see pp. 54–5, 82–3, 92–6, 120, 158–9. 76

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city centre.78 The cruelty of these expeditions for Laura is that they always end in disappointment, usually because her expectations exceed reality. Thus Laura finds herself snubbed on Collins Street by a boy she desires, bored at the Melbourne Cricket Ground by the spectacle on offer and alarmed at the social hodgepodge she finds upon entering the Eastern Market.79 Her faith in the possibilities of public space persists, nonetheless, and the end of the novel witnesses Laura, newly freed from her miserable experiences at school, discarding the symbols of her education and darting ‘like an arrow from its bow’ into the precincts of a nearby public park.80 Laura did not have to run far in her bid for freedom, with the Fitzroy Gardens located just along the street from the gates of Presbyterian Ladies’ College, the setting for the story. Other young Melburnians were less fortunate, and needed to venture further afield to seek sanctuary. To retrieve the urban journeys of these individuals, memoirs and the minutiae of government files are particularly useful. As a creative reading of this evidence reveals, it is possible to speculate in some detail on the range of activity and freedom of movement enjoyed by young citydwellers. Assessing Young People’s Urban Range Colin Ward notes that when he told graduate students about his research on young people and city life they would invariably mention Albert Parr’s 1967 article ‘The Child in the City: Urbanity and the Urban Scene’.81 The piece is indeed a classic in the field, ruminating on the author’s own turn-of-the-century childhood in Bergen, Norway and outlining wider implications for urban planners to consider when designing cities. One passage in particular bears quotation, for it reminds readers of the importance of historicizing youth experience. Called upon by his mother to visit the fish market, Parr recalls a series of spatial negotiations which included: walking to the station in five to ten minutes; buying ticket; watching train with coal-burning steam locomotive pull in; boarding train; riding across long bridge over shallows separating small boat harbour (on the right) from ship’s harbour (on the left) … continuing through a tunnel; leaving train at terminal; sometimes dawdling to look at railroad equipment; walking by and sometimes entering fisheries museum; passing central town park where military band played during mid-day break; strolling by central shopping and business district, or, alternatively, passing fire station with horses at ease under suspended harnesses, ready to go, and continuing past centuries-old town hall and other ancient buildings; exploration of fish market and fishing fleet; selection of fish; haggling about price; purchase and return home.82

Henry Handel Richardson, The Getting of Wisdom (Melbourne, 1998 [originally 1910]), see pp. 29–30, 47, 65, 115, 164. 79 Ibid., see pp. 114–25, 131–4. 80 Ibid., pp. 231–3. 81 See Ward, The Child in the City, p. 10. 82 A.E. Parr, ‘The Child in the City: Urbanity and the Urban Scene’, Landscape, 16/3 (1967): 3. 78

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Young Albert’s journey, we surmise, was quite an undertaking for a child; how astonishing, then, to learn later in the article that the author was just 4 years old at the time. Whilst the trip to the fish market was sanctioned by Albert’s mother and regarded by Albert ‘not as a chore, but an eagerly desired pleasure’, similar expeditions by other children elsewhere provoked parental alarm. In 1888, for example, E. Morris Miller, barely 7 years old, took it upon himself to return alone to North Melbourne from a visit with his aunt and elder sister to St Kilda beach, south of the city centre. ‘Being the male member of the party’, Miller notes, ‘I insisted on possessing my own train tickets’, an acquisition which allowed Miller to reverse the steps of the outward journey thus: along the beachfront; up Fitzroy Street to the train station; train to Flinders Street Station; tram to Spencer Street Station; train to Newmarket; walk home to Shields Street. The police, the author recalls ruefully, had in the meantime been summoned to assist with a search.83 In the contemporary era of the ‘school run’, when many parents ferry their offspring to and from primary school by car, often over quite small distances, independent journeys across the metropolis by young children like Miller and Parr seem particularly remarkable. It can also come as a surprise to learn that the politicians who framed the 1872 Education Act considered non-attendance admissible only if there was ‘no State school which the child can attend within a distance of two miles’ (3.2 kilometres).84 From anywhere inside that radius students were expected to walk, an activity recalled fondly in several memoirs.85 The story, however, is not a simple one of diminishing autonomy and narrowing parameters, even if the domain of young people in cities like Bergen and Melbourne has altered considerably from the final decades of the nineteenth century to current times. Instead, differentials of class, gender, ethnicity and age have long affected the abilities of young people to access public spaces. As is illustrated below, theirs was a world of scattered horizons. Scattered Horizons The duties of Nicholas Bickford and John Guilfoyle, parks and gardens curators in Melbourne, were not light.86 As well as supervising all aspects of landscaping and design, walking ceaselessly between the various reserves and reporting detailed Miller, p. 23. This journey can be traced on the map provided in the Introduction. The Education Act 1872 (Victoria), s. 13. 85 See for example Amie Livingstone Stirling, Memories of an Australian Childhood 83 84

1880–1900 (Melbourne, 1980), p. 62: ‘My solitary walks to and from school were full of interest. I was often late because of the delightful things I saw on the way’; and Mildred Snowden, ‘Reminiscences and Family Life, 1829–1938’, SLV MS 10748, p. 10. 86 Bickford occupied the post from 1874 to 1890, before Guilfoyle assumed the position for the remainder of the period. Metropolitan parklands were jointly administered, often fractiously, by the colonial Government and the Melbourne City Council (MCC). See Georgina Whitehead, Civilising the City: A History of Melbourne’s Public Gardens (Melbourne, 1997), pp. 23–4, 31–3, 47. Different sets of regulations operated in the various reserves.

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progress, the curators had also to contend with an ongoing epidemic of theft and petty vandalism. Conceived in the early 1840s to inspire ‘higher duties’ among the population, metropolitan parks instead functioned in the phrase of one historian as ‘opportunity spaces’ where all manner of antisocial behaviours flourished.87 During 1892, as a case in point, bids were tendered for the extensive repair of 39 park statues and a decorative fountain. In a deliberate affront to civic ambitions for moral improvement, a statue of Mercury was missing two wings, Gladiator’s nose had been smashed and Innocence had lost her drapery.88 The damage was not isolated – saplings were continually broken and flower beds trampled. Policemen, gardeners and even the council’s dog catcher were instructed to apprehend anyone contravening park regulations and obtain names and addresses in preparation for possible legal proceedings. In cases where the culprits were children, police constables might also be directed to visit their homes and secure parental promises for improved future behaviour. Information supplied by these enforcement agencies to the Town Clerk and the Parks and Gardens Committee, detailing the alleged offence, its place and timing, and the particulars of the offender(s) in question, presents an opportunity to speculate on the extent of territory over which urban youngsters roamed. Table A.1 (see Appendix) illustrates this data for all cases within the ‘Parks’ subset of the Town Clerk’s files and Committee minutes between 1870 and 1901 where a home street address is given. Information from the ‘Streets’ subset regarding a reported offence at the corner of King Street and Hawke Street near the city centre is also noted. It is evident that most of these individuals were fairly close to home (though certainly far enough away to elude parental supervision) when they fell foul of the authorities.89 The majority hailed from working-class districts, particularly Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond – areas crammed with small terraced housing and workingmen’s cottages and lacking in outdoor living space.90 Alfred Bilston (aged 13) dwelt in Collingwood’s Rokeby Street. He was accosted one kilometre from his house in the company of William White (aged 8), a resident of nearby Langridge Street who had travelled around 900 metres to his 87 References from an 1842 Melbourne Town Council petition to Superintendent La Trobe (see Whitehead, p. 1), and R. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain: Space and the Public Interest in Victoria 1836–84 (Melbourne, 1989), p. 195. 88 See VPRS 3181, Unit 748, Parks (1892), item 1998. 89 Walking distances were calculated using the MapInfo program. For control purposes, the figures show the distance from the home address to the centre of the open space in question. The files do not provide precise locations of the reported offences within the parks. My thanks to Gemma Clissold, formerly of the Department of Sustainability and the Environment in Melbourne, for her assistance with the software. 90 See footnote 21, above, and an 1875 Collingwood Observer editorial noting how severely cramped living conditions offering ‘neither comfort, nor convenience, nor quietness at home’ are forcing ‘growing lads and girls [to] naturally seek enjoyment elsewhere’. The editorial is cited in Collingwood History Committee, In Those Days, p. 19.

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destination. Once there, Guilfoyle reported, the boys had been observed climbing up a tree and robbing a sparrow’s nest.91 Also caught in the Fitzroy Gardens, this time for the theft of four pansies, Alexander Renfrew, John Elder and Charles Archibald (aged 10, 9 and 9 years old respectively) had ventured between 880 metres and 1,070 metres from their homes in Gertrude Street.92 The proximity of their addresses (at numbers 193, 137 and 139) suggests that the boys knew each other prior to their activities in the park. Coming from further afield, the six boys apprehended for damaging a hose pipe in the same park in December 1899 had each travelled around two kilometres to the location of the offence. The curator’s report for this case notes that whilst one boy, 11-year-old Thomas Lawler, held the hose, another boy, William Smith (the eldest in the group at 12 years and hence the likely instigator), cut the hose with a penknife before his accomplice, Charles Sharp, drank through the opening.93 To the boys, if not to the park foreman, it would have seemed an entirely sensible way to seek refreshment on a summer’s day, especially after each had walked a considerable distance from homes in Fitzroy and Collingwood. Of course, the exact routes taken by the children to the open spaces in question cannot be known, and it is very likely that the figures shown in Table A.1 are something of an underestimate given that they are calculated on the assumption that the most direct paths were followed. Other sources from the period yield snippets of evidence regarding longer journeys. To the experiences of E. Morris Miller discussed earlier might be added that of two boys, aged ‘about 14’ and named simply as ‘Johnson’ and ‘Thompson’. In November 1882, Constable McBride approached them for bathing during prohibited hours in the Yarra near ‘the botanical bridge’ (no longer standing, but possibly the site of Morell Bridge, built in 1899). Details are imprecise, but if the boys did indeed live, as stated, in Miller Street and Hawke Street, West Melbourne, they would have walked at least five kilometres across the city centre for their late-afternoon dip.94 Speaking as a witness before the 1884 Royal Commission on Education, furthermore, truancy officer Daniel Evans asserted that ‘it would astonish you what a distance those [truant] children would travel. I would find them in Spencer street in the morning, and at the Prahran brick-kilns in the afternoon’.95 It seems then that some urban 93 94 91

See VPRS 3181, Unit 749, Parks (1893), item 4422 for the report. See VPRS 3181, Unit 750, Parks (1894), item 6 for more information on this case. VPRS 3181, Unit 756, Parks (1899), item 4450. See VPRS 3181, Unit 665, Nuisances (1882), item 1739 for the report. Covering an even greater distance, Oswald Barnett recounts that ‘as a young boy’ during school holidays in the 1890s he would walk with two other boys to Campbellfield (‘some five or six miles’ from his home in East Brunswick) for the purposes of shooting birds with catapults (or ‘gings’) and climbing trees in search of birds’ eggs. (Oswald Barnett, ‘I Remember’, written 1964–1965 and transcribed by Betty Blunden, . 95 Reported in Papers Presented to Parliament, Session 1884, Vol. 3, Part 1, Q. 3669. 92

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youngsters roamed over distances considerably greater than those listed in the Table. Nonetheless, this evidence is valuable in providing a comparative body of material across different locations and for a sustained period of time. It also supplies an extremely rare insight into the criss-crossing network of urban journeys made by children in the colonial period. What else does the table indicate? The Fitzroy Gardens, firstly, stand out as the setting of the greatest number of reported incidents, most of which occurred during the summer months of the year. In her history of Melbourne’s parks and gardens, Georgina Whitehead observes that after its final enclosure in 1860 the Fitzroy Gardens ‘quickly became celebrated as Melbourne’s principal pleasure ground’, and perhaps this popularity also accounts for greater surveillance (and hence reported rule-breaking) here than elsewhere.96 Geographical location plays a part, too: this park was flanked by densely populated suburbs which had grown rapidly in the 1870s and 1880s.97 The other unmistakable aspect is that boys dominate the list of alleged offenders. Ranging in age from 7 to 16, the boys whose details are recorded here frequented the city’s green spaces in groups, as is the case with the nine boys waylaid for climbing trees in Curtain Square in 1899.98 All lived nearby in either Newry or Drummond Streets (200 to 350 metres away), and it is likely that the friendships crafted here found further expression in the square. Six sets of brothers feature in the list, and one can envisage mothers and fathers issuing instructions, later disregarded, for older siblings to take good care of their younger brothers and stay out of trouble. As boys matured, increased confidence prompted them to venture further afield, and it is surely no coincidence that the longest journey recorded on the list (3.15 km) was undertaken by the joint-oldest individual, 16-year-old John Carroll.99 The girls featured in Table A.1 present interesting cases. Ten-year-old Eliza Meeham, for instance, had walked at least 960 metres from Little Collins Street to the Fitzroy Gardens. There she and her companion Adelaide Douglas (also aged 10; address illegible) were apprehended cutting rhododendron flowers, possibly, one suspects, with the intention of brightening their inner-city homes.100 The case of Letitia Keating, alias ‘Hettie Miller’, also intrigues.101 When questioned in the Carlton Gardens by Constable Macpherson in October 1900 regarding a tree’s broken branches, Keating supplied a false name and address. Instead of living in Exhibition Street, a kilometre away, it transpired that Letitia and her 3-year-old sister, ‘Lilly’, lived far closer to the park in question, at 35 La Trobe Street – a Whitehead, p. 8. Further contributory factors may include the impact of economic depression

96 97

upon societal attitudes to public property and increased efforts at detection following the appointment of Guilfoyle as curator in 1891. 98 For further information see VPRS 3181, Unit 756, Parks (1899), item 2820. 99 Refer to VPRS 3181, Unit 753, Parks (1897), item 3942 for further details. 100 See VPRS 3181, Unit 756, Parks (1899), item 4218. 101 See VPRS 3181, Unit 757, Parks (1900), item 3914.

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distance of just over 300 metres. The quick-minded 11-year-old had clearly hoped to escape punishment and hear no more from the authorities. A court summons resulted instead. Absent from this list of individuals intercepted in Melbourne’s parks are any Chinese names. Central Melbourne had served from the mid 1850s as a staging post for Chinese gold-seekers en route to country Victoria, and over the following decades the area around Little Bourke Street became well-established as the city’s Chinatown.102 Census enumerators counted 323 boys and 338 girls of Chinese descent in the state of Victoria in 1901, many residing in the former goldfield towns but a fair proportion living among the 2,431 Chinese residents of Melbourne.103 We know that in this period children like Russell Moy and Suey Land played outside and ventured inside theatres around Chinatown including Her Majesty’s and the Theatre Royal, sometimes befriending actors passing in and out of the stage doors.104 ‘Flea house’ cinemas provided a further attraction to children including Ron Wong Loy in later years.105 The journalist calling himself ‘The Vagabond’ also notes the activities of 5-year old William Ah Sing (‘a merry little chap’) and his classmates on a visit to a ragged school in Melbourne’s O’Brien Lane in 1876.106 These are lives merely glimpsed, however, and no comparable history yet exists to that written on the Chinese children of San Francisco.107 In the absence to date of evidence suggesting a more expansive urban range – and given an undercurrent of hostility towards Chinese settlers when they were perceived to threaten spaces regarded as white – it seems likely that children from Chinatown usually stayed close to home, and hence out of the clutches of park authorities. Chris McConville, ‘Chinatown’, in The Outcasts of Melbourne: Essays in Social History, ed. Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville (Sydney, 1985), pp. 58–68; Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald and Paul MacGregor (eds), After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia, 1860–1940 (Kingsbury, 2004). Melbourne played host to 581 Chinese residents by 1861. 103 See . These figures represent those aged under 15. One third of the Chinese population of Victoria lived in Melbourne at this time. Keir Reeves and Benjamin Mountford note that 1,057 Chinese resided in the city in 1881, with the figure doubling to 2,143 in 1891. See ‘Sojourning and Settling: Locating Chinese Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies, 42/1 (2011): 113. 104 Sophie Couchman, ‘Miss Suey Land and Ron Wong Loy: The Children of Little Bourke Street and the Entertainment Industry’ (c. 2009) . 105 Sophie Couchman, ‘Tong Yun Gai (Street of the Chinese): Investigating Patterns of Work and Social life in Melbourne’s Chinatown 1900–1920’ (MA thesis, Monash University, 2000), pp. 101–2. 106 Argus, 23 September 1876, p. 4. The journalist described these children as ‘halfcastes’. 107 Wendy Rouse Jorae, Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2009). For further insights on children in Melbourne’s Chinatown, see Couchman, ‘Ton Yung Gai’, pp. 48–51, 78–80, 117–18, 136–7. 102

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Chinese Figures in a Doorway (not attributed; c. 1900). Courtesy Chinese Museum Collection, Museum of Chinese Australian History

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A century on from the cases detailed in the municipal archives, researchers in Melbourne affiliated with an ongoing UNESCO project to examine ‘how the child’s use and perception of the … micro-environment affects his life’ twice visited the suburb of Braybrook to observe adolescent behaviour.108 Braybrook, like many of the inner suburbs in the late Victorian period, represented solid working-class territory at the time of the first study in 1972, albeit without the same density of housing. This preliminary investigation (involving eleven boys and nine girls, aged 14 and 15) found the local young people to be highly mobile, ranging over an area of some five square kilometres.109 However, this mobility (facilitated by the possession of bicycles) reflected not the richness of the outdoor environment but rather its monotony. Such ‘experiential starvation’ meant that there was a constant search for stimuli; the immediate environment in the district, moreover, possessed only half the then government stipulation for open space, and the reserves that did exist were rendered empty and lifeless by council regulations intended to uphold ‘polite’ (that is adult) standards of behaviour.110 Most young people spoke of their desire to live elsewhere and voiced their disappointment that no facilities catered specifically for their needs.111 In 1997 another team of researchers revisited Braybrook. As in 1972, the young people interviewed described their locale as boring, but now they also referred to ‘no go’ areas where it was widely thought that drug use occurred. In addition, their spatial range was more restricted – sometimes to just one or two blocks away from their homes – and even the local sports centre effectively priced them out of using its facilities for fear of disruptive behaviour.112 Contrary to images circulated within the popular press at the time regarding tearaway youths in public spaces, in 1997 researchers found that their participants spent a limited amount of time outside. Instead of using and shaping their neighbourhood, young people in Braybrook had largely retreated from the public domain.113

108 See Kevin Lynch (ed.), Growing Up in Cities: Studies of the Spatial Environment of Adolescence in Cracow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Salta, Toluca and Warszawa (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1977), p. 1 and numerous writings exploring similar themes for the 1990s by Karen Malone including ‘Growing Up in Cities as a Model of Participatory Planning and “Place-Making” with Young People’, Youth Studies Australia, 18/2 (1999): 17–23. 109 Lynch, Growing Up in Cities, pp. 105, 23. It is not made clear whether this is an aggregate figure for the whole sample or instead represents each individual’s spatial range. The research team observed that greater restrictions were placed on girls than boys in this regard, but did not quantify the assertion. 110 Ibid., see pp. 24, 118, 109. 111 Ibid, pp. 118, 48. 112 See Karen Malone and Lindsay Hasluck: ‘Geographies of Exclusion: Young People’s Perceptions and Use of Public Space’, Family Matters, 49 (1998): 24–5. 113 Ibid., p. 26. This was found to be particularly so for boys and girls from the Vietnamese community.

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Drawing comparisons between the experiences of young working-class people across the centuries is clearly a rough science, but it is possible to note some general trends. Diminishing autonomy in the public realm, interrupted temporarily by the availability of bicycles and the coincidence of relatively empty roads, seems to be the trajectory, coupled with a strengthening popular belief that the child in public is either a threat or imperilled.114 Instead of coming out to play, this section of society is increasingly staying indoors with implications for the development of social competence and spatial awareness.115 Research in Britain suggests that a similar reduction in independent mobility has occurred relatively recently. In 1971, around 80 per cent of surveyed 7- and 8-year-old children were allowed to go to school without adult supervision and 65 per cent of children aged 7 to 11 were permitted to visit leisure places on their own. By 1990, just nine per cent of children similarly aged travelled to school unaccompanied, while only half as many children aged 11 and under were permitted to visit leisure places alone.116 Further British-based research in 1998 on London and the satellite town of Hatfield confirmed this trend.117 By contrast, circumstances were undoubtedly far from ideal for the working-class child growing up in colonial Melbourne, but at least the proximity of usable public space and the freedom to play outside the home provided opportunities for adventure. A New Autonomy? Limitations and Leeway The addresses, factual and otherwise, given to the park curators and police indicate that most of the alleged trouble-makers came from working-class homes. To compare their ranges of activity with those of their social superiors we need to interrogate memoirs and diaries for evidence. In contrast to the push factors associated with the working-class suburb and the corresponding appeal of public space, these sources reveal a number of pull factors and ideological assumptions working in particular to keep young urban middle-class girls close to the domestic sphere. Greater parental affluence may have afforded family holidays away from 114 This process seems to have accelerated since the 1960s. For Melbourne, Carla Pascoe identifies the immediate post-war years as ‘the swansong of extensive childhood freedoms’, even if children ‘were not necessarily as free from surveillance as they felt at the time or as they recollect in hindsight’ (Pascoe, ‘Be Home by Dark’: 224–5). 115 For an introduction to research on these effects, see Depeau, p. 81. 116 Mayer Hillman, John Adams and John Whitelegg (eds), One False Move: A Study of Children’s Independent Mobility (London, 1990), pp. 44–5. 117 Margaret O’Brien et al., ‘Children’s Independent Mobility in the Urban Public Realm’, Childhood, 7/3 (2000): 271–3. Similarly, in 1974, 55 per cent of children in one part of Melbourne walked or cycled to school, but by 2005 only 10 per cent did so (with 89 per cent being driven by a parent). See Carolyn Whitzman, Megan Worthington and Dana Mizrachi, ‘Walking the Walk: Can Child Friendly Cities Promote Children’s Independent Mobility?’ (Melbourne, 2009), p. 11.

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Melbourne for this sector of society – described in one autobiography as ‘the summit of our happiness’ – but back home there were fewer opportunities for outdoor enterprise.118 Boys, inevitably, got themselves into scrapes (pilfering fruit from orchards, for instance, was regarded as a rite of passage), and if finances allowed, the onset of the teenage years could herald a further expansion of horizons.119 For their sisters, however, freedom of movement within the public domain was usually less easily attained. Like younger middle-class children of both sexes, girls up until their formal ‘coming out’ into society fell under close supervision. They might, for instance, still enjoy public parks, but this commonly occurred under the watch of the family maid, an elderly relative, or else alongside father on his Sunday stroll.120 Trapped inside working-class Richmond but saving hard to move to a ‘better’ suburb, Dorothy Moore’s parents preferred for her to stay on the family property. ‘We were never allowed to run around the streets’, Dorothy recalled; ‘We were very English like that, very proper.’121 Kept on a similarly tight rein, for Mabel Brookes a detested punishment for unruliness consisted of being marched around the Botanical Gardens by her grandmother, passing other children engrossed in games.122 One’s playmates were more strictly determined for this section of society, too – Nancy Adams recalls spending afternoons away from her home at Scotch College playing with other children in the Fitzroy Gardens, ‘but … only with those whose parents knew ours – some of whom we disliked intensely’.123 Mobility, recent scholarship has asserted, is a thoroughly gendered privilege;124 for children like Dorothy Moore and Mabel Brookes, city space taught hard lessons in the inequality of access. Expectations for assistance with domestic tasks like sewing and cooking further circumscribed the domain of middle-class girls.125Additionally, when not Walker, ‘Victorian Reminiscences of the Sixties’, p. 2. On orchard raiding, see for example Joynt, pp. 5–6, and Miller, p. 33. Geoffrey

118 119

Serle’s account of John Monash’s youth (John Monash: A Biography [Melbourne, 1982]) and the relevant sections of Norman Lindsay’s memoirs, My Mask: For What Little I Know of the Man Behind It (Sydney, 1970) devote much attention to the freedoms available in city-centre Melbourne for teenage males in this period. See the next chapter for further discussion. 120 Nancy Adams, Family Fresco (Melbourne, 1966), p. 68; Elaine Macdonald (Mrs Whittle), ‘Journalist’s Child’ (1945), RHSV MS 198, box 53, p. 55. Also note the reference in Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (p. 105) to ‘the winding of the snaky line about the parks and streets of East Melbourne’: a supervised procession of school borders taking their daily exercise. 121 Dorothy Moore quoted in Growing Up in Richmond, ed. Morag Loh (Melbourne, 1979), p. 9. 122 Mabel Brookes, Memoirs (Melbourne, 1974), pp. 1–2. 123 Adams, Family Fresco, p. 49. Aspiring to respectability in a working-class neighbourhood, Leonard Stretton’s mother also tried to select her son’s playmates. See Stretton, p. 6. 124 Tanu Priya Uteng and Tim Cresswell (eds), Gendered Mobilities (Aldershot and Burlington, 2008). 125 See for example Prichard, pp. 41, 66–7.

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under adult supervision themselves, it often fell to girls to act as the guardians of their younger siblings. Amie Livingstone Stirling sensed the inherent injustice of this state of affairs when her younger brother, Alvie, slipped from a plank and fell into the canal below whilst under her care. Aside from a soaking, no harm was done, but Amie’s mother insisted that her daughter be punished for failing to prevent the mishap. Despite the protestations of Amie’s father, the planned trip to Melbourne Zoo was cancelled. ‘Amie is older than Alvie’, their mother was overhead to say, ‘and, being a girl she should know better than to let him get into mischief.’126 Writing her Memoirs years later, Amie still recalled her bemusement: I did much thinking. Being a girl I could not do all the things I wanted to do; I could not go to bat unless they were a boy short on the team; I could not be an engine driver or a sailor; but if one of my brothers did anything stupid, I could be blamed, because I was a girl and should know better. It was very difficult to understand.127

Girls were expected to act with decorum and extend that influence over others regardless of context.128 Coteries of middle-aged ladies attempted to enforce the ethos, while younger generations felt the force of damning looks and dreaded epithets. After making her debut and ‘coming out’ into society in her late teens, Nancy Adams was reminded by her aunts about the danger of appearing ‘conspicuous’.129 Adams’s mother, Lady Eliza Mitchell, notes the same pressures in her own autobiography, Three-quarters of a Century. She states that in the early 1880s it was regarded as ‘rather fast’ for a girl to ride in a hansom cab whether on her own or with a friend, ‘while if her companion – not a relative! – was of the other sex, she would be considered almost beyond the pale’.130 Attitudes passed down the generations. That said, once a girl from a well-off background was ‘launched’ into the social scene, the pace of life quickened with a seemingly endless round of balls and parties to attend and a steady stream of young men hoping for a dance.131 Some of the events lasted until dawn; today’s party-goers may feel a sense of kinship with the young Nancy Adams, returning home with a friend and arguing about whether it was the moon or the sun that they could see hugging the skyline.132 By the turn of the century, moreover, the seeds of a more open society for young women had been sown. Born in 1882 and raised in Jolimont and then See Stirling, p. 60. Ibid. 128 See for example the advice on female street behaviour in Anon., Australasian 126 127

Etiquette, or the Rules and Usages of the Best Society in the Australasian Colonies, Together with their Sports, Pastimes, Games and Amusements (Sydney and Melbourne, 1885), pp. 151–3. 129 Adams, Family Fresco, p. 95. 130 Lady Eliza Mitchell, Three-Quarters of a Century (London, 1940), p. 20. 131 Note the description of the social scene, for instance, in Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (Melbourne, 1993), p. 10. 132 Adams, Family Fresco, p. 91.

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Hawksburn, Elaine Macdonald (Figure 2.6) makes the telling observation in her later autobiography that ‘Girls of this late Victorian era were still set an impossibly high standard of deportment but it was becoming more theoretical than in Mid Victorian times. Some allowance was being made for youthful high spirits and 100% success was not expected.’133 Elaine’s own childhood illustrates this new flexibility. Aged just 8 years old, Elaine was routinely allowed to take the tram down Chapel Street unaccompanied to visit her friend Vera, and to go with her to the sea baths at St Kilda during the summer holidays.134 The bicycle craze of the 1890s opened up further vistas. ‘Parents had hoped’, she writes, ‘that all the nice young men would say that they would rather see their sisters dead than riding bicycles. But no! They were all urging the girls to get bicycles and come for picnics.’135 She notes that her father, Argus journalist and Boer War correspondent Donald Macdonald: without admitting defeat in so many words, would return from the office … to find his daughter in the streets making eights and zigzags and staggering about on a bicycle. When she had fallen off a few times and it had rushed away by itself and crashed into the gutter it had become definitely secondhand, and Papa would have to pay for it.136

Elaine’s confidence in moving around the city also allowed her to explore the Collins Street ‘Block’ and flirt with young men of her acquaintance when she entered her teens.137 In a city of shifting horizons, Elaine could perceive a wider realm than many of her contemporaries. May Stewart’s recently discovered 1906 diary reveals another young woman making the most of newly found freedoms, and rewards extended scrutiny. Aged 18 and boarding with a Mrs Hadlow in McKean Street, North Fitzroy, May spent her working days as a shop assistant. Her diary seldom dwells on her activities behind the counter, however, with ‘Worked’ the standard summation of her employment experience. May is a little more forthcoming about her domestic situation – noting games of ludo with Mrs Hadlow’s children, the hours occupied by reading, and successful attempts to make and mend items of clothing – but her real interest lay in recording her social life out and about around Melbourne.138 Indeed, what Macdonald, ‘Journalist’s Child’, p. 52. Ibid., p. 120. 135 Ibid., p. 123. On colonial cycling etiquette, see Russell, Savage or Civilised?, pp. 133

134

280–84. 136 Ibid., p. 124. 137 Ibid., p. 278. Such activities are explored in depth in the following chapter. 138 May Stewart, ‘Diary’ (1906), SLV MS 12995: see for example entries for Monday 28 May and Wednesday 30 May (ludo); Saturday 24 March (‘read till 3 A.M.’); Thursday 22 March (‘started to make a blouse’); Sunday 1 April (‘sat in yard drying hair darning stockings’). Although May transcribed her activities into a diary printed for use in 1905, she corrected most of the dates to the 1906 calendar. All the excerpts quoted here are for 1906.

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Elaine Macdonald (not attributed). Courtesy Royal Historical Society of Victoria

emerges most strikingly from the pages of her journal is the sheer amount of time that the author appears to have spent at large in the city. Either alone or for the purpose of seeing friends, May Stewart ventured out on 181 occasions during 1906. Shopping activities in nearby Smith Street or ‘Bruny’ (Brunswick Street) were common, so too were visits to local parks like the Edinburgh or Fitzroy Gardens. Several trips to the theatre are also noted (on Melbourne Cup Day she saw The Betting Book at the Theatre Royal, for example),

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and in addition the diary chronicles irregular trips to church, nights spent dancing, attendance of a picnic, visits to the Exhibition Buildings and numerous meetings – in various locations – with her circle of friends. The bulk of these activities take place around Melbourne’s northern suburbs, close to home and within walking distance, but there are also several recorded outings to Prahran, St Kilda, Ascot Vale and Ormond which necessitated the use of public transport. Typical entries include (with original grammar retained): Saturday 17 March. Worked, afternoon Lilly called had a yarn evening went out met Amy & friend left them met Mrs Watts did some shopping went as far as Johnston St with her met Lilly & Edie went back did more shopping then over to Brunswick Street … coming home met Lilly and Edie again. Arrived home very tired & went to bed Wednesday 13 June. Worked till 1 P.M. After dinner took a book went over to gardens & read after tea cleaned & went to theatre Amy, Mrs Hadlow & I to see “Death or Glory boys enjoyed it immense seen Amy home came home had supper & went to bed had a read Monday 3 September. Worked an apprentice put on (Ethel Buskle) evening Ettie came round went for walk down Smith Street met Art & Jim Morgan went for walk Fitzroy Gardens came home Jollimont in train & stood yarning to Willie (Arthurs coz) till 12 P.M. came in & went to bed Sunday 4 November. Went to meet Lilly, went out to Ascot Vale, met Jack, also Mrs Hepburn then went to the house there met all the family walked to Moonie Ponds to Queen’s Park had a rest came back for tea, after walked the block till time to go home saw Lilly off in train & Rushed for tram just caught last Thursday 20 December. Worked, evening went out to see Beattie was not home walked up Chapel St could not find her so came back into town went to Coles [Book Arcade] had a read then came home …

The breathlessness of May’s writing style matches the pace of her hectic social calendar. With a week’s events contained on each page, the diary affords little room for elaboration, and poses many tantalizing questions. Where, one wonders, are May’s family? How long has she been living with Mrs Hadlow? Where exactly does she work and how much does she earn? Although the document yields no information regarding these matters, as an account of a year in the life of a young Melburnian it is a remarkable piece of evidence, principally for the light it casts on the female use of the outdoor city. Transitional spaces located in-between public and private domains also emerge here as scenes for social intercourse, with May chatting for hours at her garden gate or else on the verandah.139 Often sleeping in 139 Ibid., see for instance entries for Sunday 25 February (‘met Charlie … yarned at gate till 11.45 P.M.’), Monday 9 April (‘went out to gate & was introduced to a boy’), Thursday 29 March (‘evening met Will went to Edinburgh gardens yarned till 11 P.M. came

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when not working, the diarist’s activities frequently extend late into the night: she records racing for the last tram, chatting till 4.00 a.m. and twice finding herself locked out with only a half-open window offering salvation.140 Contrary to the Victorian ideology of domesticity, hers is an outside social world where she catches up with friends, bumps into old acquaintances and experiences chance encounters. Like the independent wage earners of Chicago, a similar boom city, May Stewart can also be regarded as one of the young female ‘pioneers’ of social space.141 Assessing in the British context another rare and valuable diary, kept by Elizabeth Lee in the new suburb of Prenton (around eight kilometres from central Liverpool), Colin and Siân Pooley similarly challenge traditional historical perceptions of young women shackled to the domestic sphere.142 From 1884, when she was aged 16, to 1892 (when her diary ends), Elizabeth Lee led a very active and independent life away from home. She ventured outside on most days, generally within a three-kilometre radius of her parents’ house but often further afield. Birkenhead and Liverpool city centre proved particular attractions for socializing, with the diarist recording unaccompanied visits by tram, train and ferry, and return journeys late at night.143 Unlike May Stewart, Elizabeth Lee was required to work only intermittently – occasionally helping out at her father’s draper’s shop and sometimes with the care of her younger siblings, tasks for which she was not paid. Servants handled much of the domestic labour, leaving Elizabeth free to extend her horizons and mould the ‘malleable norms’ of Victorian femininity and suburbia.144 Elizabeth Lee’s freedoms were the product of ‘a very specific time, place and class’, the Pooleys conclude, claimed by ‘young elite’ residents of a nascent community.145 In comparison, May Stewart’s diary suggests that these opportunities for outdoor engagement with urban spaces might also be open to young women of humbler means, living among working-class suburbs closer in to the city. home and sat on verandah yarning till 3 A.M.’), and Saturday 28 July (‘met Basil came home with him stood yarning at gate till 12.30 A.M.’). 140 Ibid., Wednesday 24 January (‘had to run for last tram’), Sunday 28 January (‘ran all the way the way along Swanston St fast caught last train’); Tuesday 24 July (‘yarned at gate till 4 A.M.’), Friday 23 February (‘locked out & had to crawl through window at 12 A.M.’) and Saturday 15 December (May locked out once more). 141 See Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago and London, 1988), pp. xv; xvii–xx; ch. 4; ch 5. 142 Colin G. Pooley and Siân Pooley ‘Constructing a Suburban Identity: Youth, Femininity and Modernity in Late-Victorian Merseyside’, Journal of Historical Geography, 36 (2010): 402–10. The diary itself is also published: Colin G. Pooley, Siân Pooley and Richard Lawton (eds), The Diary of Elizabeth Lee: Growing Up on Merseyside in the Late Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 2010). 143 Pooley and Pooley, ‘Constructing a Suburban Identity’: 405–6, 408. 144 Ibid., 406–7, 409. For further context, see Juliet Gardiner (ed.), The New Woman: Women’s Voices, 1880–1918 (London, 1993). 145 Pooley and Pooley, ‘Constructing a Suburban Identity’: 410, 402.

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By the time she wrote her diary in 1906, that city had much to offer someone like May Stewart. May’s freedoms had been hard won by previous generations and were contingent upon her age, disposable income (though activities on foot were free) and to some extent on her status as a boarder. For her the outdoor city was a resource, a place of adventure and fun. Arm-in-arm with friends in August 1906, May could be found in the city centre ‘[having] a great time (a kick) polka all way up avenue’.146 Her sense of freedom is encapsulated here, and she appeared as the epitome of the ‘new brand of girl’ observed as ‘in the process of evolution’ by visiting American Jessie Ackermann in 1913.147 The public privileges long associated with male adolescence, it appeared, were slowly being claimed by more and more members of the opposite sex. Gradually Melbourne’s youthscape had become more densely populated and pushed in new directions. The Legislative Reflex: Curfew and Control Pitfalls as well as pleasures, it should be noted, characterized the urban scene. Although it could be adapted by young people to suit their preoccupations, city spaces were not designed with them in mind. Younger children, for instance, fell beneath tram wheels, tumbled into cellars and all too frequently drowned in the Yarra River.148 Tragic accidents could result from unsupervised play, further examples including the death of Alfred Murray in 1882, killed by collapsing timber at the Australian Wharf, and the early demise of young Gertrude Barron, just 3 ½ years old in 1897 when she burnt to death in a grass fire started by her 8- and 9-year-old companions.149 The latter case prompted a review of the age at which children should be allowed alone into parks and gardens, but after discussion no changes resulted, and the threshold of 5 years old that at least theoretically operated in most metropolitan parks and gardens was not extended to Yarra Park,

Stewart, ‘Diary’, see entry for Sunday 26 August (including loose sheet). Jessie Ackermann, Australia from a Woman’s Point of View (London, 1913), p. 261. 148 See, for example, VPRS 937, Unit 321, bundle 1 (item unnumbered, dated 28 146 147

September 1886), police report regarding tram hitting Robert John O’Halloran (aged 4); VPRS 3181, Unit 861, Streets (1894), item 4205 – death (in November 1894) of 2-year-old Mary Richardson after falling 10 feet into a cellar guarded only by rails 18 inches apart; and VPRS 937, Unit 337, bundle 3 (item unnumbered) – sad account of the drowning in April 1893 of Beatrice Crampton, 12-year-old daughter of the Sub-Inspector of police, whilst trying to rescue a playmate. For Victoria as a whole, Kim Torney notes that 205 children were reported drowned between 1860 and 1869 by the Argus newspaper (Torney, p. 13). I have noted at least 16 such cases in the Argus for the Yarra River alone in the 1870s. For examples of later instances see Argus, 15 November 1886, p. 9 and 4 January 1907, p. 5. 149 VPRS 937, Unit 306, bundle 3, item 82/352, police report dated 12 March 1882; VPRS 3181, Unit 753, Parks (1897), item 4163.

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Princes Park (where the fire had occurred), Flinders and Fawkner Parks – all of which fell under a different jurisdiction.150 That decision, however, ran against the grain of increasing adult concern regarding young people’s behaviour in public spaces. Much anxiety centred upon so-called ‘larrikin’ activities – analyzed in detail in Chapter 4 – but behind this headline-grabbing issue an equally important discussion was taking place which served to slowly reposition any unsupervised child in public as a potential problem for society. Together, a broad church of progressives and ‘child savers’ hoped to divert young people away from self-generated outdoor pastimes and channel their energies into more ‘rational’ pursuits, a trajectory which later culminated in the appearance for younger Melburnians of the supervised playground. Such an outcome could only be achieved by exaggerating the dangers posed to young people by the urban environment and conjuring new problems with which to grapple. Misguided (albeit often well-intentioned) intervention, in concert with successive layers of regulation which redefined the street as thoroughfare rather than social location, would eventually challenge the position of public spaces as an arena of potential autonomy for young people.151 The street child of the mid-nineteenth century had been conceived in sentimental terms as a quick-witted and lively ‘street Arab’, essentially a harmless presence that might put one over or embarrass dithering adults, but who otherwise represented neither a threat nor a potential victim.152 While nationalist commentators like those associated with the Sydney Bulletin continued to peddle this image of the colonial child during the final decades of the century (as part of a wider project to present Australian youngsters as healthily precocious and sceptical of stuffy ‘old world’ conventions), other social critics re-imagined children on the street as objects in need of reformation. Influenced by factors including rising crime rates, concern for the health of the city-bred child and the belief that they or the state should act in loco parentis to rescue fallen street children, the reformers first focused their attention on the most obvious target: the child at large.153 Public space also came Ibid. Also see the ‘draft regulations for care of metropolitan parks & gardens’ included in the Town Clerk’s files for 1885 (VPRS 3181, Parks, Unit 741, item 1091). This document features an annotated amendment to the suggested minimum age requirement – 7 years old has been stuck out and reduced to 5 years. 151 On the regulation of street space – which allowed the motor car a free run after its later entry onto the scene – see Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, pp. 36–63. 152 For a parallel argument concerning the United States, see Ruskin Teeter’s ‘Coming of Age on the City Streets in 19th-Century America’, Adolescence, 23/92 (1988): 909–10. 153 On these developments refer to Graeme Davison, ‘The City-Bred Child’, pp. 143– 74 and Chris McConville, ‘Outcast Children in Marvellous Melbourne’, in The Colonial Child: Papers Presented at the 8th Biennial Conference of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Melbourne 12–13 October 1979, ed. Guy Featherstone (Melbourne, 1981), pp. 39–48. For an American comparison, see the introductory sections to Christine Stansell, ‘Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850–1860’, Feminist Studies, 8/2 (1982): 309–35. 150

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to be viewed as inherently problematic, a zone where negative influences upon impressionable youngsters could not be controlled. Hence the concern expressed by the Board of Education in 1869 that children walking to and from their citycentre school had to pass by ‘houses of ill fame’ – scenes ‘calculated to produce a most injurious effect upon their minds’ – or the complaint in 1880 that Sunday school children returning home through the Fitzroy Gardens witnessed less respectable individuals damaging the trees and swearing.154 In 1886, a police report into Melbourne’s ‘outcast children’ confirmed the worst fears of many reformers: untroubled by truancy officers, a number of children of both sexes were said to ‘live almost constantly on the streets’, picking up casual hawking jobs, engaging in petty crimes, sleeping out in the open and rendering themselves vulnerable to sexual predators.155 After such liberty the street child ‘becomes what he cannot help’, the reporting officer concluded.156 Armed with such insights, recently established rescue organizations including William Forster’s Try Boys Society (1883) and William Groom’s Excelsior Class (1878– 79; re-formed with Forster in 1886) lobbied for further powers, powers duly conferred with the passing of the Neglected Children’s Act and Juvenile Offenders Act in 1887. Henceforth, approved private rescue agencies or individuals could apprehend children deemed to be ‘neglected’ and assume responsibility for their legal guardianship from the courts or from their parents.157 These legislative changes also widened the definition of a ‘neglected child’. In 1864 the classification had included children found begging and ‘any child found wandering about or frequenting any street thoroughfare tavern or place of public resort or sleeping in the open air and who should not have any home or settled place of abode or any visible means of subsistence’.158 In 1887, as Donella Jaggs observes, the classification was extended to include any child apparently under the age of 10 years found engaged during the summer months in casual employment after 7 o’clock in the evening, or at any other part of the year after the hour of 9 o’clock.159 With this clause the idea of a time limit upon children’s access to public space entered into law, thus providing child rescuers like Selina Sutherland – the See VPRS 3181, Unit 654, Nuisances (1868–1869), item unnumbered, letter written 22 April 1869; VPRS 937, Unit 303, bundle 3, item 10366. 155 See VPRS 937/P6, Melbourne Inward Registered Correspondence (1887), Unit 4, bundle 1, ‘Outcast Children’, written by Senior Constable McHugh, 21 October 1886, pp. 1–9. A slightly amended version of the report was circulated to a wider audience by the Melbourne Daily Telegraph on 19 November 1886. 156 Ibid., p. 9. 157 The Neglected Children’s Act 1887 (Victoria), s. 31, s. 19, s. 62–73; The Juvenile Offenders Act 1887 (Victoria), s. 39. For the purposes of the former Act, a child was defined as any person under the age of 21. On the impact of the reforms see McConville, ‘Outcast Children’, pp. 42–6. 158 Discussed in Jaggs, pp. 25–6. 159 Ibid., p. 55. 154

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first individual licensed to apprehend children under the 1887 Act – with a far wider scope for intervention.160 Sutherland’s activities encouraged others interested in policing the public domain, culminating in an attempt in 1900 to further curtail young people’s freedom of movement around the city. On 10 July that year, Daniel Duggan (MLA for Dunolly and member of the Australian Natives Association) introduced into Parliament the Street Frequenting Children’s Restriction Bill, a piece of legislation designed ‘to restrict and prohibit Children under the age of Fourteen Years being in the Streets after Nine o’clock’.161 Under the terms of the Bill, any child not accompanied by a parent or guardian and found in any ‘street road thoroughfare or highway’ after the stated hour would be liable to a penalty of 10s on the first occasion and £1 for each subsequent offence. In a reversal of the 1887 Act, newspaper vendors and messengers were to be granted an exemption, but all other children 14 and under, whether working or not, would now be subject to regulation year round.162 Deeming the darkened or gas-lit streets of Melbourne to be no place for the young, Duggan and his supporters William Maloney (physician and Labor Party MLA for West Melbourne) and Richard O’Neill (MLA for Mandurang, and, like Duggan, an auctioneer) aimed to shut the city to children by curfew. Under these regulations, youngsters like Jean Fowler and her siblings, accustomed to playing in Richmond until 11 at night, would have to end their evening games early and conform instead to middle-class ideals of propriety and children’s proper place.163 Though the Bill – and another Duggan introduced on the same day to fine anyone under 16 caught smoking in a public place – did not pass into law,164 the On Sutherland, see Shurlee Swain, ‘Selina Sutherland: Child Rescuer’, in Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Melbourne, 1985), pp. 109–116. 161 A copy of the bill is located in VPRS 3181, Unit 70, By-Laws (1897–1900). 162 Ibid., see s. 3. The Bill’s proponents were possibly influenced by developments elsewhere. Hobart City Council discussed the desirability of a curfew ordinance in 1898 (Argus, 19 July 1898, p. 6), and by 1900 the curfew bell reportedly rang in many locations in North America. On the latter, see Tamara Myers, ‘Nocturnal Disorder and the Curfew Solution: A History of Juvenile Sundown Regulations in Canada’, in Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States, ed. Mona Gleason et al. (Vancouver, 2010), pp. 95–114. 163 Anon., Australasian Etiquette (1885) stresses the need for parents to lead by example in teaching their children to be ‘circumspect’ (see p. 225). Russell (Savage or Civilised?, pp. 214–16, 360) notes the evangelical basis of such behavioural ideals and the emphasis on the domestic training (and by inference preferable confinement?) of children as a bulwark against their public misbehaviour. 164 A copy of the Juvenile Smokers Restriction Bill is located in the same file mentioned in footnote 161, above. The backgrounds of the three MPs are noted in Kathleen Thomson and Geoffrey Serle, A Biographical Register of the Victorian Legislature 1851–1900 (Canberra, 1972), pp. 58, 138, 155. 160

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sponsorship of the legislation is indicative of a trend. The long-accepted notion that children should enjoy an equality of access to the public domain was under review. Melbourne’s youngest inhabitants had now only a brief window of time before those involved in the playgrounds movement would attempt to further confine their play into sanitized, and separate, locations. In the early years of the twentieth century, then, young people in Melbourne found themselves at a crossroads. Their taken-for-granted play space at the heart of the city was under threat, and the pressures to control their movements would only intensify with the arrival of the motor car and increasing efforts to enforce school attendance. Young people were peculiarly vulnerable to these changes, for the youthscape was an ephemeral phenomenon, requiring continual reworking by the boys, and increasingly the girls, who crafted it. Located somewhere between the ‘hard city’ of unyielding buildings, legislative regimes and enforcement agents, and the ‘soft city’ of personal imagination and will,165 young Melburnians dwelt in what might be termed the ‘plasticine city’. They moulded and adapted the material environment placed before them, sculpting new shapes and impressing upon the city their own intentions. Without constant manipulation, however, cities, like plasticine, are liable to harden and be rendered less usable. Though Melbourne’s reformers had grown pessimistic about the possibilities of public space by century’s end – exhibiting what one historian aptly describes as a pervasive ‘urban disenchantment’166 – the children of the city did not share the assessment. For them the urban scene remained a source of excitement and a place to seek adventure.

On this distinction, see Jonathan Raban, Soft City (Glasgow, 1974), pp. 9–10. A phrase borrowed from Anthony M. Platt’s The Child Savers: The Invention of

165 166

Delinquency (Chicago and London, 1969), p. 36.

Chapter 3

Getting and Spending: The World of Outdoor Work and the Beginnings of the Youth Market To contemporary Western sensibilities, the very idea of ‘child labour’ can seem incongruous: a product of a backward past, an index of ‘underdevelopment’ or proof of bad parenting.1 Similarly, a number of preconceived notions circle discussion of the youth market, in particular the widely held view that discretionary spending by young people is a very recent phenomenon – the result of post-war affluence, associated with the lifestyles of newly identified ‘teenagers’.2 Such thinking, I argue here, ignores the consumption habits of young people in earlier times, underplays the contribution they made to the evolution of urban leisure spaces and overlooks the influence that their means of earning a livelihood and independent spending practices had upon prior conceptualizations of youth, notably the idea of adolescence. Following on from the preceding assessment of factors affecting young people’s spatial range and use of the public domain, this chapter retains a focus on the outdoor city to consider the interrelated issues of getting and spending.3 The opening sections delineate the variety of street jobs undertaken by young people in Melbourne between 1870 and 1914, the various rationales for this work and the Victoria Goddard and Benjamin White contend that the topic ‘confronts researchers with the need to re-examine a number of ingrained assumptions and also moral attitudes which are difficult to overcome’ (‘Child Workers and Capitalist Development: An Introductory Note and Bibliography’, Development and Change, 13 [1982]: 466). Similarly, Clark Nardinelli states that the scholarship on children’s employment ‘may well be the most emotional of all the writings on the industrial revolution’, and – one might add – capitalism more generally (Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution [Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990], p. 34). Television history amplifies popular conceptions of the emergence of a ‘proper’ childhood, free from work – see for instance Suffer the Little Children (dir. Helena Braun, 2010, BBC). 2 See for example the feature articles in Life magazine, 11 June 1945 and 20 December 1948, and the 2007 television documentary Inventing the Teenager (dir. Claudine Dabbs, BBC). 3 Dennis Denisoff’s ‘Small Change: The Consumerist Designs of the NineteenthCentury Child’ is one of the few works to also recognize this relationship. See Dennis Denisoff (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture (Aldershot and Burlington, 2008), pp. 1–23, especially pp. 10–11. Denisoff places the (British) child at the forefront of an emergent consumer culture ethic. 1

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sums on offer for different pursuits.4 Through an extended discussion of the real and imagined figure of the city newsboy, the analysis next reveals the strategies of street work and the slow substitution at the behest of child savers of one identity – the child as street merchant – for another altogether more circumscribed: the child as dependent child. Attention then switches from income to outlay. Retaining some of the same characters from the earlier analysis, and also weaving in the experiences of young middle-class Melburnians, this section revisits the key locations of Melbourne’s budding youth market, an aspect of city life seldom acknowledged by historians. The attractions and associated conflicts of the old Eastern Market feature prominently here, and the shop assistant ‘riots’ of 1886 are analyzed within the context of a growing demand for leisure time and the concurrent opening of new leisure spaces. Just as opportunities to spend the youthful shilling in the city’s public spaces increased, it is shown, successive phases of micro-regulation meant that the abilities of young people to earn on the city streets contracted. Indeed, it is in turn-of-the-century Melbourne that we can perceive the beginnings of a sustained shift whereby legitimacy in public spaces followed not from young people’s street calling, but rather from their capacity as consumers. Economies of the Streets Juvenile street trading in Melbourne saw its heyday from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s.5 The pursuit had a long pedigree in the Victorian capital – soon after the separation of the Port Phillip district in 1851 local newspapers reported upon the activities of the Juvenile Traders’ Association, a pioneering (if short-lived) assistance agency, and in 1857 a compilation of lithographs appeared depicting boys collecting newspapers to sell from the Argus office and shining shoes in the streets.6 Through the 1860s and 70s, young match sellers, news vendors and crossing sweepers became firmly established characters in the urban scene, only intermittently troubling the consciences of the city fathers.

4 This focus on street trading is in contrast to the historical preoccupation with studies of children working in industrial contexts. This oversight is noted for Britain in Peter Kirby, Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 1–2, 71, and for Scandinavia in Ning de Coninck Smith et al. (eds), Industrious Children: Work and Childhood in the Nordic Countries 1850–1990 (Odense, 1997), pp. 7–8. For analysis of scholarly writing on working childhood, see Simon Sleight, ‘“Let Children Be Children”: The Place of Child Workers in Museum Exhibitions and the Landscapes of the Past’, in Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe (Oxford and New York, 2013), pp. 126–43. 5 Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, p. 129. 6 See (for instance) Argus, 11 June 1858, p. 4; Henry Heath Glover, 12 Hours Road Scraping in Melbourne: Scraped from the Streets and Sketched on Stone (Melbourne: 1857).

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The history of subsequent pressure from an increasingly vocal minority of citizens to regulate young people’s street trading activities has been well documented in Australia and elsewhere, with most historians of the subject sharply divided as to whether legislation was essential and belated (no thorough parliamentary treatment of the issue occurred in Melbourne until 1925), or unnecessary, even harmful.7 In the middle of this debate the actual experience of juvenile street work, particularly in the Australian context, has tended to be forgotten.8 Likewise, while the expansion of the leisure industry and the associated patterns of popular culture and consumer practice have been investigated fruitfully for the late nineteenth century, the resulting histories rarely discuss the role of young people in the vanguard of these changes. Books by Gail Reekie and Beverley Kingston, for instance, examine the part women played in grand formal shopping environments like the new department stores yet overlook the link between youthful patronage and the expansion of more diverse retail areas including markets and other spaces of consumption and amusement.9 Correspondingly, in Richard Waterhouse’s otherwise fine survey of Australian popular culture the author acknowledges the existence of a youth culture before the twentieth century, but fails to account for it satisfactorily, concentrating instead on the highly visible rock ’n’ roll and surfing subcultures after World War II, and maintaining that Australian society only discovered adolescence in the 1950s.10 Though work conducted in Britain and America has begun to uncover the existence of youth markets during earlier times (principally in the first decades of the twentieth century, but arguably dating as far

Compare (in the American context) David Whisnant, ‘Selling the Gospel News, Or: the Strange Career of Jimmy Brown the Newsboy’, Journal of Social History, 5/3 (1972): 269–309, and David Maunders, ‘Legislating for Dependence: The Development of Juvenile Trading Legislation in Victoria 1887–1927’, Journal of Australian Studies, 22 (1988): 94– 104. Also see Shurlee Swain, ‘Development of Child Welfare Policy in Australia’, in The World of Child Labor: An Historical and Regional Survey, ed. Hugh D. Hindman (Armonk and London, 2009), pp. 949–52. On European children’s work over the longue durée, see 7

Marjatta Rahikainen, Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot and Burlington, 2004). 8 Brown-May goes some way towards correcting this imbalance, however, in

Melbourne Street Life (see pp. 78–81, 129–34, 147–9), and in his ‘Melbourne’s Newsboys’ exhibition held at Melbourne Town Hall, 4 May–24 July 2005. For overseas comparisons, see Davin, Growing Up Poor, chs. 6, 9, 10, Nasaw, chs. 3–7, Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995), ch. 7. 9 Beverley Kingston, Basket, Bag and Trolley: A History of Shopping in Australia (Oxford, 1994); Gail Reekie, Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store (Sydney, 1993). 10 Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788 (Melbourne, 1995), pp. 240–46, 84.

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back as the appearance of penny theatres in 1830s London11), in Australia the idea of the youthful consumer as a postwar phenomenon remains unchallenged. Historical oversights are not unusual, of course; what makes these omissions particularly noteworthy is the abundance of material generated on the themes of youthful acquisition and consumption in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. As this chapter illustrates, young people’s getting and spending activities threw up all manner of correspondence, investigation, prognostication and imagery. Much of this evidence is characterized by concern. Urban reformers – eagerly following one another’s international initiatives – came to identify the street as the locus of despair, with metropolitan thoroughfares and back lanes in effect the metonym for a wider inner-city, working-class milieu: an environment to which they wished to bring schemes for renewal, and from which, they determined, young people required inoculation. Treading a fine line between sympathetic humanism and moral didactics, Chicago activist Jane Addams supplied perhaps the capstone to this phase of reformism with the publication in 1909 of her seminal book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets.12 ‘It seems at times as if a great city almost deliberately increases its perils’, Addams wrote anxiously: The newly awakened senses are deliberately appealed to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by the flippant street music, the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats … [A] fundamental susceptibility is thus evoked without a corresponding stir of the higher imagination, and the result is as dangerous as possible.13

Young male wage-earners were specified by Addams as the group most at risk of becoming dissolute: ‘Never before have such numbers of young boys earned money independently of family life, and felt themselves free to spend it as they choose in the midst of vice deliberately disguised as pleasure’.14 Note here the emphasis on the city as purposefully harmful, a categorization heightening a sense of moral principle and widening the space for potential intervention.15 11 See: David Fowler, ‘Teenage Consumers? Young Wage-Earners and Leisure in Manchester, 1919–1939’, in Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880–1939, ed. Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding (Manchester and New York, 1992), pp. 133–55; Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 2004); and, on London’s penny theatres and penny magazines, John Springhall, Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain 1860–1960 (Dublin, 1986), pp. 120–33. 12 Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (Chicago, 1972 [originally 1909]). 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 Ibid., pp. 6–7. Also see Edward N. Clopper, Child Labor in City Streets (New York, 1912), chs. 6, 7. 15 Indeed, Allen F. Davis notes that in the same year that Spirit of Youth appeared, Addams helped initiate the Juvenile Protective Association, a body mandated to ‘control or eliminate poolrooms, bars, dance halls, theaters and other institutions that the committee felt were breeders of crime and vice’ (see p. xxi, 1972 edition).

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Note too the clearly stated link between independent getting and autonomous spending, the force of Addams’ exposition strengthened by more than 20 years’ experience at Chicago’s renowned Hull House rescue centre. In Australia, reformminded contemporaries perceived similar metropolitan perils. Edith Onians of Melbourne’s City Newsboys’ Society, for example, held Addams’ activism in high regard, observing firsthand the Chicago scheme on overseas tours and advocating its methods to Melbourne’s public upon her return.16 Scattered throughout the material bequeathed to us by Onians and fellow charity workers are many of the examples employed in the following analysis. As is the case with other institutional sources used in this chapter and elsewhere in this study, such evidence has to be read finely against the grain. In pushing for change and reporting their successes, bodies like the City Newsboys’ Society and Gordon Institute were selective in choosing which stories to tell.17 One way to try and narrow the gap between discursive construction and lived experience is to focus on reported encounters between rescuers and recipients in the hope of gaining a perspective from both sides. Each party carried preconceived notions into these meetings. When Onians came across a group of newsboys in 1897 ‘sitting on the pavement, killing time till the evening paper came out’, the moment had already been imagined in her own childhood through reading a Sunday school tale about a barefooted waif alone in London’s wintry streets. ‘I was touched to the depths of my heart by this picture’, Onians tells us in her later account, Read All About It, ‘and made up my mind there and then that when I grew up I would try to help poor boys.’18 On this occasion, Onians does not tell us the names of the boys or exactly what they said to her, only that ‘they promised, and came regularly’ to a school class she initiated.19 Their silence is in this instance important, for their role in Onians’s foundational scene-setting story is not as individuals but as local representatives of poor children the world over. They play a part but do not share in the script writing. Elsewhere in her book, however, Onians is much more forthcoming in reporting the conversations she had with the young people she met and in describing their characteristics, activities and backgrounds. Here as in other fragmentary passages found in the archives, the attentive historian can sometimes make out the voices of the young street traders whose calls once filled the evening air and whose noisy games were once part of the sensory experience Edith Onians, The Men of Tomorrow (Melbourne, c. 1914). Also see newspaper articles by Onians in the cuttings book of the Newsboys’ Society, SLV MS 10034, Melbourne Newsboys’ Club Foundation, box 1602. 17 On the construction of the figure of the vulnerable child in international child saving discourse more generally, see Shurlee Swain and Margaret Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire. Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester, 2010). 18 Edith Onians, Read All About It, p. 7. 19 Ibid. On the life of Onians, also see John Ramsland, ‘Edith Onians, Melbourne Waifs and the Newsboys’ Society’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 72/2 (1986): 116–29. 16

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of the city. Where shoulders rubbed and goods were exchanged in metropolitan space, the interaction sometimes left an impression, later recorded. And from these fragments one can hope to recapture the spirit of youth on Melbourne’s turnof-the-century city streets, streets that served as outside offices and gateways to amusement for many young Melburnians. Hunters and Collectors The range of outdoor occupations involving young people in Melbourne in this period varied enormously. Commuting into the city in 1888 from his country Victoria constituency, William McLellan (MLA) observed ‘a swarm of children covering a tip-head near North Melbourne, and picking up whatever they could find’.20 Here and at other rubbish heaps around Melbourne’s fringes, he stated, little children could often be seen ‘scratching up with their fingers pieces of pewter or tin, or else bones or rags’.21 For similarly observant visitors approaching their city-centre destinations, such sights served as an introduction to an elaborate metropolitan economy of waste and recycling in which children were heavily involved. Closer in, along inner-suburban streets and laneways, young people might be encountered wheeling small handcarts containing assortments of what were termed ‘marine stores’ – bottles, bric-a-brac, shoddy and other marketable items – for resale to adult dealers.22 New money-making schemes came into view as one entered Melbourne’s commercial hub. After dismounting or stepping out from a carriage, one would soon find a child eager to hold the reins of an unattended horse for a small payment,23 while other youngsters working in principal thoroughfares like Elizabeth Street might try and shine your shoes, sell you an afternoon paper, or else offer you a box of matches or a posy of flowers.24 Still more young people ran messages and fulfilled errands for shopkeepers, while others swept street crossings (see for instance Figure 3.1), sang for money or performed acrobatics See Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), Session 1888, Vol. 57, p. 497. Ibid., p. 495. 22 Ibid., p. 493. In 1888, ‘Some 700 or 800 young persons, whose ages ranged from 20 21

boyhood to youthful manhood’ were reckoned to be involved, employed by ‘from 35 to 40’ dealers (VPD, Session 1888, Vol. 58, p. 1,335). Coming from Government proponents of a Bill to regulate the trade, these figures should be regarded with caution. A marine store operated by Henry Whoren on Leichardt Street is noted in Victoria Police Gazette, 16 June 1874, p. 126. 23 In 1889, for instance, Police Sergeant Holland noted in a report on Melbourne’s General Cemetery that ‘a number of youths 14 to 16 years of age come there with funerals for the purpose of holding horses during an interment for which they may get a shilling or sixpence’. See VPRS 937/P6, Melbourne Miscellaneous Inward Registered Correspondence, Unit 7 (1884–), bundle 1, report dated 25 January 1889. 24 See ‘John Freeman’, Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life; Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, pp. 132–3; 84, 148–9.

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Fig. 3.1

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Flinders Lane Looking West from Swanston Street (not attributed; albumen silver, 1895). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria. Note the figure of the young crossing sweeper, left of centre

on the pavement.25 And when city councils offered threepence per captured rat in a turn-of-the-century attempt to sanitize the city and stem the risk of disease, Melbourne’s children were again to the fore in taking up the offer.26 Hunters and collectors par excellence, it was they who scurried behind buildings and into drainage channels in the hope of claiming reward. An air of semi-legality clung to many of these activities, especially where retrieved items were concerned, and it is little surprise to learn that ‘marining’ 25 Note the query regarding young ‘Italian children slaving as street musicians’ in VPD, Session 1891, Vol. 67, p. 1,417, and the 1905 photograph of a young street acrobat at the corner of Queen and Collins Streets in Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, facing p. 214. On errands, see Argus: 3 July 1872, p. 1; 27 April 1887, p. 7. George and Charles Payne, young street singers in 1890s Melbourne, are mentioned in Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives on Child Protection in Australia (Melbourne, 2002), p. 18. 26 See McCalman, p. 67 (the Richmond Council was not so generous, paying a penny less for each rat), and VPRS 3101, Health Committee Reports and Returns of Attendance 1900–1901, Unit 16, Reports 52 and 64, 8 July 1901 and 9 August 1901. The latter document notes that between May and July 1901, municipalities in Melbourne paid £274/7/9 to ratcatchers (for a haul of between 21,951 and 32,926 rats, depending on the going rate).

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became an early subject for legislative scrutiny, initially by targeting the dealers (in 1876) and later by turning parliamentary attention towards the youthful collectors (in 1888 and 1890).27 City newspapers, notably the Argus, had called consistently for action to protect private property from the nimble fingers of over-eager scavengers, and some MPs also related personal experience of theft.28 ‘Marine store boys’, it was claimed in the chamber, ‘opened yard doors without asking, and walked into one’s back premises, ostensibly to get bottles, or bones, or rags, but they were always ready to lay their hands on anything that came their way.’29 Whether the regulation of the industry was truly effective, however, is questionable: in 1879 a truancy officer reported one J.A. Benson, a dealer in Collingwood’s Hoddle Street, still buying from young children (supposedly outlawed by the 1876 legislation).30 And it seems that no successor organization was constituted to replace the shortlived Boys’ Trading Brigade, an 1873 initiative whose backers appeared to lose heart when faced with the charge that ‘marining’ was inherently unmanageable and outside the law. Through a system of supervision and identification (including scarlet jumpers, caps with red bands and an identification number), the organizers of the Brigade had promised to clean up the trade. However, a subsequent account from a dealer who stated that all young people engaged in this occupation were untrustworthy seems to have damaged the cause, and the Boys’ Trading Brigade disappears from the historical record thereafter.31 Other city-dwellers, meanwhile, alerted the authorities to ‘sham sweepers’ appealing vociferously for tips at road crossings or else clutching brooms to divert attention from their begging activities.32 And in 1899, police prosecuted two sets of brothers from Richmond for allegedly perpetrating another money-making scam: offering for sale in Clarendon Street flowers recently removed from the Fitzroy Gardens.33 Refer to: The Old Metal Dealers Act 1876; The Marine Stores and Old Metal Dealers Act 1888 (which stipulated the hours when collecting could occur, confined the activity to males aged over 13 – or to those under that age who had reached a required educational standard – and excluded all females); and the consolidated Marine Stores and Old Metal Dealers Act 1890. 28 See for example Argus, 10 December 1873, p. 4; Argus, 31 August 1876, p. 6 (letter by ‘Ex-Detective’); and VPD, Session 1888, Vol. 57, pp. 496, 502. 29 VPD, Session 1888, Vol. 57, p. 496. Comment by Joseph Harris, MLA (member for St Kilda). It is likely that some of this activity related to purposes of play rather than retail. The game of jacks, for example, required the use of bones, seeds or other collected items. 30 See VPRS 937, Inward Registered Correspondence (Victoria Police), Unit 302, bundle 1, file 79/321. The two children in question reportedly received thruppence for their wares. 31 Argus: 17 December 1873, p. 4; 2 June 1874, p. 6. 32 See for instance: Argus: 5 October 1877, p. 3; 23 May 1879, p. 5; 25 July 1885, p. 10; 29 July 1885, p. 10. 33 VPRS 3181, Town Clerk’s files, Series 1, Unit 756, Parks (1899), item 4030, report dated 1 November 1899. The case, involving the brothers Shannon and Parsons, also features in Table A.1 in the Appendix. 27

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As historical insights, however, the legitimacy of many plaintiffs’ complaints against juvenile street workers can often be questioned. Missives issued against news vendors from the Melbourne and Suburban News Agents’ Association, or grievances regarding young flower sellers from metropolitan florists, must be regarded as dubious assessments of practice.34 For complaining shopkeepers, the underlying source of agitation lay in the fact that their fixed positions on city streets or around Melbourne’s markets did not allow them to chase custom as effectively as their young competitors. For the latter, there were quite literally no overheads with which to be concerned or to eat into a day’s takings. In this regard the niche that young people filled in the service economy was extremely modern: they followed footfall rather than just hoping patrons might stop by. Young street traders were also resourceful opportunists, peddling newspapers until late at night if a big story had broken or switching rapidly between items like theatre tickets and horse racing cards depending on the demands of the market.35 Through their peregrinations, furthermore, they gained a unique insight into metropolitan topography. ‘At ten years old’, Edith Onians remarked about one of her former charges, ‘there was not much Crutchey did not know about town.’36 Two other 10-year-olds, Bill and Tom, she stated: knew every lane and right-of-way for miles. They knew all the wharves along the Yarra bank and often climbed and crawled beneath them to retrieve floating beer bottles and other sources of revenue. They knew all the short cuts and were as much at home in the city as old men.37

Such intimate acquaintance endorses Walter Benjamin’s contention, introduced earlier, that it is the child who grows up in closest proximity to the city.38 Because they were willing to go where no-one else would in search of a shilling, their expeditions undoubtedly facilitated by the play impulse common to all children, Melbourne’s young scavengers and hawkers got to know their city in a unique way. Only the homeless, Benjamin suggests, acquire comparable first-hand knowledge of the urban environment.39 See VPRS 3181, Unit 898, Street Standings (1891–1892), item 3713 (dated 21 September 1892), and VPRS 3181, Unit 901, Street Standings (1899–1901), item 1887 (a similar complaint from the Cash News Agents’ Association of Victoria, dated 23 May 1899). 35 See for example the Parliamentary comment concerning lads under 10 years of age selling Argus ‘extra-ordinaries’ during the Crimean War until 10 or 11 p.m., and the later observations of Edith Onians regarding paperboys clearing between £1 and £2 a day after the death of King Edward, and as much as £10 to £15 by employing younger ‘runners’ to cater to demand (respectively: VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 54, p. 505; Edith C. Onians, ‘Boys in Street Trades’, Annual Report City Newsboys’ Society, 1914, SLV MS 10034, box 1, p. 15). 36 Onians, Read All About It, p. 44. 37 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 38 Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, p. 595. 39 Ibid., p. 612. 34

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How Many and How Much? How many children were engaged in outdoor occupations and what did they earn? Much outdoor work was for a long time poorly regulated – no-one bothered to count the number of youngsters raking through festering heaps of rubbish at the North Melbourne tip, for example, and many similar ‘black market’ pursuits are not recorded in the Victorian censuses. Parents anxious to avoid a knock on the door from the truant inspector would also have been inclined to under-report the monetary endeavours of school-age children. Nonetheless, a detailed analysis of census material by Ann Larson yields much useful data, and other snippets of information regarding street work can be found throughout contemporary newspapers, in the files of the Town Clerk, and in the sources generated by rescue agencies. From Larson’s patient examination we learn that between 1871 and 1901 the number of boys aged under 20 engaged in the workforce in Melbourne remained fairly steady at between a fifth and a quarter of the total male juvenile population, while girls’ participation rate hovered at around 10 to 15 per cent of the comparable total (following a 6 per cent jump between the 1861 and 1871 censuses).40 Divided by age, Larson found that in 1891, just 107 boys and 80 girls under 10 years old were returned as employed; while 15 per cent of boys aged 10 to 14, and 6 per cent of similarly aged girls were located in the workforce.41 Older brothers and sisters carried most of the workload, then, as one would expect, and the transition to working life occurred for most young Melburnians between the ages of 14 and 15. This trend would strengthen with time as the education system reached more and more children, slowly extending the period of their schooling and limiting the time available for employment. That said, very young children could still be found working until well into the twentieth century, at least within Melbourne’s informal street economy. In 1909, for example, opera star Nellie Melba engaged a Melbourne newspaper to seek out the city’s youngest newsboy and give him a gift. Seven-and-a-half-year-old Jack Murdoch carried off the prize.42 Returning to the census figures, it transpires that domestic labour engaged more girls than any other single industry across the period, although increasing numbers also entered the manufacturing sector. For boys, by contrast, industrial and manufacturing work occupied the overwhelming majority.43 Larson’s 1901 age/occupation tables further reveal that running messages and selling newspapers were jobs dominated by boys under 20, while for girls outdoor work (of an official nature at least), was statistically negligible, though jobs requiring them to commute to and from workplaces in the clothing, tobacco, bootmaking and shop 42 43 40

Larson, p. 106. The remainder are listed as ‘dependents’ or ‘students’. Ibid., p. 109. Noted in SLV MS 10034, box 1602, cuttings book, article dated 16 January 1909. Larson, see the table on p. 111. Also see Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 17–19, 23–5. 41

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assistant sectors were manifold.44 In terms of round figures, anecdotal evidence from contemporary sources suggests that approximately 400 boys and ‘a dozen or so’ girls sold newspapers across the period, that ‘some 700 or 800 young persons’ were estimated to collect marine stores, and that the Victorian public service alone employed 400 males aged under 20 to run messages in 1891.45 Melbourne City Council contracts and Royal Commission findings indicate in addition that no fewer than 46 boys aged between 14 and 18 were employed as ‘street orderlies’ (charged with keeping the main thoroughfares in the city centre free of dust and debris), and that in 1872 ‘about forty boys’ from industrial schools were employed as paid gardeners under the watchful gaze of Ferdinand von Mueller, Director of the Botanic Gardens.46 Gauging shifts in the popularity of different callings across the period is difficult, but it can be said with some certainty that young bootblacks were largely pushed out of the trade by old men,47 that a surge in juvenile flower selling occurred from 1896 (as manifested in extensive newspaper commentary and complaints from florists), that the number of newsvendors remained fairly constant, and that the age of the message boy and street orderly was increasingly threatened by shifts in technology.48 The gender divide, as has been suggested, is more sharply defined – outdoor street work was dominated by boys. Some girls were certainly involved, but they were widely regarded with apprehension, and sometimes in sexualized terms. Illustrating this point, in 1887 Ephraim Zox (MLA for East Melbourne and friend of the Try Society) commented with regard to street trading that ‘There was a wonderful difference between boys and girls. Contaminate a boy and he might

Larson, see pp. 114–15. The 1884 Royal Commission on Education heard estimates that there were 400

44 45

children ‘constantly occupied in this way’, and that at least 150 of this number did not attend school (Papers Presented to Parliament, Session 1884, Vol. 3, Part 1, Q. 3663 and 3666). David Maunders, however (‘Legislating’, p. 97), cites the 1891 estimate of Gordon Institute manager Charles Barber that the number was closer to 200. The estimate of newsgirl numbers comes from an undated article (probably from the Melbourne Herald in 1888–1889) in SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. On marine stores collectors, see footnote 22, above. Messengers figure from Larson, p. 123. 46 On street orderlies see VPRS 3181, Unit 892, Street Cleansing (1901), item 716. Hours of operation were set at 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with special cleansing duties to be performed in addition before 7 a.m. on Sunday mornings. The young gardeners feature in evidence submitted to the 1872 Royal Commission on the Public Service and Working of the Civil Service Act (see Papers Presented to Parliament, Session 1873, Vol. 32, Q. 1226, 11296 and 11715). 47 Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, p. 132. 48 Most notably by the arrival of the telephone (by February 1891 there were already around 1,500 customers – overwhelmingly business addresses – using the Government’s telephone exchange [see Argus, 16 February 1891, pp. 4–5]), improved road surfacing and street cleaning machinery.

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get over it, but when a girl was contaminated the result was much more serious’.49 With the public arena perceived as potentially so detrimental, it was little surprise that city streets were seen as no place for girls to work legitimately. Historian Gareth Stedman Jones has noted that in London the oversupply of juvenile labour was a structural feature of the late-Victorian casual economy, with older citizens denied job opportunities by younger workers commanding lower wages.50 Scattered evidence suggests a similar trend in Melbourne. Rae Frances observes that trained adult workers in the light manufacturing sector were steadily replaced by young unindentured ‘apprentices’ (or ‘improvers’), while Brown-May refers to an 1888 letter from a mature-aged ratepayer complaining bitterly that ‘so many small boys running about selling newspapers … more so now the Factory Act is enforced … is much to the injury of poor old people & cripples who cannot work, and have a very hard struggle to get a living’.51 Young street workers did not have it all their own way, however; as the example cited in the preceding paragraph suggests, boot blacking became largely the preserve of old men by the final years of the century, with city council officials ensuring in this instance that licences be reserved for the elderly or the infirm.52 The rise of the concept of the family wage during the 1890s also began to limit the role of children’s work. With men expected to take home sufficient pay to support a family in respectability, children (and their mothers) performed more work at home – domestic labour that was usually unpaid.53 For their endeavours in the city’s public spaces, Melbourne’s young workers might earn relatively substantial sums, or alternatively pocket very little indeed. Details are imprecise: not until the last decade or so of the nineteenth century – when the child rescue movement was gathering momentum and calls for regulation became increasingly persistent – did contemporary commentators take much interest in the wages of street children. Evidence remains impressionistic, but it is possible to speculate on the range of potential incomes in different outdoor jobs. In an 1899 feature article on Melbourne’s newsboys, for example, a visiting New Zealand journalist observed that: A boy who earns five shillings a week is considered to do fairly well, and there are scores of boys in Melbourne who live on this and no more … One or two 49 See VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 54, p. 507. On Victorian sensibility surrounding young working girls and prostitution see Michèle Mendelssohn, ‘“I’m not a bit expensive”: Henry James and the Sexualization of the Victorian Girl’, in Denisoff, The Nineteenth-Century Child, pp. 81–93. 50 Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971), see pp. 67–73. 51 See Frances, pp. 17–19, 25, 30, and also p. 4 of Brown-May’s notes to the ‘Melbourne Newsboys’ exhibition. 52 Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, p. 132. 53 McCalman, pp. 29–31. My thanks to Frank Bongiorno for sharing his insights on this subject.

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earn from fifteen to eighteen shillings a week, but these are the Rothschilds, the Oxenhams of the profession, and the rank-and-file earn considerably less than half that.54

By contrast, the protagonist of an 1896 short story, ‘Jimmy, A Melbourne Newsboy’, earned 7s 3d one hectic Saturday, while in 1907 ‘an intelligent [news] boy who was asked for an estimate of their average [weekly] earnings put it down at 12/6’, with beginners starting on a lower rate of around 5s.55 Switching professions, adverts placed in the Age by florists in Lygon Street indicate that a wage of 4 or 5s a week was also the going rate for a novice flower seller in 1896.56 Street sweepers or ‘block boys’, on the other hand, earned 2s a day for basic duties in 1901, graduating to 3s if operating a pump cart.57 One had to be at least 14 to be eligible for that wage, however, whereas many street trades including selling papers or hawking flowers were open to any age group. Little is recorded regarding the income potentially on offer for those engaged in more informal types of work, like gathering bottles or singing for tips, although we can surmise that these and similar activities were highly erratic sources of revenue. Such sums, of course, compare unfavourably to contemporary adult wages of the era: according to one observer, even an unskilled male labourer earned 25s a week in the 1880s.58 Factory work wages might also exceed what could be earned in some of the more precarious street callings – in 1895 (one of the few years for which reliable information is available according to age) the weighted average weekly income for 13-year-old factory boys, new to the business, was 6s 54 See ‘Some Australian Types: The Melbourne Newsboy’, Lyttelton Times, 7 January 1899 (article in SLV MS 10034, box 1602, cuttings book). 55 See Try Excelsior News, March 1896, p. 7, and ‘City Newsboys: How they Live’, article dated 7 June 1907 in SLV MS 9910, box 2, cuttings book. It seems that Brisbane newsboys were slightly better paid, earning between 10s and £2 a week according to an 1891 Royal Commission. Figures noted in Bryan Jamison, ‘Making “honest, truthful and industrious men”: Newsboys, Rational Recreation and the Construction of the “Citizen” in Late Victorian and Edwardian Brisbane’, Journal of Popular Culture, 33/1 (1999): 64. 56 VPRS 3181, Unit 863, Streets (1896), item 2189. In 1901 an article in the Argus speculated that the Swanston Street flower boys earned from 5 to 15s a week (see VPRS 3181, Unit 71, By-Laws [1901–1903]). 57 See VPRS 3181, Unit 892, Street Cleansing (1901), item 716, cleansing contracts for Divisions No. 1 and 2. Also refer to Onians, ‘Boys in Street Trades’, pp. 13–14, for a 1913 description of the different street cleansing tasks carried out by the ‘scoop hands’ and ‘broomies’ and a breakdown of their wages. 58 Figure cited in Oswald Barnett, ‘I Remember’, no pagination. Also see Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne, 1978), pp. 190–93, 198–9, 214 for discussion of Melbourne’s wage structure and associated statistics. Women earned less than men – an 1890 report found the majority of a selection of semi-skilled women in the clothing trades taking home under 20s per week (and some much less). See Charles Fox and Marilyn Lake (eds), Australians at Work: Commentaries and Sources (Ringwood, 1990), pp. 114–15.

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3d.59 One needs to bear in mind, however, that these are figures for a full week’s efforts digging a ditch or turning out dozens of pairs of boots in an airless factory; making a living on the streets, on the other hand, was an activity often confined to one part of the day, with no foreman checking output and with the associated chance, however small, of making a killing.60 Street trading activities in this period should also be set against the backdrop of a decline in apprenticeship opportunities and the economic depression in the 1890s, a malaise which foreclosed many alternative avenues for work.61 That said, even in the good times wages were higher sooner outside the apprenticeship system, with no introductory period of low pay to endure while one fulfilled the terms of one’s indentures.62 Pragmatism, it can be concluded, was the abiding principle for many young people entering the world of work: as one parliamentarian recognized in 1891, ‘It had been said that at the age of thirteen or fourteen boys ought to be following some other occupation, but it was simply a question of profit. A boy of fourteen could often make more profit by running an evening newspaper than in any other way’.63 Despite the relatively modest amounts on offer to most young workers, street traders included, general sentiment of the day held that earnings had become too high and that this somehow threatened the social fabric.64 When a family acquaintance promised to tell the father of one young lad about his son’s smoking habit, the boy in question is said to have retorted ‘I don’t care a d--- if you do, I can earn more wages than he can’, a boast which doubtless alarmed those sitting

Larson, p. 126. Fourteen-year-old boys earned the same amount, while those aged 15 took home an extra 8d per week. Figures calculated by Larson from Chief Inspector of Factories’ Report. 60 Flower sellers and bootblacks depended upon the morning and late afternoon surges of office workers, for instance, while city newsboys usually only began their day after the Herald or Standard – both evening papers – appeared. Larson argues that the part-time nature of much juvenile work, theoretically conforming to schooling requirements, is one reason why the general public was not unduly troubled by the phenomenon in this period (Larson, pp. 117–19). 61 On this see Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, pp. 56–61, and Larson, pp. 127–36. 62 Larson, pp. 131–2. 63 J.M. Pratt quoted in VPD, Session 1891, Vol. 68, p. 2,925. Further, a deputation calling for the regulation of juvenile trading claimed that newsboys stated ‘they can earn as much in two days at the papers as they can in a week at a trade’ (Standard, 19 February 1891 – clipping from SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book). 64 See for example: evidence presented by Joseph d’Rew (manager of a boot factory) before 1874 Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Crimes and Offences Prevention Bill (Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Session 1874, Q. 420); associated parliamentary debate (VPD, Session 1874, Vol. 20, p. 1,976; VPD, Session 1871, Vol. 12, p. 131); Argus, 11 March 1875, p. 6; opinion of William Forster, quoted in Melbourne Herald, 26 May 1898 (SLV MS 9910, box 41, newspaper cuttings book). 59

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on the Employés in Shops Commission in the mid-1880s.65 This state of affairs would certainly have been an exception to the norm if true, yet it was commonly assumed in this period that the balance of incomes between fathers and sons was out of kilter, a concern which fed discussion on youthful spending habits (as we shall see later) and debates on the causes of ‘larrikinism’ (outlined in the following chapter). A special unease also surrounded the earning and spending capacities of young female workers, due largely to the association of the street with the sale of sexual favours. In 1878, witnesses speculated before a Select Committee on contagious diseases that young ‘flash girls’, motivated by ‘the love of dress’, were supplementing their income from factory labour by hawking their virtue.66 Such causality is hard to substantiate, but does nevertheless indicate a deep concern about the presence of young women on dimly lit streets and an incipient fear regarding working-class consumption and morality. Although there certainly were some young girls working as prostitutes in Melbourne during this period,67 accusations of illicit activity can often be exposed as fabrication. In 1896, for example, investigating police could find no evidence to support a claim that Melbourne’s flower girls were acting as ‘decoys’ for brothels, yet constables were able to trace the assertion as arising from a struggling Swanston Street florist.68 Claiming sexual impropriety, it seems, was but another tactic for adult business owners in attempting to secure competitive advantage. Socially slighted and small in number, Melbourne’s flower girls occupied only an anxious corner of Melbourne’s popular imagination. Embodying a different set of concerns and exhibiting a more organized level of resilience, it was a fellow street trader who instead became the focus for discussion about youthful acquisition. Metonym and Metronome: The Melbourne Newsboy Within the world of outdoor street work, sketched in broad brushstrokes above, one young street trader came to acquire a prominence in the public consciousness. He was the subject of short stories and extensive newspaper coverage, took cameo roles in paintings and plays, and received assistance from a rescue society created 1885 comment, referenced in Noel McLachlan, ‘Larrikinism: An Interpretation’ (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1950), p. 102. 66 See ‘Report from the Select Committee Upon A Bill for the Prevention of Contagious Diseases’, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, Session 1878, Vol. 1, Q. 444 (evidence of police sergeant Dalton), Q. 1199 (Sub-Inspector of Police, Henry Pewtress), Q. 1360–61 (Dr F.T.W. Ford), Q. 1434–7 (police magistrate E.P.S. Sturt). 67 Ibid., see Q. 1031 (evidence of Alfred Winch, Superintendent of Police), Q. 1183 (Pewtress), and also Chris McConville, ‘The Location of Melbourne’s Prostitutes, 1870– 1920’, Historical Studies, 19/74 (1980): 86–97 (particularly pp. 92, 96). 68 For the police report on the matter, see VPRS 3181, Unit 863, Streets (1896), item 2398. 65

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for his benefit. Through the real and imagined figure of the Melbourne newsboy, city fathers channelled their hopes and fears regarding child labour. Metonym for all young street workers, he was also portrayed as a metronome of city life: Amidst the throng of the city streets there is no one so well known, and yet so little known, as the newsboy. He is part of the mechanism of everyday existence, a little, barefooted figure which automatically appears on the scene, and, having discharged his small service to the community, silently disappears. His face becomes more familiar than that of a policeman on the beat …69

‘So well known, and yet so little known’: while history records the newsboy’s presence at train stations like Flinders Street and at busy city intersections, it is likely that few adults who sought from him their daily digest of information stopped to extend the relationship beyond the most fleeting of transactions.70 Time has moved on, too, and the rumble of homeward-bound city traffic has erased from common memory the shrill cries of newsboys who once hurled the day’s headlines into the evening air. Nevertheless, by re-reading the very newspapers formerly distributed by newsboys and by sifting through associated discourse, one can understand the forgotten place of the Melbourne newsboy within the city, learn how he came to acquire symbolic value (and see how this in turn affected his fellow street traders), and reveal how newsboys themselves moved within and manipulated the popular conceptions which folded around them. And in so doing it becomes possible to know the newsboy a little better, and narrow the distance between cultural construction and working-class lived experience. Look back at nineteenth-century depictions of Melbourne street scenes and the newsboy is often figured, dashing across the roadway, paper in outstretched hand as in Henry Burn’s Swanston Street from the Bridge (1861), or sprinting down Collins Street as S.T. Gill portrays him in Doing the Block (1880, see Figure 3.2). He made his appearance on the stage, too – in the popular melodrama Marvellous Melbourne (1889), Will the newsboy is one of the first characters we meet, bellowing out the particulars of a ‘speshul harticle’ in the day’s ‘Evenin’ ’Erald’

69 ‘City Newsboys: How they Live’, article dated 7 June 1907 in SLV MS 9910, box 2, cuttings book. The comparison is also drawn in the Melbourne Herald, 24 August 1904, p. 4: ‘the boys, although as well known to everyone as the town clock, never cease to be interesting’. Also see the aforementioned Lyttelton Times article (7 January 1899): ‘In Melbourne his special arena is between Burke (sic) and Collins Streets, and it is there that he fights out the battle of existence … He is in his small way the protagonist of the whole drama, the sprite of the whole stormy scene’ (my emphasis). 70 Note for example the observation about a ‘swarm’ of youths selling papers and race cards on the platforms at Flinders Street and Spencer Street train stations (see VPRS 3181, Unit 899, Street Standings [1893–1894], item 2807: letter from Traffic Manager’s Indoor Assistant, Victorian Railways).

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S.T. Gill, Doing the Block (1880) (pencil and Chinese white on buff paper, 24.6 x 34.0 cm). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria. Inscription on reverse reads ‘Melbourne July 10th /80 Time 3.30 P.M.’

and presenting himself throughout as honest, dependable and hard to trick.71 For intended dramatic impact, however, Will’s endeavours are surpassed by a pivotal scene in Edward Maitland’s alarmist 1888 novella, The Battle of Mordialloc. Just as a massive crowd is settling down to watch the running of the Melbourne Cup, ‘shrill voices of newsboys’ disturb the scene and broadcast terrible news: ‘“ARGUS”, SPECIAL EDITION – large fleet bearing down on the coast of Australia!’72 Although not even the most mischievous newsboy attempting to drum up custom would have dared broadcast such a fictitious headline, as a matter of routine it was he whose job it was to first voice the day’s events in this ‘the land of newspapers’.73 This function had added importance in a colonial society such as Australia, because it was the newsboy who ultimately delivered news received by cable or steamship from those British cities many continued to regard as ‘Home’. 71 Alfred Dampier and T. Somers, Marvellous Melbourne: A Drama in Five Acts (self published, c. 1889), see especially pp. 2–6. 72 Edward Maitland, The Battle of Mordialloc or How We Lost Australia (Melbourne, 1888), p. 32. 73 Opinion of the visiting Richard Twopeny, p. 221.

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There the young chimney sweep was firmly established as the stereotypical child labourer, looming large in cultural constructions of working children, especially in London.74 In Melbourne the newsboy occupied this symbolic position, and hence the patter of scurrying feet and the rustle of newspapers accompanied most characterizations of juvenile employment, at least where street work was concerned. In tandem with his role as cultural conduit, the newsboy was at the same time presented as ‘the brash voice of the native-born’, the precocious manifestation of ‘young Australia’.75 Depending upon his popular reception, he could confirm or refute predictions concerning the future of the race. His advocates (generally in the majority) further claimed that he possessed special qualities lacking in other street traders, even down to the level of physiognomy: [The newsboys] are quite a distinct and superior class to the average boys of the streets. Hard workers, as need scarcely be said, their toil leaves its mark upon them. Looked at in the mass, two or three distinct types could easily be separated. There are the Napoleonic paper sellers, boys with strong jaws, and thoughtful, resourceful faces; the hard-headed, round-faced, snub-nosed boys, who never know when they are beaten; and the curly-haired, foreign-looking boys, who surmount their troubles by sheer gaiety of heart.76

Edith Onians, the long-serving Secretary of Melbourne’s Newsboys’ Society, concurred – ‘These boys’, she stated, ‘have a grip of life that the more sheltered boy never has’.77 In the fictionalized accounts where newsboys take the main parts, they are invariably presented as model citizens, supporting their widowed mothers or else eking out a living independent from their dissolute parents.78 Jimmy, the protagonist of an 1896 short story, is described as ‘the neatest and most civil of all the Melbourne Herald boys’, ‘a real man’ who as the sole breadwinner following the death of his father ‘had kept the house going, and paid all debts by his own untiring efforts’. Keen to sell his last paper and return home to his worry-worn See Heather Shore, ‘Chimney Sweep – Cultural Icon’, in Hindman, pp. 567–8. A point made by Brown-May in his notes to ‘Melbourne’s Newsboys’, and

74 75

illustrated with a number of cartoons including ‘Wise in his Generation’, Melbourne Punch, 14 May 1874, and ‘Had’, Melbourne Punch, 28 March 1872. 76 Melbourne Herald, 24 August 1904, p. 4. 77 Onians, ‘Boys in Street Trades’, p. 20. Also see Age, 22 July 1898, p. 3: ‘The news boy, from the nature of his calling, is the most alert and the most active of his class’. 78 See for instance: Justin Shelley, ‘Jimmy, A Melbourne Newsboy’, Try Excelsior News (March 1896), pp. 7–8; C.T and J.B., ‘A Story of a Newsboy’, Try Excelsior News (November 1896), p. 14; Anon, ‘A Melbourne Boy: How Charlie Spent his Christmas’, Try Excelsior News (January 1897), pp. 7–8; W.W., ‘Little Zad, The Newsboy’, story dated 24 December 1879, probably from the Melbourne Herald, found in SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book, no pagination.

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mother with his afternoon’s takings, Jimmy is knocked down and killed by a Windsor-bound tram, thereby acquiring heroic status.79 ‘Who dare affirm’, the storyteller concludes by asking, ‘that in the realms of joy this brave little spirit is not equal to a bishop or a king?’80 ‘Little Zad’, by contrast, overcomes his shyness and learns self-esteem after he starts to sell papers and attend school classes. His fate is little better than Jimmy’s – killed in this instance trying to stop a robber – but his salutary effect on his larrikin acquaintance, ‘Shuffles’, is seen to endure beyond his early demise.81 Underlying these narratives of selflessness and self-improvement is a message that outside and early intervention is necessary to protect the doughty newsboy from the dangers of city life. Weighed down too soon by shouldering the burden of adult responsibilities, the newsboys in these tales seldom reach happy retirement. This is most clearly perceived in the case of Charlie, ‘a bright, winning, energetic little chap’ who falls into bad company, gives up selling papers, discovers alcohol and is encountered one Christmas just out of prison and ‘a wreck in self-respect, hope and energy’.82 Given the provenance of several newsboy narratives, this moral point is scarcely surprising. What is interesting, however, is the twin portrayal of the newsboy as valiant yet vulnerable, an inherently good character undone in the end by his environment. We shall return in due course to the implications of this representation for the newsboy’s fellow street peddlers. It seems that newsboys were aware of the fictions attached to their trade and actively moved within them to manipulate adult sympathies. Twelve-yearold ‘Curley’, for instance, borrowed a uniform from the naval brigade of the Newsboys’ Club with the stated purpose of posing in it for a photograph. He then kept hold of the item for several weeks, clearly realizing its commercial value for eliciting tips.83 His contemporary, ‘Soldier’ Rogers, also mastered the arts of manipulation, supplementing his income by singing ‘a few pathetic numbers for special occasions, such as – for cold, wet days – “Down Fell the Snow”’.84 Tugging on the heart strings of sentimental adults was one way to try and increase earnings; 79 Shelley, ‘Jimmy, A Melbourne Newsboy’, p. 7. The death of child protagonists, disconcerting for present-day readers, was a common narrative trope in nineteenth-century literature, often featuring for instance in tales of Australian children lost in the bush. See Henry Kingsley, The Lost Child (London & New York, 1871) and Marcus Clarke’s ‘Pretty Dick’, published in his posthumous Australian Tales (Melbourne, 1896), pp. 9–19, for examples. 80 Shelley, ‘Jimmy, A Melbourne Newsboy’, p. 8. 81 W.W., ‘Little Zad, The Newsboy’, no pagination. 82 Anon, ‘A Melbourne Boy: How Charlie Spent his Christmas’, p. 7. 83 See Onians, Read All About It, pp. 52–3. ‘He earned a lot of money’, Onians notes, ‘but he went without hat or boots, often as not without coat or even shirt’ (p. 52). 84 Ibid., p. 29. Also see p. 56 for a further example of this tactic. In ‘A Melbourne Boy’, Charlie employs yet another rouse – ‘Having had the misfortune to break his arm, he soon noticed that people when buying a Herald pitied him and gave him more money, so it was a long time after the arm was well that he took off the bandages’ (p. 7).

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another was to follow their advice and offer evidence of improved personal habits. During a debate on potential licencing in 1891, former Victorian Premier James Service remarked that ‘he had sometimes told boys offering him newspapers that he would not buy from them if they had dirty hands’. To his amazement, ‘On returning from England once, after two years’ absence, a boy came up to him and said – “Herald, sir; you see my hands are clean”’.85 Disposing of one’s papers in a competitive street environment was no easy task, requiring vendors to attract attention by performing for customers.86 Who could blame newsboys for trying to evoke pity to gain an extra sale or for conforming to adult wishes? Although willing to portray themselves as vulnerable, newsboys were unwilling to be victimized. Throughout this period both the Standard and the Herald sold in Melbourne for a penny (1d). So when in 1891 the newspaper proprietors raised the wholesale price to newsboys from 8d to 9d per dozen (hence reducing the potential profits from sales to the general public by a quarter), the city’s newsboys expressed outrage and determined to strike. A rival publication, the Argus, delighted in reporting the full particulars: The first note of dissension was the yelling of the strikers as they chased an urchin, who had become possessed of half-a-dozen papers, through the streets, and these hunts were kept up with spirit during yesterday afternoon … A few men, who were disposed to regard the matter as ‘a boy’s lark,’ bought papers and commenced to sell … They were followed along the street by a number of young urchins, who, on the first opportunity, pulled the papers from under their arms and tore them across, afterwards offering the fragments for sale in a satirical spirit … As a result of the strike very few papers were sold in the street, though here and there a runner carried on his business utterly ignorant of the fact that the executive committee of the whole had called him out … In front of one of the newspaper offices half-a-dozen police were required to keep order … The ordinary work of the newsboys has admirably fitted them for the business of a strike demonstration, and the din created would not have discredited the largest of the unions.87

While the Herald advised its readers on ‘How to Get your Evening Paper’ (a headline somewhat perversely carried inside the paper itself), five of the strikers

VPD, Session 1891, Vol. 68, p. 2926. Sometimes this pressure led newsboys to resort to underhand tricks, selling old

85 86

papers on the pretext that they were the latest news or making up headlines to draw customers. Instances of the latter – known as ‘false cries’ – are discussed in Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, p. 84, and in his exhibition notes for ‘Melbourne’s Newsboys’, pp. 2, 4. Prison governor John Buckley Castieau fell victim to another rouse in 1872, lamenting in his dairy that he had been sold a damaged Herald in Bourke Street by a lad who also short-changed him. See Mark Finnane, ‘Castieau Diaries: Finnane typescript’ (1855–1884), entry dated 25 January 1872. I am grateful for access to this source. 87 Argus, 10 March 1891, p. 8.

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were waiting to appear in court.88 Two of them were charged with assaulting an elderly man selling papers in Bourke Street, and three others for leading a march of around 50 boys down Swanston Street, at the head of which they carried a banner bearing the slogan ‘Newsboys’ Rights’.89 John Harris and Pierce Moore were fined 10s each for the first offence, whilst George Davis, Frank Bowie and Arthur Humphreys were discharged after William Forster from the Try Society spoke in their defence.90 The strike subsequently petered out, its goals unrealized. Despite a deputation to the publishers, an eloquent letter of appeal, and Forster’s role as intermediary between the parties, the price remained at 9d per dozen.91 Though some younger newsboys wished to continue the strike, in the end a majority – described as ‘unanimous’ by the Herald – determined that they had little choice but to return to work.92 Although defeated, the newsboys had taken a stand, maintaining a high level of solidarity from start to finish.93 Evidence that newsboys regarded themselves as a collective or perhaps even a fraternity can also be gained from accounts of newsboy funerals. Compared with the American context, reports of newsboy burials are rare finds in Melbourne, but the source material that does exist provides tantalizing insights into newsboys’ image of themselves.94 As in America (where in some cities the newsboy acquired even greater iconic status), it is normally in the evening newspapers that one comes across funeral narratives.95 These papers relied heavily on newsboys for distribution, and hence laid greater store on reporting the activities of their employees. In February 1888, for instance, the Herald noted in brief a procession of 60 newsboys walking ‘two by two’ through Rathdowne Street towards Melbourne General Cemetery for the laying to rest of young William Harding.96 The paper devoted more extensive coverage some years later to the life and burial of ‘Soldier’ Rogers, the same individual encountered earlier in this chapter singing sad songs for tips. After a life on the streets, selling papers, singing on the wharves 90 91

Herald, 10 March 1891, p. 2. See Herald, 11 March 1891, p. 2; Argus, 12 March 1891, p. 5. Herald, 11 March 1891, p. 2. Reported in the Standard, 12 March 1891 – clipping found in SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. 92 Herald, 12 March 1891, p. 2. 93 This, moreover, was not the only occasion on which the Melbourne newsboys went on strike: David Maunders notes that similar action was taken in 1912 (see Maunders, ‘Legislating’, p. 98). For a thorough assessment of similar, if slightly later, strikes in America, see Nasaw, pp. 167–86. 94 For an excellent analysis of newsboys’ funerals in America, see Vincent DiGirolamo, ‘Newsboy Funerals: Tales of Sorrow and Solidarity in Urban America’, Journal of Social History, 36/1 (2002): 5–30. 95 See Whisnant, pp. 269–71, for references to a statue erected in honour of newsboys in Barrington, Massachusetts, and President Dwight Eisenhower’s statement that ‘newsboys … symbolize so many cherished American ideals’. 96 Clipping dated 24 February 1888 in SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. 88 89

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and in pubs, ‘Soldier’ had turned to prize-fighting for a living and had been killed, aged 24, from injuries sustained during a bout. ‘Five hundred boys’, the Herald reported, ‘marched bareheaded before the hearse to the cemetery, and tried not to sob as the first clods of earth thumped on the coffin of their hero.’97 Respects were paid in financial terms, too – many newsboys spending ‘all their earnings’ on flowers for the grave and raising the substantial sum of £25 to help support the deceased’s wife and baby girl.98 The historian of newsboy funerals in America cites an exchange in 1890 between newsboys in Boston and a florist regarding a wreath for a fallen workmate. Speaking of their pal, ‘Skinney’, the boys are reported to have stated that ‘He b’longs to us fellers as much’s anybody’ – a moving disclosure of kinship and an indication, it is argued, of ‘how poor children felt in class ways.’99 As a similarly close-knit community, it seems that Melbourne’s newsboys were also laid to rest as members of a trade and regarded themselves as possessing class interests worth defending, interests proclaimed most obviously by the banner they carried down Swanston Street in 1891. Whether looking out for one another on street corners, deciding to withdraw their labour or clubbing together to bury their dead, Melbourne’s newsboys did not merely regard themselves as dependent children. They may have led lives peddling other people’s news, but they were also prepared to make their own headlines. The Little Merchant? Street Work and its Regulation The elevation of newsboys within the public consciousness, premised in part on their vital role within the information economy and bolstered by their streetwise tactics and sense of companionship, accounts in large measure for the piecemeal response of legislators in this period to the whole area of young people’s street work. To most MPs a big difference existed between young street traders (represented by the noble newsboy) and similarly-aged collectors of marine stores. As discussed earlier, concern for private property moved Parliament to regulate the latter enterprise, and even those critical of the legislation did not argue that raking through the detritus of the city benefited children. Newsboys, by contrast, were often described as learning valuable lessons from their commercial activities. Speaking as Victorian Premier in 1898, George Turner described the newsboy as ‘a hard-working, keen-eyed, energetic little chap, who believed in fair dealing’.100 Turner was responding to allegations that selling newspapers bred criminal tendencies, and the Herald, anxious to defend the status quo, offered fulsome support. Its editor portrayed the newsboy in turn as ‘a keen Herald, 16 September 1910, p. 8. Ibid. Onians also discusses the funeral in Read All About It, p. 32. 99 DiGirolamo, see pp. 5, 25. 100 Undated clipping from Melbourne Herald (see SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings 97 98

book).

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little salesman who often rises by sheer force of enterprise to better things’.101 Seen in this light, young street traders were getting ahead in life. ‘By investing a penny in a paper you not only have half-an-hour’s intellectual enjoyment, but you do good’, promised John Freeman in similar fashion; ‘You encourage a habit of industry and a desire to do well … [and] thereby beget a spirit of self-reliance in those poor waifs of humanity that may cling to them all through their lives’.102 With no refunds available for unsold copies, newsboys did indeed require a degree of ‘self-reliance’ or business acumen to gauge potential sales for particular editions and hence decide how many dozen copies to buy from suppliers. Then they had to compete with one another to actually sell them. We cannot know what proportion of newsboys were able to climb the ladder of prosperity that the Herald’s editor claimed was placed before them, or how working on the streets contributed to any success stories.103 Scattered evidence suggests some newsboys did well: Dan Barry, for instance, became an actor and stage manager after earlier selling evening newspapers in Bourke Street; by 1921, Harold Watson had worked his way up to the position of cinema proprietor.104 Evidence is hardly conclusive, however, and the Newsboys’ Society tended to emphasize cases portraying its guiding influence in a positive light. But we can speculate that many adults who purchased papers from newsboys probably believed (or told themselves) that the young street traders were fulfilling useful if rough and ready apprenticeships. The pervasive myth of ‘the little merchant’, identified by David Whisnant as delaying for decades the introduction of regulations to reorganize newsboys’ working practices in America, operated to a similar end in Melbourne.105 It was an entirely convenient mindset: if the middle classes believed that selling in the streets was a good thing for young people, any nagging doubts about the acceptability of other people’s children doing what one would not wish for one’s own offspring

Herald, 26 May 1898 (SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book). Freeman, p. 157. 103 In the English context, Stedman Jones is sceptical about the possibilities of casual 101

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juvenile workers finding financially rewarding adult work, arguing that their chances were ‘slight’. The army, he states, served as a destination of last resort for the unskilled boy aged between 18 and 20 (Stedman Jones, pp. 70–71, 77–8, 96–7). On the difficulty of tracing young street workers through the archives, see the memorable account in Steedman, pp. 171–4. 104 See Melbourne Bulletin, 3 April 1885, pp. 1, 3 (where Barry is described as ‘a fair specimen of the energy and self-reliance which characterise all Australians’); Argus, 15 December 1921, p. 8. Other former newsboys are noted as finding careers as a dentist and a foreman, with further individuals joining the army (Argus, 6 November 1921, p. 9; Argus, 13 September 1916, p. 5). Two parliamentarians debating the Street Trading Bill in 1925 also stated that they were former newsboys (see VPD, Session 1925, Vol. 170, pp. 2,243 and 2,323). 105 See Whisnant, pp. 292–7.

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could be dispelled.106 The myth was even flexible enough to incorporate apparent indiscretions by these budding entrepreneurs, with the reported propensity of Melbourne’s newsboys to engage in boisterous games like pitch and toss and twoup explainable, for example, as preparation for the ‘free play’ of the market.107 Child savers viewed matters slightly differently. They were quite happy to accept, indeed further, the romantic perception of newsboy life, but demanded that strict parameters be set around it and that girls be totally excluded from street trading. For years the child savers appealed for licensing, sometimes in an uneasy coalition with adult shopkeepers who felt undermined by young people’s selling power. At two critical junctures, in 1887 and again in the lead-up to the 1925 Street Trading Act, the government of the day called upon the expertise of William Forster and Edith Onians to help frame the legislation.108 Slowly the advocates of control gained the upper hand, but not without a protracted struggle. Heated dispute frequently accompanied parliamentary consideration of proposed regulations, with many MPs staunchly against moves perceived as restricting the capacities of ‘respectable poor families’ to augment their income by sending their children out to work.109 Left-leaning David Gaunson (his outlook signified by ties to working-class icon John Wren and in his legal defence of bushranger Ned Kelly) described Government proposals in 1888 as ‘draconian’, for example, while colleague William McLellan stated that it was ‘monstrous and inhuman’ to interfere with the status quo, and that in any case street trading was good exercise and made children ‘sharp as needles’.110 A point made by Karen Sánchez-Eppler in her section on ‘Newsboy Narratives’ in Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago, 2005), pp. 151–85. 107 See, for example VPRS 3181, Unit 861, Streets (1894), item 1202, and an 1881 police report (VPRS 937, Unit 304, bundle 2, report dated 1 August 1881) concerning the behaviour of newsboys in Collins Street – ‘Unless arrangements are made to have a constable in attendance daily, Sundays excepted from 2 to 4 PM the boys will continue to offend as about 100 of them go there for the Herald and play all sorts of pranks before the Herald is issued’. Also see Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, p. 185. 108 In 1887, Forster suggested that children under 10 should be prohibited from pursuing casual employment in the streets from 8 p.m. in summer and 7 p.m. in winter. ‘It is after 8 o’clock that the scenes occur witnessing which taints and corrupts the child’s mind’, he argued. He also stated that some young street traders needed up to an hour to return to their suburban homes, an indication that they were travelling considerable distances (see SLV MS 9910 box 41, cuttings book, article dated 27 July 1887, and also VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 54, pp. 506–7). For evidence of the involvement of Onians in framing the Street Trading Bill, see VPD, Session 1925, Vol. 169, pp. 2,233 and 2,332. 109 Quotation from VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 54, p. 504 (opinion of William McLellan). 110 VPD, Session 1888, Vol. 57, pp. 495–500; VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 54, pp. 504–5. Gaunson’s background is detailed in Thomson and Serle, p. 73. Some prominent public servants also expressed their sympathy with the cause of young workers. In 1900 Melbourne’s Mayor, Sir Malcolm McEacharn, stated that prohibiting trading licences for children under school age ‘might inflict a hardship on widows and others who might have to depend on their children’ (Age, 12 October 1900, p. 7). 106

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Such class antipathy would only strengthen with time. When the Street Trading Bill was up for discussion in 1925, Labor members invoked Melbourne’s socioeconomic divide by noting that the families likely to be affected ‘do not belong to Toorak, or to any of the constituencies represented by honourable members on the other (the Ministerial) side of the House’ but instead ‘come from the big centres of population which we on this (the Opposition) side of the House represent’.111 Proponents of legislation, meanwhile, championed the cause of ‘respectable householders’ against the alleged wrongdoings of marine-store children and believed that in restricting street trading more generally they had young people’s future interests at heart.112 Occupying a political middle ground, Liberals like Alfred Deakin appealed to the notion of the greater good, stating in 1887 that strong measures ‘would probably have the effect of depriving some families’, but that it was better ‘to save those poor children while they still could be saved’.113 Slowly, despite the dissenting voices, the regulatory system tightened, with minimum educational targets and trading hours set, age barriers established and girls virtually outlawed from selling.114 So it was, then, that the child savers effected the slow substitution of one identity – the child as newsboy, flower girl or crossing sweeper – for another more circumscribed: the child as a dependent child. Young street traders and their families resisted the change. Not only did restrictions upon their earning capacity affect their household economies, but the gradual turning of the screws also brought with it diminished potential for autonomy. And in a cruel twist, the restrictions placed upon young people’s abilities to gain an income on the city streets occurred just as new leisure spaces and forms of commercial amusement opened up with them in mind. Gradually losing the legitimacy for so long acquired through street trading, Melbourne’s young people were forced to carve out a new niche in the city, this time as consumers. VPD, Session 1925, Vol. 170, p. 2,446 (comment by John Lemmon, MLA for Williamstown and committed Labor activist). Opposition colleague Robert Henry Solly (MLA for Carlton) also referred to Toorak in expressing his grievances (ibid., see p. 2,327). 112 See for instance the comments of James Service (MLC for Melbourne Province), VPD, Session 1888, Vol. 59, p. 2,543. In 1910 the Charity Review expressed still wider concerns, stating that ‘The participation of young boys and girls in street-trading is neither in their own interests nor in that of the nation’ (cited in Scott and Swain, p. 46). 113 VPD, Session 1887, Vol. 54, p. 506. Ephraim Zox stated similarly in 1887 that ‘No one liked to see children in the streets at night selling matches, flowers, or newspapers, but at the same time a considerable number of those engaged in that occupation had parents whose livelihood depended upon the assistance they could give’ (ibid.). 114 See the relevant sections of legislation in 1876, 1888 and 1890 pertaining to marine stores trading, The Neglected Children’s Act 1887 (s. 18 and 78), The Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act 1890, the Local Government Act 1915 (discussed by BrownMay in Melbourne Street Life, pp. 155–6), and the Street Trading Act 1925. Also note the implementation of an 1899 council by-law banning ‘violent outcry’ – the young street vendor’s most efficient way of advertising his or her wares (Brown-May, ibid., p. 84). Further attempts were made to regulate young people’s street employment in 1874, 1891, 1900 and 1922–1923, but the Bills either failed or the relevant clauses were struck out. 111

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‘Temptations’ At leisure and in search of distraction in turn-of-the-century Melbourne, all roads led to Bourke Street: the city’s ‘leading thoroughfare’ and foremost entertainment quarter.115 Starting out at the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth streets and walking from west to east, Bourke Street presented the prospective consumer with a myriad ways to spend a shilling. Countless volumes could be bought, and confectionary selected, at Cole’s Book Arcade, reputedly the biggest bookshop in the world and also home to an eclectic mix of exotic animals and side attractions.116 A swathe of pubs including the Orient, Unicorn and Royal Mail catered to the thirsty punter, and as the street numbers counted down, bowling alleys, billiard rooms and dancing halls like Jennie Donigan’s jostled for patronage. Visual delights were offered at a waxworks and at the cyclorama, where spectators could experience the sensation of stepping inside panoramic murals of battle scenes or alternatively watch boxing contests. Those with strong stomachs could dine at oyster saloons or perhaps Mrs Torpey’s fourpence restaurant before trying ‘the haunted swing’, a nauseating ride which toyed with perspective and one’s sense of balance. For fans of melodrama, minstrelsy or vaudeville, Bourke Street was also the place to be – Melbourne’s first theatre had been built here, and famous venues like the Tivoli, Palace and Theatre Royal welcomed the masses. And all this before entering the Eastern (or ‘Paddy’s’) Market, a cornucopia of sounds, sights and smells occupying a prime position near the intersection of Bourke and Stephen (later Exhibition) streets. By daylight or lambent gaslight, the Bourke Street corridor hummed with activity. In 1874 one observer reported seeing ‘hundreds’ of young people here on Saturday nights, and throughout the period the street grew in popularity as new attractions opened and fresh faces appeared.117 Not everyone in the city perceived the street as the gateway to innocent amusement, however. Melbourne’s child savers shared the concerns of Jane Addams that Bourke Street and its ilk did not cultivate ‘the higher imagination’ but instead served to lead city youth astray. Figure 3.3 illustrates these anxieties concisely in visual terms. Here we see a boy of school age (identified by his books 115 See the entry on ‘Bourke Street’ in Brown-May and Swain, The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, pp. 82–3 for an overview of its history. The following description relies heavily on the recollections of Charlie Fredricksen, born in 1872 and working in and around the Bourke Street entertainment quarter from age 12 (when he began as a street musician in a band outside the Lyceum Theatre). See Frank van Straten (ed.), Bourke Street on a Saturday Night: The Memories of Charlie Fredricksen – ‘The Man Outside Hoyt’s’ (Melbourne, 1983). 116 See Cole Turnley, Cole of the Book Arcade: A Biography of E.W. Cole (Melbourne, 1974). 117 Statement by Superintendent Winch before the 1874 Select Committee on the Crimes and Offences Prevention Bill, Q. 218. Highlighting the link between earning and outlay, an 1887 observation noted ‘scores’ of young traders sharing this street space (see Scott and Swain, pp. 21–2).

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113

‘Temptations’, Australian Boys’ Paper, 1 January 1902, p. 117. Courtesy State Library of Victoria

and short trousers) falling prey to the persuasions of adult spruikers who whisper in his ear, beckon and point – all in an attempt to lure the ‘victim’ towards their premises or persuade him to buy undesirable items. Many potential moral pitfalls are referenced: alcohol by the sign for the billiard saloon; law-breaking by the advert for the magazine; smoking by the pipe and cigarettes; sex by the promise of a ‘racy photograph’ and the sample picture offered by the man in the pinstripe jacket. The cartoon is especially effective in that the boy appears both physically and morally poised at the moment of indecision – should he walk on, or instead follow these adults’ suggestions? With a pocket full of loose change and time to spare, the choice is his. Published in the Try Society’s Australian Boys’ Paper for

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the benefit of its readers, the cartoon shows the multiple pathways to moral ruin which it believed lay open to young consumers treading city streets. It speaks also of the period of supposed ‘storm and stress’ between the ages of 13 and 16 when in the words of Edith Onians young people ‘are placed in the way of great and varied temptations while the will is weak and the mind unformed’.118 Catering to the Youthful Shilling Providing alternative ‘safe’ environments for young people to seek amusement away from street-based temptations was part of the rationale for establishing rescue organizations like the Try Society and Gordon Institute. Striking a successful balance took time, though. Before the foundation from the 1880s onwards of the better-known and longer-lived associations, an earlier attempt to create such a setting in suburban Prahran highlighted the shortcomings of trying to dictate too rigorously the moral atmosphere which potential patrons would imbibe. In 1879 a number of individuals associated with the Prahran Gospel Tent opened a ‘youths’ coffee house’ on Commercial Road near the junction with Chapel Street. The organizers supplied reading material, equipment for the playing of draughts, chess and dominoes and also served a variety of refreshments including coffee or cocoa (at 2d a cup), glasses of raspberry vinegar (1d each) and slices of bread and butter (‘two slices for 2d’).119 All in all a worthy endeavour, it would seem, and one which it was hoped ‘would prove of service in attracting many of the youths whose principal evening occupations hitherto had been lounging at street corners and annoying wayfarers as they passed by’.120 Sounding a note of caution, however, a visitor reviewing the facility for the Argus noted that the viability of the coffee house was being undermined by ‘the enthusiasm of some of the lady members … in introducing too obtrusively the religious element’.121 The walls of the establishment, he observed, were covered with Scriptural texts, and sermons or hymn singing interrupted the board games. Responding to the criticism, one of the benefactors argued that when he played secular pieces for patrons on his harmonium, ‘their own demand every night is “Please, play for us some of the hymns”’, a version of events challenged subsequently by correspondence noting that singers had been pelted with draughts and dominoes or else mocked with wild gesticulation and ‘irrelevant choruses’.122 Clearly the youthful patrons appreciated the provision of a leisure space – in its first weeks ‘the evening average [was] over Quotation taken from a paper delivered in 1915 by Onians, found in SLV MS 10034 box 1589, folder (c). 119 Argus, 28 April 1879, p. 6. The coffee house was open daily between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 See the letter by Robert Inglis, Argus, 29 April 1879, p. 6, and the replies in Argus: 30 April 1879, p. 6; Argus, 1 May 1879, p. 6. 118

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40’ – but were not prepared to tolerate overt moralism.123 They were, in short, discerning customers. In establishing his later Try Societies buildings in Hawksburn and the city centre, William Forster appreciated the failings of the coffee house experiment. In a speech delivered at the opening of the Hawksburn hall in 1887, Forster stated his belief that ‘amusement of some kind is as essential to youth as food’, a point not lost on a visitor to the scheme who noted that the classes conducted there ‘are not larrikinism eradicated; they are rather larrikinism organised, cleaned up, and made presentable in better company … [Forster] does not try to take the larrikin from his regular amusements and pursuits, but rather to take those pursuits from their evil associations, the street corner and the drink shop’.124 Members had only to pay nominal entrance fees and Forster ensured that before classes commenced in boot repair, printing or woodwork one of the first items on the agenda was a period of physical activity. Indeed, Edith Onians, Forster’s associate in the City Newsboys’ Society, freely admitted that ‘games of all kinds, swings, and bagatelle tables’ were placed prominently at the front of the Society’s premises to entice street children inside, and that only after individuals had become ‘stayers’ were they formally entered on the roll and persuaded to join trade and educational classes.125 Analysis of attendance patterns reveals, nonetheless, that members were again choosey in deciding how best to fill their time – gym and general amusement activities attracted twice as many young people as did lessons, and in the 1890s only 50 per cent of Try Society members renewed their subscriptions year on year.126 While the rescue agencies struggled to maintain their clientele, back on Bourke Street stallholders at the Eastern Market illustrated their greater appreciation of youthful wants by offering a wide variety of amusements and at the same time embracing innovation. It was here at the crossroads of Bourke and Stephen Street that Melbourne’s Saturday night youth market was largely cornered, the attractions on hand both reflecting and fostering the desires of city children. Long since demolished and subsequently overlooked by historians in this regard, the portion of the Market referred to as the lower flat constituted Melbourne’s largest commercial youth space in the late nineteenth century. Setting the trend for its resulting usage, in the early 1870s crowds patronized skittle alleys and a ‘Fancy Fair’ advertising ‘Merry Go Rounds, Swings, Shooting Boards, Spring Bagatelle Argus, 28 April 1879, p. 6. A copy of this speech can be found in SLV MS 9910, box 40, ‘Old Papers’. Also

123 124

refer to ‘Pictures of Melbourne Life’, SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. 125 Onians, ‘Boys in Street Trades’, p. 15. In Read All About It (p. 24), Onians also records that on one occasion she offered ‘Battler’, a young match-seller, a coat on condition that he would attend her classes – a bargain which he kept only with reluctance. 126 Information gleaned from an unpublished paper, ‘“So Many Arabs Saved from the Streets”: An Account of Boy Rescue Work’ (n.d.), located in SLV MS 10034, box 1590, p. 5, and David Maunders, Keeping Them Off the Streets: A History of Voluntary Youth Organizations in Australia 1850–1980 (Melbourne, 1984), p. 42.

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Fig. 3.4

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

Paterson Bros., Looking East Showing the Eastern Market Sheds, Princess Theatre and St. Patrick’s Cathedral (albumen silver on mount, 1875). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

Boards, Weighing Lifting Machines, Gingerbread, Fruit, Confectionary, Oysters and other refreshments and a Fancy Toy Stall’.127 As one patron later recalled with regard to the site, ‘If you had a shilling in your pocket, you could have a good time’.128 A contemporary, Dudley Ricketts, agreed; the Eastern Market, he observed, was ‘a real holiday place for kids’.129 The sense of enjoyment was not shared universally, though, with complaints issued that ‘crowds of boys and girls’ were blocking entrances to watch ‘the purse and half crown trick’ (while sales assistants circulated with boxes of confectionary),

127 See the report by the Inspector General of Markets dated 19 June 1871 (VPRS 3181, Unit 522, Markets [1871], item 977) and a letter dated 28 October 1872 seeking permission for the fair (ibid., Unit 523, Markets [1872–1873], item 1614). 128 Comment of Charlie Fredricksen in van Straten, p. 7. For comparison with the equally lively Shudehill and Flat Iron markets in Manchester and Salford in this period, see Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham and Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 130–38. 129 Dudley Ricketts, ‘My Story’ (c. 1981), manuscript held by RHSV MS 621, box 7/4, Part B, p. 2.

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and that petty thieving was rife.130 A raffish predominantly working-class element gravitated towards the Market from the outset, and remained there – indeed increased in extent – despite the complete reconstruction and upgrading of market buildings in 1879.131 Although the architectural character of the space changed, its associations did not – an indication that aesthetic environment is often of secondary importance to tactical inhabitation in determining the meaning of place. Hence throughout the 1880s and 1890s the Town Clerk continued to field regular grievances concerning the behaviour of young people gathering at the Market and at a lively pigeon exchange outside the Stephen Street entrance.132 These complaints and subsequent reports by police and the markets inspector reveal an expansion in the range of amusements on offer at the Eastern Market and, if provision can be read as a strong indication of demand, an upsurge in the numbers of young people frequenting the site. In 1883, for example, a shopkeeper protested about the proposed merrygo-round and swinging boats that an entrepreneur named Allen wished to erect, arguing that ‘if you allow them in the Market they will bring all the larrikins, and larrikiness[es] of Little Bourke Street which when the other swinging boats was in the Market the disgusting language was fearful to hear … ’.133 The following decade the markets inspector reported ‘the constant presence of a number of objectionable youth and boys’ (and on another occasion ‘pandemonium’) in connection with eight pool tables and a skittles game, while shooting galleries grew ever more popular (and dangerous) and a ‘knife and ring board’ appeared.134 130 VPRS 3181, Unit 526, Markets (1877), item 526; ibid., Unit 525, Markets (1875– 1876), item 480, letter from market lessee Richard Meagher (dated 24 April 1876); Argus, 12 January 1899, p. 3. 131 A photograph of the reconstructed site is included in Peter McIntosh and Joe Murray, The Streets of Melbourne From Early Photographs (Melbourne, 1985), not paginated (Figure 21). 132 For details of the pigeon mart, see the Illustrated Australian News, 13 August 1872, p. 174 (‘about two hundred lads gather every Saturday night to swop and sell pigeons. These vary – that is the bipeds – in age from seven to sixteen years’). The same edition also features a sketch of the scene. Despite sporadic petitions and complaints, a police report from 1895 notes the continuation of a brisk trade in pigeons by ‘boys and young men’ (see VPRS 3181, Unit 555, Markets [1895], item 2004). 133 Furthermore, the complainant alleged that the attractions would ‘take all the children penney from them. their was several accidents with the other swing boats which they had to be taken to the Melbourne Hospital’. For the letter see VPRS 3181, Unit 532, Markets (1883), item 949, dated 22 June 1883. 134 See VPRS 3181, Unit 545, Markets (1892), item no 88, and ibid., Unit 553, Markets (1894), item 1993 for the inspector’s reports. Six shooting galleries were present in the market in 1893 (ibid., Unit 550, Markets [1893], item 2203), and the previous year a girl was arrested for shooting a young stallholder behind the ear at Duke’s Shooting Gallery (ibid., Unit 545, Markets [1892], item 1693). In 1898 the police reported that it was common practice for cadet boys to use their own rifles in the galleries (ibid., Unit 563, Markets [1898], item 1272).

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In 1892 a tuppence stake gave confident players the chance to earn up to a shilling on a 10-foot long pool table by hitting a ball into a small hollow – a real moneyspinner for the operator, noted a policeman – while in 1900 prizes including alarm clocks and a silver mounted pipe were on offer to patrons paying a penny a go on a spring bagatelle board.135 ‘Side shows of every description’, fruit and lolly shops, a noisy dog market, Edison’s new ‘Talking Machine’ and the pungent smells of overcrowded toilets and hot food further contributed to an extraordinarily vivid sensory experience.136 Figure 3.5 captures the flavour of some of these attractions in the first decade of the twentieth century. Amidst the clamour, one observer even found evidence regarding the progress of the race, advising somewhat ruefully that ‘Should any person have doubts as to the want of “go” in our colonial youth, let him visit the Eastern Market on a Saturday evening between 6 and 10, and get his doubts removed’.137 In the early twentieth century the Eastern Market slowly subsided in popularity, overtaken by the attractions of the short-lived but fondly remembered Princes Court and Dreamland amusement parks and the rise of cinema.138 But its importance as a hangout for working-class adolescents in the late nineteenth century should not be forgotten. The money spent there is strong evidence of a burgeoning youth market in Melbourne, a market which also encompassed ‘the bob rush’ for tickets at theatres like Bourke Street’s Theatre Royal, the purchase of new youth-oriented magazines and ‘penny dreadfuls’ and the consumption of ice cream from the cart of William Nankervis, shrewdly positioned in the early 1890s outside the gate of Scotch College in East Melbourne.139 The evening crowds of young people congregating on Collingwood’s Smith Street and Brunswick Street

135 See VPRS 3181, Unit 545, Markets (1892), item 161, and Unit 569, Markets (1900), item 4794. 136 See van Straten, p. 7. 137 Argus, 17 April 1875, p. 9. 138 On the former, which operated between 1904 and 1909 near the current site of the Arts Centre on St Kilda Road, see Brown-May and Swain, The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, p. 568, and the reflections of Dudley Ricketts (p. 1) regarding the giant water chute and haunted ‘Katzerjammer Kastle’. Dreamland opened in St Kilda in 1906. Its chief attractions included the ‘Mt Fujiyama’ helter skelter, ‘The Rivers of the World’ (a half-mile long water ride) and ‘Robson’s Figure Eight’, a large rollercoaster (Argus, 14 January 1907, p. 8). The latter survived the closure of the park in 1909, operating until 1914. That year the Argus reported between 8,000 and 10,000 people attending the new Luna Park on Saturday nights and up to 250 couples gliding around the Palais de Danse (22 January 1914, p. 13). 139 The ‘bob rush’ is noted by Elaine Macdonald in ‘Journalist’s Child’, p. 304. Titles of magazines for young people included Young Australia and Australian Youth, while the Deadwood Dick series of ‘penny dreadful’ novels also proved popular in the period. E. Morris Miller mentions reading them in his memoirs, for example (p. 29). The ice-cream stand is recorded in VPRS 3181, Unit 899, Street Standings (1893–1894), loose sheet.

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Eastern Market scenes in 1908 (not attributed). Reproduced from Colin E. Cole, Melbourne Markets 1841–1979: The Story of the Fruit and Vegetable Markets in the City of Melbourne (Melbourne, 1980), p. 45. Note the children’s patronage of the Commonwealth Bowling Saloon (top right) and the shooting gallery (bottom left)

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in Fitzroy can be read as further expressions of this market, so too the youthful patronage of numerous roller skating rinks around the city.140 Middle-class youth shared these spaces but often shied away from the riffraff and instead accompanied their parents to more respectable destinations like the Melbourne Zoo or the aquarium.141 On weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings they could also be found mixing uneasily with the aspiring working class to ‘do the Block’ on Collins Street (discussed further below), parading the finery and frippery acquired through parental request or factory labour.142 In terms of expenditure, not all young Melburnians were as fortunate as Percy Grainger’s sisters, grateful beneficiaries in 1872 of a generous shared weekly allowance of 2s 6d; peers had to make do with far less or fall back on their own earning capacities.143 But as budding consumers they soon realized that once they had a shilling in their pockets they could gain access to the world of consumption, and that vendors of new bonnets or theatre tickets cared little about how necessary funds were acquired. Demanding the Leisure Franchise: The 1886 Shop Assistant ‘Riots’ Money, though, was not the only factor in determining ease of access to the new leisure spaces. When Jacobina Hopkins wanted to visit a travelling circus in the mid-1880s, it was parental injunction that forestalled the trip, with her mother determining that the attraction was suitable for Jacobina’s elder brothers but beyond the pale for a teenage girl.144 The disappointment was probably felt keenly, for public displays of spending had added importance for girls whose access to city spaces as street workers was being undermined at an even faster rate than was the case with boys. By contrast with Jacobina’s misfortune, Melbourne’s garrison of young shop assistants was prevented from enjoying early evening entertainments by

On the former see Collingwood History Committee, p. 35. On the popularity of roller skating with young Melburnians, see Argus: 25 December 1886, p. 4; 13 January 1910, p. 6. The Australasian Sketcher (16 July 1881) depicts larrikins roller skating uproariously. 141 See for example James Paxton, Toorak as I Knew It (Melbourne, 1983), p. 8. Also note the aversion to the Eastern Market expressed by Henry Handel Richardson’s Laura in The Getting of Wisdom, p. 124. 142 Refer to the entry on ‘Doing the Block’ by Graeme Davison in Brown-May and Swain, The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, pp. 214–15. 143 Noted in Dorum, p. 19. 144 As recorded by Jacobina’s great-granddaughter, Marjorie Johnston, in Growing up in ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ (Melbourne, 1985), p. 31. Also see the discussion of the scattered horizons of city youth in the previous chapter. 140

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employers for whom ‘only a sense of shame’ regulated business hours.145 Though the Saturday half-holiday had become widely accepted practice among Bourke Street retailers in the early 1870s, the benefits had been slow to spread outwards to the suburbs, where in any case shop assistants were still expected to work long hours on weekdays, especially in the clothing trade.146 ‘One of the Sufferers’ reported working for between 14 and 17 hours a day in 1873, and in 1884 the Royal Commission on Employés in Shops found widespread evidence of overwork and other exploitative practices.147 By late March in 1886 the situation had reached boiling point, with many retailers in the northern suburbs refusing to follow the spirit of legislation enacted the previous year to bring in seven o’clock closing.148 In what can be interpreted as a demand for leisure time and the right to take part in the expanding youth market, young shop assistants took to the streets to protest. Activity centred initially on Smith Street in Collingwood, and particularly around Mr Lancashire’s draper’s shop at the junction with Peel Street. Precipitated by handbills warning that ‘An attempt to break through the early closing movement and return to the old hour of nine o’clock, is now being made by a few shopkeepers in this street’, a crowd estimated at upwards of a thousand young men and women, ‘nearly all of whom were shop assistants’, rallied to ‘publicly exhibit their disapprobation’.149 Over the course of the next week the ranks of protesters swelled incrementally to a peak of between 10,000 and 15,000, growing correspondingly more vociferous in their demands for seven o’clock closing by preventing customers from entering shops, engaging in stand-over tactics and smashing several shop windows.150 On the night of 4 April a roving mob toured the main shopping precincts of the northern suburbs, issuing demands to traders to ‘Put up your shutters’ and again shattering the windows of intransigent shopkeepers.151 Heavy policing eventually quelled the disturbances, although not before the trouble had spread to Richmond and several protestors had been brought 145 Opinion of J. Gordon, Secretary of the Victorian Shop Employees Union, cited in Argus, 31 March 1886, p. 7. 146 See Argus, 29 July 1871, p. 5, and 6 November 1871, p. 1 (supplement). 147 Letter published in Argus, 16 January 1873, p. 5. For the Commission findings, refer to Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Session 1884, Vol. II, Part 2, pp. iii–xv. 148 Whilst endorsing early closing in the 1885 legislation, the government of the day had left it to often intransigent local councils to determine and implement the hours of business by which shopkeepers must abide. Agitation by bodies including the Political Short Hours League and the stubborn refusal of several shopkeepers to fall into line ultimately facilitated the protests. (See Age, 30 March 1886, p. 5, and 3 April 1886, p. 8 for background details.) 149 Age, 1 April 1886, p. 5. 150 During this time the demonstrations generated considerable newspaper coverage. See: Age, 3 April, 1886, p. 9; Age, 6 April 1886, p. 5; Argus, 6 April 1886, p. 6; and the extract from Table Talk republished in James Grant and Geoffrey Serle, The Melbourne Scene 1803–1956 (Melbourne, 1957), pp. 152–3. 151 Reported in detail in the Argus, 5 April 1886, p. 6.

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to book on a variety of charges.152 Among those arrested was William Callender, ‘a lad’ seen by Constable McHugh ‘to throw a missile and “boo-hoo” in front of Mr Lancashire’s shop’. He was fined 20s for his actions, faring better than Alexander Watson, ‘a respectable looking youth’ fined twice as much for insulting behaviour and resisting a police officer.153 Commenting on the episode, Melbourne’s rival newspapers the Argus and the Age took opposing positions. For the conservative Argus the early closing system was a block on trade – an attitude described in turn as ‘sordid self interest’ by the Age, which through its editorials portrayed the demonstrators as rightfully demanding ‘a few evening hours for entertainment’, if rather misguided in their methods.154 Seen in a broader context stretching back to the concessions won since mid-century for some sectors of the adult workforce by the movement for the eight-hour day, and onwards through to the expansion in the range of evening amusement venues, the street protests are indeed best understood as a claiming of the leisure franchise by young people, a sign that a shift in attitudes had occurred regarding what constituted an acceptable balance between work and play. Like the newsboys who protested in Swanston Street, the Smith Street shop assistants were claiming what they regarded as a right. They were willing to serve, but they also wished to enjoy. One is reminded of an observation made in 1889 by a factory inspector lamenting the disinclination of colonial youth to follow a trade. In what can surely be read as a wider appraisal of the native-born by their parents, the inspector commented that ‘The generality of them do not like to be bound; they like to be free’.155 ‘Picking Up’ in Public When young people described ‘going out’ or ‘walking out’ with one another in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, the language they used was entirely apt. Courtships were most often pursued outside, across urban spaces rife with conventions to be embraced or ignored. From the 1860s to the 1890s, Melbourne’s best known meeting point was ‘the Block’, an area of commercial street space on the ultra-fashionable Collins Street between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets. The practice of walking in groups there benefited – at least according to one visitor – from Melbourne’s notably wide footpaths (by contrast, it was argued, with the cramped streets of Sydney).156 By 1870, parading up and down this location on weekday afternoons from 3.30 p.m. and either side of noon on Saturdays was ‘an

See Age, 6 April 1886, p. 5; Age, 7 April 1886, p. 5; Argus, 7 April 1886, p. 8. Argus, 7 April 1886, p. 8. 154 Argus, 5 April 1886, p. 4; Age, 9 April 1886, p. 4. 155 Quotation from Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, p. 60. 156 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 November 1891, p. 5. 152 153

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institution’ that attracted the city’s well-heeled and aspiring classes of all ages.157 Heavy emphasis was laid on sartorial elegance, and the coded looks and coy behaviour accompanying the ritual circulation of bodies is well-described in social commentary and novels from the period.158 For ‘carriage society’ in the colonial era especially,159 the Block served as a significant rendezvous. Yet more important for young Melburnians, mostly less privileged than those parading the Block, were a variety of emergent commercial spaces around the city, some better known to historians than others. In 1883 the Sydney Morning Herald described the working class frequenting the Esplanade in beachside St Kilda on Sunday afternoons,160 an influx that dramatically accelerated with the extension to a once prestigious suburb of tram lines in 1888. It was here, Elaine Macdonald observed, that servants and working girls had their social life, ‘the equivalent of garden parties and races’.161 As female excursionists (noted by a feature writer as consisting chiefly of domestic servants, factory girls and barmaids) walked up and down the foreshore and onto the pier, they were ogled from the railing by lounging teenage boys and young men, described as ‘“not quite larrikins” – young fellows working in all sorts of capacities from apprentices to trades, factory hands, butcher and baker boys’, later to be seen hanging around street corners in the city centre.162 In 1895, ‘Cleo’ surveyed an evening St Kilda ‘crowded principally by the strawhatted youth and his companion, sweet sixteen with short skirts, obviously tight stays, and carefully frizzed hair’.163 By 1914 similarly-described young couples were still there, surrounded by ever increasing varieties of seaside attractions, but more interested, it was noted, in escorting one another along the Esplanade or the pier.164 There are clear similarities between these courtship practices and the ‘monkey parades’ in British cities during this period. In 1905, Charles Russell wrote of girls in selected Manchester streets plucking flowers from lads’ button-holes on Sunday evenings as a prelude to making acquaintances. The boys normally took Melbourne Punch, 17 February 1870, p. 55. For example: Argus, 16 June 1882, p. 7; Argus, 19 June 1885, p. 7; Freeman, pp.

157 158

78–85; Richardson, The Getting of Wisdom, ch. XIV; Argus, 30 November 1910, p. 5; Truth, 7 January 1911, p. 5 (featuring a description of ‘Block’ personalities in the 1870s and 1880s, and noting that ‘its glories have [now] departed’). 159 The phrase belongs to ‘The Vagabond’, Argus, 19 June 1885, p. 7. Penny Russell, however, notes an increasing wariness towards the end of the nineteenth century about the suitability of the Block as a place for ladies. See Russell, Savage or Civilised?, pp. 277–9, for discussion. 160 Ibid., 13 January 1883, p. 7. 161 Macdonald, ‘Journalist’s Child’, p. 282. Amidst the social mêlée, Macdonald continues, ‘It was considered tactful by all concerned that the employer in the parked vehicle should not see the maid, pretty in her Sunday best, getting off with a sailor or following up a friendship with one of the tradesmen who called for orders’ (ibid.). 162 Argus, 3 December 1887, p. 4. 163 Argus, 18 January 1895, p, 6. 164 Argus, 22 January 1914, p. 13.

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Fig. 3.6

Promenading on the Esplanade in St Kilda, c. 1908 (not attributed). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

the initiative, though, Andrew Davies explains, with young people walking ‘up and down the main streets, in twos or in groups, with the aim of “clicking”, or pairing off, with members of the opposite sex’.165 These encounters had a long heritage: since the 1860s streets including Oxford Road, Market Street and Stretford Road had witnessed similar promenades.166 Christopher Breward also notes the existence of the ‘monkey parade’ in turn-of-the-century Hackney, where fashion mattered and London youths exchanged winks or smirks as they sized one another up.167 Even Salford’s art gallery served as ‘a great monkey run’ in the twentieth century, echoing the much-criticized use of covered avenues at Melbourne’s 1880 international exhibition.168 Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, pp. 102–3. Ibid., p. 102. Davies describes these street rituals as an ‘unrivalled’ method for

165 166

young city dwellers to meet unattached members of the opposite sex, and notes the continuation of the practice until at least 1939 (p. 107). The circulation of young people in cars around Melbourne’s Chapel Street on Friday and Saturday nights (‘Laps on Chaps’) is a contemporary manifestation of promenading behaviour. 167 Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester and New York, 1999), pp. 206–14. 168 On the former see Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, p. 104. On the latter see Federal Australian, 31 March 1881, p. 4, where it is noted that ‘streams of young people of both sexes have been … flowing up and down the main avenues, vacantly gazing at each other, hour after hour … indifferent to the splendid collection of objects of interest’.

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Lacking privacy in her home for chatting with friends and entertaining boys, Melbourne diarist May Stewart instead pursued virtually all her social and romantic engagements in public. At the beginning of 1906, she ‘smooges’ (kisses) ‘M’ and then later Charlie in Edinburgh Gardens; by late October that year her affections have turned to Tom, and the Fitzroy Gardens provide the setting for further intimacy.169 On 17 occasions in her diary, May also recounts flirting with – or, in the phrase of the day, ‘mashing’ – boys around the city.170 Six of these exchanges either begin or take place in their entirety on board trams and trains: transient settings subject to their own spatial conventions. On Sunday 21 January, May wrote ‘on tram did a mash had fare paid made appointment for Thursday night’; a month later, by contrast, the diarist notes that she went ‘off to Prahran did mash in tram & left him’.171 At other times the flirtatious encounters take place in St Kilda, by the seaside at Sandringham, during shopping excursions in the city centre and with a cab driver who drops May off near her home.172 Each of these locations is removed from her immediate surroundings in North Fitzroy, and a sense of anonymity perhaps encourages May to be bolder in her behaviour.173 An unwritten set of rules seems to govern the exchanges, nevertheless, at least from the diarist’s perspective. Hence two boys are discarded in the street for being ‘dead slow’ and a hasty extrication is made from a conversation with a boy who May describes as ‘red hot’ (too forward?).174 Only once does a dalliance turn sour – May terming a boy she meets on Princes Bridge a ‘nasty brute’.175 For the rest of the time the diarist enjoys courting attention, trading coded stares See Stewart, ‘Diary’: Thursday 26 January; Tuesday 30 January; Thursday 1 February (‘went to meet M went into Edinburgh gardens smooged till 11 P.M. came home & went to bed’); Friday 23 February (‘went to meet Charlie … smooged till 10.15 P.M.’); Wednesday 24 October. Norman Lindsay also recalls utilizing Melbourne’s parks for sexual dalliances as a young art student in the 1890s (Lindsay, pp. 134–45, 150–52). 170 The Melbourne Punch notes the arrival of the word in 1883 (27 December 1883, p. 251), stating that it is a corruption of ‘ma chere’ (or ‘my dear’). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the term in the sense employed here occurred in 1879. For definitions including ‘An infatuation, a “crush”; a flirtation’ and ‘to flirt, strike up a flirtatious acquaintance (with)’, see . 171 Stewart, ‘Diary’: Sunday 21 January; Saturday 24 February. May kept her appointment, ‘smooging’ with her new acquaintance – probably the aforementioned ‘M’ – the following week in Edinburgh Gardens. 172 Ibid., see entries for Sunday 8 July (St Kilda), Tuesday 26 December (Sandringham: ‘had a paddle did a mash had some fun’), Saturday 17 February (flirting in Bourke Street and separately with a city-centre cab driver). 173 Refer here to Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London and New York, 1991), pp. 83–101, for an analysis of how in places beyond the boundaries of one’s habitual haunts a loosening of normative constraints and conventions is often experienced. 174 Stewart, ‘Diary’ see entries for Saturday 10 February and Tuesday 14 August. 175 Ibid., see entry for Sunday 14 October (loose sheet). 169

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and swapping banter in circumstances that she clearly regards as not altogether serious. The diary ends on 31 December with May heading out at 11.45 p.m., the world at her feet once again, and ‘wishing three boys a happy new year’.176 With one more ‘appointment’ still unfulfilled after another encounter on board a tram,177 the reader is left with the impression that 1907 will herald little slackening in the pace of the diarist’s social schedule. City fathers often disapproved of these public acts of courtship. As part of an investigation into presumed juvenile immorality in 1909, evidence was received that within various metropolitan gardens young couples ‘can be seen nightly, lying with arms & legs entwined, billing and cooing under the gaze of a thousand passers by’.178 In the Edinburgh Gardens, a favourite resort for May Stewart, a police sergeant noted an average nightly presence of 50 girls (aged 14 to 20), ‘very orderly’, but often accompanied by ‘young men & boys’.179 Other policemen reported finding condoms lying on the grass in Albert Park, in Fitzroy and at the beach, and repeated colonial-era convictions that ‘Australian girls mature at an early age’ or that some girls were willing to sell themselves to obtain fashionable clothes.180 Definitive evidence linking young people to such activities was not forthcoming, though, the police report concluded, even if the ‘existence of juvenile immorality is generally acknowledged’.181 Following a spate of opportunistic thefts from young couples seated in the evenings ‘on the lawns and about the various nooks’ of city parks, Melbourne’s Argus joined the discussion, issuing a withering rejoinder in February 1914. Under the heading ‘“Picking Up” The Casual Acquaintance’, the newspaper condemned the free and easy way in which young city-dwellers formed associations. According to the article, ‘picking up’ occurred ‘every evening … everywhere’ and almost always involved two girls going off with two boys (‘straw-hatted’ once again) after making acquaintance on a street and exchanging ‘a few stereotyped remarks’.182 Continuing its rebuke, the newspaper stated that: It would be a decided exaggeration to say that this practice of picking up promiscuous acquaintances invariably, or even generally, leads to actual immorality. Probably about 75 per cent of cases never lead further than much

Ibid., Sunday 31 December. Ibid., see entry for Sunday 24 December. 178 ‘Age of Consent Report 1909’, VPRS 1,226, Inward Registered Correspondence 176

177

(Chief Secretary), box 107, statement from Sergeant Wen (Windsor Station), dated 11 November 1909. I am most grateful to Frank Bongiorno for sharing material from this file with me. 179 Ibid., statement from Sergeant Hickey (Fitzroy North), 11 November 1909. 180 Ibid., statements from Constable Lithgow (Middle Park), Sub Inspector Hore (Fitzroy), Detective Sainsbury, Sergeant Westcott (Prahran), 11 November 1909. 181 Ibid. 182 Argus, 18 February 1914, p. 14. Earlier thefts from mashing couples are noted in Argus: 9 January 1912, p. 7; 4 February 1914, p. 14.

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flippant conversation on the promenade, or perhaps a harmless (if somewhat shameless) flirtation under the lamps in the park … Nevertheless, viewed in its most harmless aspect, it is a practice open to the gravest objection. It undoubtedly destroys the somewhat frail barrier of ordinary courtesy between the sexes; it as surely cheapens the girls who indulge in it, both in their own eyes and in the estimation of the young men they meet. It is distinctly subversive of parental discipline … it would be well to take steps to check the practice …183

That ‘check’ looked unlikely in 1914. City fathers could not contain the desires of city youths to form relationships in the older metropolitan spaces and new leisure zones that modern Melbourne now offered. In this area of life at least, a loosening of bonds had occurred. Out and about around the city, the budding courtships of young Melburnians continued unabated. A Fresh Dependency Discretionary spending money for tram rides or fairground entry bought access to a range of products and experiences – often, in fact, to space itself. In David Nasaw’s estimation, the earnings of American street children ‘magically transported them from the realm of dependent childhood to the world of consumption, where money, not age, brought with it fun and freedom’.184 A similar argument about the transcendent properties of capital could be mounted in the Australian context. But did the induction of young people into the consumer market really bring liberation, and if so, at what price? It was only a thin slice of freedom that spending money procured: contingent and at best ephemeral. Once the money was gone the autonomy vanished and could not be recaptured without further outlay. Melbourne’s young consumers recognized this hard fact. Elaine Macdonald, for example – who we encountered in the previous chapter riding her bicycle and taking the tram down Chapel Street – reminisced that when it came to personal expenditure the sense of anticipation beforehand could equal the actual event. Aged 7, and armed with 2s from her parents, Elaine would visit the St Kilda baths with her friend Vera, and move onwards from there to an amusement park along the Esplanade. A revolutionary new steam-driven carousel was the chief attraction, its musical organ and terrific speed ‘quite thrilling’ to an enraptured audience of children.185 ‘We tried various ways of making the most of four threepence’, Elaine later recalled, further commenting that: Staying on for four rides in succession was plutocratic – the bystanders must be telling each other that we had been on nearly all afternoon. But it was over too soon, and Vera’s pernickety little stomach would be showing signs of relaxing its grip on the ginger cakes and lemonade, so, experimenting, we found it best

Argus, 18 February 1914, p. 14. Nasaw, p. viii. 185 Macdonald, ‘Journalist’s Child’, p. 122. 183 184

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Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914 to have one ride and stand out the next two. That was almost as good as riding continuously so long as one had a threepence or two still warm and sticky in one’s fist.186

Exhibiting a parsimonious streak which he passed on to his son, Rupert, Elaine’s contemporary Keith Murdoch went to far greater lengths to prolong the pleasures obtained by his more modest weekly allowance of threepence, even cutting his jelly beans in half to double the enjoyment.187 Both individuals appreciated that the sovereignty acquired from consumption was transitory, and that therefore one must be prudent in determining outgoings. How might a similar commitment to habits of thrift amongst Melbourne’s social elite have lessened the drop from the dizzying heights of the land boom in the 1880s to the depths of economic depression in the 1890s? And how telling, then, that adult Melburnians should express concern about the spending practices of their children when for individuals like Macdonald or Murdoch an entire weekly outlay consisting of a few pence or a shilling or two could scarcely lead to comparable fiscal disaster or moral ruin. In an effort to curtail the perceived perils associated with independent spending, rescue agencies encouraged young street workers to save. As well as ensuring that any money earned by society members on country placements was paid directly by employers into trust funds, a number of organizations established penny savings banks for the benefit of those still plying their trade in Melbourne. After glancing at the books of the Try Society’s city branch in 1899, a visiting journalist from the Age spelt out a lesson for his adult readers. Although gratified that a few accounts showed balances in excess of £5, the reporter singled out the example of one young street worker with a more precarious banking history. His passbook revealed that ‘A shilling is paid in one day, augmented by eighteenpence next day, and the day following sees a draw of half a crown and “nil” representing the “balance”’.188 Fortunately for all concerned, the journalist concluded, ‘The bank manager allows no overdrafts, and the boys are kept off the shoals and quicksands upon which so many commercial barques have been wrecked’.189 By 1899, when the piece was composed, Victoria was starting to recover from its economic crash and its citizens had grown used to a climate of austerity. Straitened circumstances and the associated moral imperative to save money gave reform-minded adults another chance to seek adjustment to the lives of working-class youth, and at the same time offer insights drawn from their own rash judgements and harsh experiences. As any teacher can attest, however, there are always some students who just won’t listen. While Edith Onians and her concerned colleagues stressed the 186 Ibid. Also see McCalman, pp. 70–71, for a description of children in suburban Richmond similarly prolonging the pleasures of consumption after the arrival of cinema in 1912. 187 R.M. Younger, Keith Murdoch: Founder of a Media Empire (Sydney, 2003), p. 22. 188 Age, 8 April 1899, cutting from SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. 189 Ibid.

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benefits of saving and drew attention to the proclivities of city newsboys to blow their wages in laneway games of pitch and toss,190 another of Melbourne’s sons was experiencing the psychological legacies of ephemeral empowerment through spending. In March 1878, a year after entering Scotch College, 14-year-old John Monash wrote to his father and complained that homework, extra tuition and choral practice meant he only had Saturday afternoons to himself.191 As he matured, the young Monash corrected this perceived imbalance, visiting the Public Library, skipping school to read adventure stories in Cole’s Book Arcade and later spending almost every evening in the city, where he developed a virtual addiction to popular theatre.192 Five times he attended one production, Boccaccio, lying to his mother about his whereabouts.193 Aged 16, John Monash’s diary takes an intriguing turn. After yet another evening spent exploring the city’s streets and back lanes, Monash returned home late and jotted down the following statements: ‘avoid temptation lest you may not be able to resist it … my guardian angel was busy tonight … the anticipation of a pleasure is better than the enjoyment thereof … strolled about streets, without success, till 11.30’.194 Had Monash, asks his biographer Geoffrey Serle, been soliciting girls?195 The teenager’s diary also records feelings of frustration about his personal progress and a sense of aimlessness – ‘I cannot understand myself at all, though I am ever the subject of my reflections’, he wrote in 1882, referring later to ‘lost time’ and an air of restlessness (‘I can settle down to nothing’).196 In the long run, of course, John Monash’s misadventures would do him no lasting harm, and he went on to achieve fame and no small measure of glory.197 But here one encounters him poised at a transitional life-stage, the phase of socalled ‘storm and stress’ gradually being identified as ‘adolescence’. His mood swings and introspective mindset would now be recognized as classic traits of the teenager. Something more is evident here too, I think. Lurking in the shadows of his dissatisfaction with the bright lights of the city, and behind his spasmodic guilt over the time and money squandered on frivolous pastimes, can we also see a dawning perception that the pleasures of capitalism are often unfulfilling? Had 190 See for example the reported exchange between Onians and a newsboy in the Herald, 17 May, 1910, p. 6: ‘I try to persuade them, but one boy said to me the other day “If you lost ninepence out of a shilling, Miss, wouldn’t you play to get it back?” “No,” I answered, and got my comment. “You’re no sport,” he said, and I was silenced’. 191 Serle, John Monash, p. 13. 192 Ibid., pp. 21–2, 27. 193 Ibid., p. 27. 194 Ibid., p. 28. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid., pp. 29, 30, 32. 197 John Monash rose to command Australian forces on the Western Front with notable success during the First World War, and later became Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University. Monash University in Melbourne is named after him.

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John Monash realized, like Walter Benjamin a little later, that the debt owed by the city to youth is rarely repaid?198 And in seeking autonomy through consumption, were not Melbourne’s young connoisseurs, speaking in broad terms, merely embracing a new dependency? In conclusion, two distinct shifts can be seen to have occurred in the final decades of the nineteenth century: the slow decline of street trading as a viable legal occupation for young people (a change which met with understandable resistance from street traders and their families), and the gradual opening up of the youth market (resisted, in turn, by child savers and moral guardians). Exposed to the temptations of consumerism, Melbourne’s children were to be denied the means to acquire the necessary funds for all that was on offer, at least from their endeavours in public. With regard to the issue of autonomy, these seemingly opposing trends can in fact be seen to be aligned along the same axis. As the child savers gradually lifted the burdens of adult responsibility from the shoulders of young street workers, thus repositioning them as dependent children, a similar result flowed from the identification of young people as consumers with discrete interests. Altered ideas of what constituted a proper childhood accounted in part for the change, alongside the realization by adult entrepreneurs that they could harness the youthful shilling. Legitimacy in public space hence began to be associated with spending rather than getting, and a vital point of contact between young people and adults was lost. What had been taken for granted as ordinary came instead to be regarded as out-of-place. The city of the twenty-first century, we can speculate, with its separate spheres and mutual suspicions, is poorer for the change.

Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, pp. 105, 82.

198

Chapter 4

Interstitial Acts: Urban Space and the Larrikin Repertoire On a winter’s day in the late 1870s, Anglo-Indian writer Henry Cornish alighted from his train carriage and found himself somewhat disappointed with Melbourne. ‘My … conviction’, he stated in his travelogue Under the Southern Cross, ‘is that Melbourne, like some of the gawky, weedy “larrikins” in her streets, has grown too fast in her youth, and has thus run too much to arms and legs. Her frame-work is big enough to last her for the next fifty years. What her constitution now requires is consolidation.’1 Cornish’s neat conflation of Melbourne’s growing pains with those of its youthful inhabitants suggests a relationship between the character of city space and the attributes of city dwellers. Regarded in this light, urban form and group disposition are mutually reinforcing. Taking Cornish’s passing observations as our cue, Melbourne’s physical structure can indeed be seen to have helped nurture the larrikins in its midst. Within the unfolding pattern of the city’s urban frame lingered gaps, vacant land, interstitial spaces: areas soon colonized by bands of working-class youths themselves located in age somewhere in the cleft between childhood and adult maturity. This chapter revisits these metropolitan settings and contends that larrikinism, a term first popularized in Melbourne in 1870 and taken to refer to ‘young rough[s], cad[s], and general mischief maker[s]’,2 is best understood as a series of ‘performances’ in space. Reading the city as a stage, key aspects of the larrikin’s repertoire – dress, speech and public behaviour – are explored and larrikin activities related to the transitional urban locations in which they occurred. The sexualized undertones of larrikin behaviour are also examined and contextualized alongside contemporary anxieties concerning the apparent precocity of native-born youth. Assessment of the attempted literary reclamation – or perhaps rather, after Cornish, the ‘consolidation’ – of the larrikin rounds out the analysis, with nationalist writers demonstrating their determination to safeguard the reputation of ‘Young Australia’ by presenting a sanitized image of larrikinism for public consumption.

Henry Cornish, Under the Southern Cross (Melbourne, 1975 [originally 1880]), pp.

1

93–4.

Ibid., p. 94.

2

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Locating the Larrikin In the eyes of social commentators, the ‘larrikin’ could range in age from 6 to 28.3 More commonly, however, he is encountered in the archive in his teens and early 20s, poised at a transitional moment between childhood and adult maturity. Police Sergeant Dalton, to whose trilled Irish pronunciation of ‘larking’ the word ‘larrikin’ is commonly attributed,4 remarked in 1874 that he had encountered larrikins as young as 8, but more commonly aged 12 and most frequently aged between 14 and 18. ‘When they get up to 20,’ he surmised, ‘if they are not entirely bad, they begin to rise out of it.’5 Superintendent Winch, by contrast, stated that 19 years was the average age of offenders committing ‘larrikin crimes’ including assault, insulting behaviour, larceny and vagrancy over a six-month period ending in October of the same year.6 It seems then that larrikinism was predominantly – though not exclusively – a passion of youth. Indeed, in the absence of a psychosexual concept of adolescence at this time, ‘larrikin’ became a catch-all and stopgap description for adults perceiving the excesses of what would later be termed the ‘storm and stress’ period of development but at a loss to explain how and why young city-dwellers could be so wilful.7 ‘Larrikin’ was a label, almost always negative in connotation, applied to a broad sweep of behaviours from the criminal undertakings specified by Winch through to minor misdemeanours including sign-stealing and door knocking. This imprecision helped popularize the word and led, as we shall see, to something of a ‘moral panic’ about youth at large in the city.8 In some respects, ‘larrikin’ was just a new term for a pre-existing condition. Soon after separation from New 3 Finch-Hatton, p. 302; Edward E. Morris, A Dictionary of Austral English (Sydney, 1972 [originally 1898]), p. 262. 4 ‘Larrikin’ first appears in Melbourne newspapers in 1870, and two years earlier in Walter Cooper’s play Colonial Experience (Sydney, 1979 [originally 1868], p. 58). Susan Priestly discounts the Dalton link, arguing that a fellow Irishman and predecessor in the Melbourne constabulary, John Stanton or Staunton, first used the term ‘around 1850’. See Susan Priestly, ‘Larrikins and the Law 1849–1874’, Victorian Historical Journal, 74/2 (2003): 243–50. 5 Evidence given at the 1874 Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Crimes and Offences Prevention Bill (hereafter SCoCOPB): see Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council During the Session 1874, Q. 80–82. The Bill recommended penalties for larrikin crimes including whipping and solitary confinement but did not pass into law. During an earlier debate on a similar measure in 1871, the issue of age was also raised. Here it was reported that out of 34 cases of larrikin offending which came before Melbourne’s Mayor on a single day, 22 were committed by boys under 18 years of age (see VPD, Session 1871, Vol. XII, p. 114). 6 SCoCOPB, Appendix A. 7 Refer to Chapter 1 for discussion of adolescence as a scientific concept. 8 A concept coined by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils & Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (St Albans, 1973 [originally 1972]).

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South Wales, early editions of Victorian newspapers began to record the presence of wayward youths on the city streets and express concern about their activities. In 1857, for instance, the Argus commented that Melbourne’s pilfering ‘quickwitted boys’ were ‘a satire on “our civilisation”’, while the following decade readers could follow the career of Thomas Moran, alias ‘Tommy the Nut’, one of a gang of street boys charged with theft and vagrancy.9 Looking back further, the Sydney Gazette of July 1825 makes reference to ‘larky boys’, and in the 1840s Sydney’s ‘Cabbage-tree Mob’ also made the headlines.10 As demographer Ann Larson deduces, the word larrikin ‘described a phenomenon which had needed a name for many years’.11 Despite this tradition of larrikin-like behaviour, however, the popularization of the new term from 1870 does appear to coincide with an actual increase in the number of juvenile misdemeanours and an accompanying shift in perception. Providing firm statistical evidence for the escalation of offending is problematic, but it can be said with some assurance that larrikin crimes reached a peak in Melbourne during the late 1880s, in line with the enormous population increase in that decade and an expansion of police powers.12 Looking back in 1899, a Melbourne journalist identified 1889 as the ‘zenith’ of larrikinism in the city. ‘In that year every suburb had its larrikins, and there were none so poor that they could not boast two or more well-defined “pushes”.’13 By contrast, a textmining exercise using the Trove digital newspapers archive identifies a slightly earlier moment, 1882, as the high point for associated newspaper commentary on the Melbourne larrikin; across Australia, 1,113 articles mention the figure in that year.14 An interactive graph reveals that by the time of Federation in 1901, Argus: 18 September 1857, p. 4; 6 October 1860, p. 6; 6 March 1862, p. 6. Also see the recollections of ‘Ex-Detective’ regarding Moran in Argus, 31 August 1876, p. 6. 10 Sidney J. Baker, The Australian Language (Melbourne, 1970 [originally 1945]), p. 119. 11 Larson, p. 148. 12 Noel McLachlan found that 7,086 people were arrested for ‘larrikin crimes’ (McLachlan’s phrase) in 1891, compared with 1,135 arrests in 1861 and ‘the [same] figure’ in 1901. See McLachlan, ‘Larrikinism’, p. 41. Using a different methodology, police reported 2,044 arrests for assaults and insulting behaviour in 1881 (Argus, 20 January 1882, p. 7). Estimates of the total number of larrikins in the city at any one time vary. A feature article in the Melbourne Argus cites a police estimate of over 5,000 larrikins across the city in 1882, while Geoffrey Serle suggests a peak figure of 1,000 (see Argus, 18 January 1882, p. 6; Serle, The Rush to be Rich, p. 282). Problems in defining larrikinism are discussed below. 13 Argus, 25 October 1899, p. 11. ‘Push’ became a well-known colloquialism for larrikin gang during the period. 14 This figure is based on a keywords search (‘Melbourne’ plus ‘larrikin’) of the thousands of newspaper editions digitized by Trove at the time of writing. My thanks to Tim (‘Wragge’) Sherratt for his assistance in performing the search and for creating the valuable QueryPic resource. See for a graph depicting the changing incidence of ‘larrikin’ in Australian newspapers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 9

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the search terms feature 264 times, representing a marked decline, but hardly an insignificant number.15 The indexing of Melbourne’s Argus newspaper for the 1860s and 70s allows the historian to further approximate the proliferation of larrikin incidents and growth of corresponding discussion.16 In the 1860s, 56 alleged public order offences in Melbourne involving boys and young men are reported in the newspaper (including those mentioned as court cases), 37 letters feature from outraged local readers (many on the subject of catapult, or ‘shanghai’ use), and 14 articles of associated conjecture (editorials, transcripts of lectures and so on) are printed.17 During the 1870s, by contrast, the Argus index notes 156 similar ‘larrikin’ incidents, 72 letters and 76 articles of related conjecture.18 What may be the most telling feature of this impressionistic comparison across decades is the more than fivefold increase over the period in the number of conjecture pieces printed by the newspaper. The Argus had itself grown slightly in physical size during this time (thus allowing greater room for feature articles and editorial moralizing), yet this increase in concern – out of all proportion with the apparent increase in larrikin transgressions – suggests what Stanley Cohen has called ‘over-reporting’, a key aspect in fostering a climate of moral panic.19 Such situations, Cohen argues, often also feature fretful references to sickness and infection besetting the body politic or motivating the actions of ‘delinquent’ youths.20 Pathological explanations for larrikinism were likewise offered in Melbourne: William Forster of the Try Boys Society compared the phenomenon to a ‘disease’ in February 1899, perhaps influenced in his assessment by an Age article printed a month earlier which drew parallels with mental illness and declared in summary that ‘The growth of the Melbourne “Push” is something abnormal’.21 Factors fuelling these fears and others closely related are discussed in more detail Ibid. (Incidentally – but underlining the difficulties of quantification – the spike in the graph in 1896 is caused in large part by newspaper reporting of a successful racehorse named ‘Larrikin’.) 16 For the 1860s, index subheadings including ‘Youth’, ‘Children’ and ‘Police’ were used to tally the number of articles relating to reputed public order offences involving individuals identified by the paper as boys, girls or otherwise ‘young’ or ‘youthful’. In the 1870s such transgressions were frequently, though not always, identified as larrikinism; hence for this decade articles mentioned under the new ‘Larrikinism’ subheading were counted alongside relevant items under the same subheadings used for the 1860s. The figures that follow are presented only as an estimate; undoubtedly there will be mistakes and omissions, especially given the format differences between the 1860s print index and the online index available for the 1870s. For the 1860s, see Geraldine Suter’s Indexes to the ‘Argus’ (1860s) (Melbourne, 1999). For the 1870s see , also compiled by Suter (last accessed 27 June 2012). 17 Suter, Indexes to the ‘Argus’. 18 Refer to . 19 See Cohen, Folk Devils & Moral Panics, pp. 9–10, 31–2. 20 Ibid., see pp. 55–6, 62–3, 109–10. 21 Age, 8 February 1899, p. 2; Age, 11 January 1899, p. 4. 15

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below. What is important to note for now is the possibility that the popularization of larrikinism as a concept might both label and describe an increase in the volume and severity of public order offences and at the same time mask a self-perpetuating anxiety, an anxiety revealing as much about society’s elders as about its youngest charges. Far from being confined to the antipodes, the larrikin’s cousins occupied finde-siècle city spaces across the first world. San Francisco had its ‘hoodlums’, Manchester its ‘scuttlers’, Paris its ‘apaches’, London and St. Petersburg their ‘hooligans’. Indeed, in an intriguing aside, Geoffrey Pearson notes that before the word ‘hooligan’ became popular in London in 1898, disorderly urban youths in Britain’s capital were sometimes termed ‘London Larrikins’.22 Yet despite these international parallels early historical research on larrikins in Australia looked only inwards, with Noel McLachlan’s 1950 study representing the first serious academic analysis.23 Offering a social causation analysis for larrikinism, McLachlan’s assessments draw upon much pioneering research but are nevertheless diminished by the author’s uncritical nationalism and unrefined application of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory. Amidst useful statistics detailing the extent of larrikin crime, the author’s claims that ‘push’ (or gang) society was unique to Australia, that larrikins formed an unprecedented proportion of urban population and that the vigour of the larrikin insult was without parallel are not supported with comparative evidence. Moreover, McLachlan theorizes rather carelessly that ‘cultural anomie’, sexual repression and the Australian ‘democratic tradition’ were causal factors for larrikinism without substantiating such assertions.24 Reading the account some 60 years after its composition, one suspects that McLachlan’s underlying project was somehow to ‘claim’ the larrikin as a unique product of Australian society, much as the nationalist writers of the 1890s and early twentieth century tried to do, and in a similar vein to the contentions made by McLachlan’s contemporaries concerning the first generation of Australian native-born, the so-called ‘Currency Lads’.25 ‘Hoodlum’ first appeared in print in San Francisco in 1868; three years later the word ‘scuttler’ was applied to youthful transgressors of a similar type in Manchester. The almost simultaneous ‘exposure’ of the larrikin is a striking coincidence. For analysis see: Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain’s First Youth Cult (Preston, 2009); Robert A. Nye, ‘The Politics of Social Defense: Violent Crime, “Apaches,” and the Press at the Turn of the Century’, in his Crime, Madness & Politics: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984), pp. 171–226; Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London, 1983), pp. 99–100; Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley, 1993). For editorial comparisons, see: Argus, 19 September 1871, p. 5; New York Times, 16 July 1894, p. 2; Times (London), 30 June 1902, p. 7. 23 McLachlan, ‘Larrikinism’. 24 McLachlan, ‘Larrikinism’, pp. 52, 101, 112, 122–3, 126–31. 25 MacNab and Ward, ‘The Nature and Nurture of the First Generation of Native-Born Australians’. Compare with McLachlan’s statement: ‘No other country could “boast” of a non-professional, semi-criminal society of youths comparable with these’ (‘Larrikinism’, p. 29). 22

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Over 20 years passed before the larrikin received fresh attention within the academy. Shortly after the appearance in 1973 of James Murray’s Larrikins: 19th Century Outrage (a popular history book lacking in both critical analysis and scholarly references), an insightful thesis by Chris McConville served to extend historical knowledge of larrikin activities, based on a study of the phenomenon in Melbourne.26 Inspired by the work of the Chicago urban ecologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, McConville situated the Melbourne larrikin alongside another highly visible street presence, the prostitute. Crime rates were analyzed by suburb, the metropolitan area divided into four ‘zones’ accordingly, and the locale of Collingwood explored as a case study.27 McConville located the larrikin’s working-class ‘outrages’ amidst the strictures of late-Victorian middleclass society, and explained larrikinism in terms of ‘the impact of a harsh moral code on a population already alienated in the functioning of the economy’.28 Whilst demonstrating the extent of recorded larrikin law-breaking, McConville thus maintained that the reaction to larrikinism outweighed its severity. Although paying scant attention to questions of gender and glossing over the particularities of the larrikin’s relationship to different types of urban space, McConville’s analysis nevertheless opened the field for later scholars to investigate more fully the author’s suppositions concerning the larrikin’s appearance, behaviour and class position. Whereas McConville had subtitled his study ‘Social Deviance in the City’, later writers suggested that larrikinism need not necessarily be viewed as an aberration. Regarded in this light, larrikinism could be seen as a ‘positive attempt to achieve status in an environment promising few avenues for youthful selfexpression’ or else ‘active resistance’ to ‘ideas of respectability and discipline’.29 Kylie Smith has developed this argument, asserting that larrikins were classaware, and proposing a bold comparison with the Australian labour movement: ‘While the organised working class in Australia tried to fight hegemony on the James Murray, Larrikins: 19th Century Outrage (Melbourne, 1973); Chris McConville, ‘Outcast Melbourne: Social Deviance in the City, 1880–1914’ (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1974). 27 McConville found that the central city possessed a uniquely high crime rate between 1880 and 1914. Inner-suburban ‘industrial and cottage suburbs’ like Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond ranked next on the list, followed by ‘areas of mixed function’ such as Prahran, Footscray and Williamstown. Last of the zones, ‘each with a distinctive function in the economy, a distinct class of occupants and a unique physical environment’, came ‘villa suburbs’ such as Kew, Essendon and Caulfield (McConville, ‘Outcast Melbourne’, pp. 110–12, 142). 28 Ibid., p. 279. 29 Patrick Ryan, ‘Larrikinism in Australian History’ (Honours thesis, Monash University, 1982), see pp. 41–52 for quotation and discussion of the author’s ‘interactionist perspective’; Kylie Smith, ‘Larrikins, Labour and the Law in Sydney from 1870 to 1900’, in The Past is Before Us: The Ninth National Labour History Conference, ed. Greg Patmore, John Shields and Nikola Balnave (Sydney, 2005), p. 451. 26

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factory floor,’ she maintains, ‘larrikins fought it in the streets.’30 Here Smith is attempting to reposition the larrikin firmly within the domain of labour history, an interesting proposition but one which struggles to accommodate larrikin gang rivalry, evidence of hostility towards other members of the working classes and the fact that much larrikin activity was opportunistic and seemingly not inspired by any organized motivation to further a working-class cause. Nevertheless, Smith’s arguments clearly warrant extended scrutiny, and her comments in passing on the ‘overt sexuality’ of larrikin culture point towards a fruitful direction for further investigation.31 Melissa Bellanta’s recent book-length analysis, Larrikins: A History, greatly enhances historical understanding in this direction among several others, and has been trailed by a number of publications drawing attention to hitherto little-studied aspects of the larrikin phenomenon including the role of popular theatre and the activities of ‘the larrikin girl’.32 Critical assessments of larrikinism such as these highlight the problems encountered by many social historians in dealing with individuals seen at the time as troublemakers by vocal sections of the wider community. Complaints about larrikin activities inevitably comprise a major body of evidence upon which the researcher must in no small part rely, and hence careful evaluation of this material is warranted. During the late nineteenth century, distressed ratepayers angered by larrikin activities in their neighbourhoods could fire off their grievances in a number of directions: to the Mayor (letters to whom were routinely redirected for the attention of the Town Clerk), to the police or to the newspaper editor. Whilst the Town Clerk and the police may well have grumbled at the arrival of bundles of such time-consuming correspondence, newspapers positively thrived on the material. Visiting English journalist Richard Twopeny was astonished to find over 200 newspapers circulating in Victoria alone during the 1880s,33 and from the Age or the Argus (each selling many thousands of copies daily) down to a proliferation of smaller scale suburban newspapers and religious publications like the War Cry, each production was hungry for copy. In fact, the activities of the larrikin helped fill column inches at a historical moment when the newspaper was at its most powerful and when newspaper journalism increasingly focused on the feature, or exposé, article. In what Bill Schwarz has termed a ‘double movement’, Smith, ‘Larrikins’, p. 456. Ibid., p. 451. 32 See Melissa Bellanta: Larrikins: A History (St Lucia, 2012); ‘The Larrikin’s Hop: 30 31

Larrikinism and Late-Colonial Popular Theatre’, Australasian Drama Studies, 52 (2008): 131–47; ‘Leary Kin: The Australian Larrikin and the Blackface Minstrel Dandy’, Journal of Social History, 42/3 (2009): 677–95; ‘The Larrikin Girl’, Journal of Australian Studies, 34/4 (2010): 499–512. 33 Twopeny, p. 221. ‘This’, he stated with much justification, ‘is the land of newspapers’. A later visitor from France noted in 1890 that ‘more than 110’ newspapers circulated in Melbourne and its suburbs, another startling statistic by today’s standards. See Oscar Comettant, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines, trans. Judith Armstrong (Adelaide, 1980 [originally 1890]), p. 220.

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newspaper crime reporting evoked everyday occurrences and at the same time distanced its readers from events, revelling in each intimate detail, but moralizing from a sphere safely removed.34 Hence the ostensibly unlikely claim in January 1870 that larrikins were a ‘daily experience’ for Argus readers35 might in a way have been close to the mark: larrikins could be encountered each day, indeed potentially many times daily, but the nature of the meeting would most probably be vicarious, the result of consulting a number of different publications and with no need to venture too far from a fireside armchair. In this way press commentary made larrikin activity seem pervasive, a depiction which, in turn, cast the public domain as a place of potential menace and a source of heightened anxiety. As the newspaper fanned the flames of concern, some public figures expressed doubts about the basis of the crime reports. In 1874, judge Redmond Barry earned a swift rebuke for daring to suggest that the press exaggerated the larrikin menace, and later the same year references were made during the parliamentary debate on the Crimes and Offences Prevention Bill to ‘a sort of mania’ about larrikinism among newspaper editors and to the ‘spasmodic fit’ in which the colony found itself on the issue.36 A split had occurred between those who viewed larrikinism as a serious social menace and various members of the legislature who held firm in their more liberal beliefs. Files held at Victoria’s Public Record Office reveal that the police, nonetheless, took seriously the public complaints they received either directly by post, transferred from the Town Clerk’s office or culled with scissors from the newspapers. As Mark Finnane has observed in relation to larrikinism in Queensland, however, constables sent to investigate often discovered little or no foundation for grievance.37 In September 1881, for example, a letter from ‘Paterfamilias’ to the Daily Telegraph recounted how the correspondent and two female friends had been ‘grossly insulted’ when walking down Melbourne’s Spring Street one Sunday evening, and that later a mob of ‘larrikins and prostitutes’ had been encountered near Carlton Gardens, egging on two participants in an illegal prize-fight. At the request of Superintendent Winch, Constable Maxwell filed a report, stating that he was on duty in the area on the night in question but ‘saw nothing whatever of the offence complained of’. ‘In fact’, Maxwell concluded, ‘it was one of the quietest nights Bill Schwarz, ‘Night Battles: Hooligan and Citizen’, in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (London and New York, 1996), p. 108. 35 Argus, 10 January 1870, p. 4. 36 Argus, 5 October 1874, p. 4 and VPD, Session 1874, Vol. XX, pp. 2,477 and 2,486. Defending the Bill, Henry John Wrixon (MLA for Belfast) retorted that ‘honourable members mostly live outside the sphere where they can be practically acquainted with this evil’ – a reference to separation both physical and social from the working-class communities in which the larrikins largely resided (ibid., p. 2,491). 37 See Mark Finnane, ‘Larrikins, Delinquents and Cops: Police and Young People in Australian History’, in The Police and Young People in Australia, ed. Rob White and Christine Alder (Cambridge: 1994), pp. 9–10. 34

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during the fortnight that I was on duty in the locality.’38 The following year, three letters of complaint to the police from Mr Chamberlain (a chemist in Commercial Road, Prahran) alleged a range of antisocial larrikin behaviour including foul language, blocking of the roadway, use of the plaintiff’s doorway as a toilet and the filling of his gas lamps with urine. Once again the police found nothing.39 And in 1887, responding to James Ewins’ letter regarding larrikins disturbing Sunday evensong in Richmond by stoning St Bartholomew’s Church and throwing mud and pieces of dead fish at the congregation, Constable Craig reported that he had attended the scene a week later in plain clothes and seen no sign of larrikins.40 Was it the case, then, that complainants were telling lies, concocting false stories? Or are the police reports unreliable? The truth, I think, lies somewhere in the middle. Consider the probable genesis of a complaint and the manner of police response. One does not, we might speculate, normally raise a concern the first time one feels aggrieved, unless the offence was very serious; instead evidence is accumulated to make a case, a word or two might be had with the person or persons causing annoyance, or time is bided in the hope that the nuisance will abate. Only later will pen be put to paper, or neighbours conscripted to form a petition. When this occurs the complainant might be tempted to overstate the problem in an effort to elicit action from the police, action that could well be considered overdue. Next comes the response. The letter of grievance arrives and is investigated, the police sending one or more constables on foot to make enquiries. Unavoidably, this is days after the alleged offence where complaints in writing are concerned. The constables sometimes uncover wrong-doing on visiting the scene, but more frequently report finding little or nothing. We should not be surprised: could the police be expected to catch larrikins repeating the act? And even if they did observe larrikin disorder, would it always be in the policeman’s best interests to report it, given that the purpose of the beat was to prevent lawbreaking in the first place? Clear differences also existed between public and police perceptions of ‘larrikin’ offending, a disparity well illustrated by an 1882 case from Emerald Hill. Following a strongly-worded letter referring to a larrikin nuisance ‘every evening’ in Moray Street, Sergeant Bailey, sent to make enquiries, reported that ‘on one or two occasions a number of Boys ranging 8 years of age to 12 years of age were found playing in the Street, but not … committing any mischief in anything that would justify the Police in bringing them before the Bench for their conduct’.41 Larrikinism, it transpires, could be a matter of perspective: a grave problem in the eyes of a local resident might, to a visiting policeman, seem like mere child’s PROV VPRS 937, Inward Registered Correspondence (Victoria Police), Unit 304 (1881–1882), bundle 2. Newspaper clipping dated 13 September 1881; police report dated 17 September 1881. 39 VPRS 937, Unit 308 (1882–1883), bundle 5. Letters dated: 29 May 1882; 3 July 1882; 8 April 1883. 40 Ibid., Unit 321 (1887), bundle 2. Complaint dated 28 February 1887; police report dated 13 March 1887. 41 Ibid., Unit 306 (1881–1882), bundle 5. Police report dated 6 June 1882. 38

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play. Serious offences, especially those that resulted in physical assault, did lead to arrests and prosecutions,42 but it would not be surprising if a substantial number of complaints – like the example above – were dismissed as trivial, and verbal cautions issued where behaviour fell just outside the remit of the law or the policeman’s individual inclination to act.43 On these matters the historical record is less forthcoming. Gaps in the Grid As well as detailing myriad public grievances, police files further reveal the dissatisfactions of the police themselves in countering larrikins. In response to a petition from seven residents of Grattan Street, Carlton, concerning ‘a gang of boys who nightly assemble for the purpose of throwing stones, breaking windows and otherwise annoying the inhabitants’ (and which was accompanied, for emphasis, by a sample stone), the reporting policemen complained that the beats in the district were too long to prevent trouble and that ‘as soon as the boys see a constable approaching they run away’.44 Indeed, two other police reports in the series note that code words including ‘Nit’ and ‘Philip’ were used by larrikins to signal danger.45 Little wonder that local residents and policemen alike became frustrated, for it was in-between constables’ beats that larrikins could act with impunity. And, crucially, it was in the gaps of the city that larrikins often found room for expression. Paul Carter has asserted that the physical structure of nineteenthcentury central Melbourne – with its lattice-like pattern of interconnecting streets and absence of an obvious centre – played a major role in fostering the city’s commercial outlook.46 For Carter, the laying out of the city in 1837 can best be See, for example, Argus, 1 January 1874, p. 5 (reporting sentences of two to three months’ hard labour for larrikins who assaulted a landlord’s relative and smashed up a hotel bar), and Argus, 18 November 1874, p. 5 (six years’ hard labour for two larrikins for mugging a miner visiting from Queensland). 43 See Finnane, ‘Larrikins’, pp. 10–15 for parallel observations. 44 VPRS 937/P4, Miscellaneous Melbourne and Departments Inward Registered Correspondence, Unit 7 (1868), bundle 2. Petition dated 18 August 1868; reply by Sergeant Crisp dated 25 August 1868. Concerns regarding inadequate policing levels persisted throughout the period. As a case in point in 1891 the Age commented that ‘there have been no additions to the number of the force for years, although the population has increased by leaps and bounds. A constable in Carlton or Collingwood, for instance, has a night beat of four miles. In Collingwood there are only four constables and a sergeant, or two to 35,000 people … A tradesman sometimes goes to the police station complaining of annoyances from a company of larrikin youths, but there is no constable available … ’ (see Age, 20 January 1891, p. 6). 45 See VPRS 937, Unit 302 (1880), bundle 5, report of Senior Constable Walsh, 26 January 1880; ibid., Unit 308 (1882–1883), bundle 1, report of Constable Rahilly, 3 October 1882. 46 Paul Carter, ‘Allotments in the Wilderness: The Australian City and its Spatial Impact on History’, Age Monthly Review, 2/11 (March 1983): 13–15. 42

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understood as a ‘spatial event’: an intersection of time and space producing a series of like-for-like land parcels, hard to rank in terms of status and thus prompting speculators to disperse investment across the grid. ‘In spatial terms’, Carter concludes, ‘Melbourne was the model of Progress’.47 Commercial ‘Progress’, however, was not the only outcome of the Melbourne model – while residents waited for builders to fill in empty plots, the city’s larrikins occupied the unused space for their own ends. During the winter months of 1868, for example, they could be found on Sundays on a vacant block at the corner of Neill and Canning Streets in Carlton, ‘coming out of the town and gambling & swearing’.48 In response to complaints about the activity, local police promised to try and prevent future disturbances but noted that ‘Carlton is too large for constables to patrol it properly’.49 Even when police were available, they faced problems in regulating spaces caught in a legal no-man’s land. Speaking as witness before the Select Committee on the Crimes and Offences Prevention Bill in 1874, Magistrate Sturt explained that: From my experience … lads will get into vacant pieces of private ground, unenclosed, or with only one rail perhaps, it is not a public place, consequently there is a difficulty in adjudicating … If you have got a vacant allotment not enclosed, the lads will assemble there on Sundays … to gamble, or to play at pitch-and-toss, and to do other things greatly to the annoyance of the whole neighbourhood. 50

Little had changed almost 20 years later when in January 1893 a Carlton jeweller named Yardley highlighted the problems associated with another neglected corner of the city. In a polite but firm letter to the Chief Commissioner of Police, Yardley stated that: I wish to draw your attention to the annoyance caused to the Residents of Rathdowne Street between Lee and Newry Streets every evening by the congregation of a couple of bands of larrikins on a vacant allotment of land … [T]hey consist of one lot of mere boys only who seem never to be happy unless standing or sitting about the front of my premises, throwing stones at the telegraph cups or at the verandah posts … The other band is a lot of young fellows who are filling in their time by step dancing on the footpath, singing and on one or two occasions indulging in obscene language … [N]o sooner do they 47 Ibid., 14–15. In a similar vein, Helen Proudfoot describes Melbourne’s original grid structure of identically sized allotments as politically ‘democratic’ rather than ‘merely “regular”’. See ‘Founding Cities in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, in The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History, ed. Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone (Sydney, 2000), pp. 13–14. 48 See VPRS 937/P4, Unit 7 (1868), bundle 2, letter from C. Bolwell, dated 16 August 1868. 49 Ibid., police report dated 21 August 1868. 50 SCoCOPB, Q. 330.

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A revised Police Offences Act had belatedly extended the definition of a ‘public place’ in Victoria to include private ‘roads streets footways courts alleys and thoroughfares’ for policing purposes in 1890, but it would seem from accounts like Yardley’s that the law proved ineffective.52 Until Melbourne’s population density increased, and the vacant allotments were built upon, the city’s larrikins would continue to exasperate residents across the inner suburbs. Reflecting on the phenomenon in 1910, a police officer stated that larrikinism ‘was not made; it was born, or grew out of its environment’.53 ‘Coeval’, it was observed, with the progress of Melbourne,54 ‘it arises as mushrooms arise out of the steamy paddocks’.55 References to gang (and later ‘push’) names including the ‘The Fitzroy Forties’, ‘The Napier Street Push’, ‘The Bouverie Forties’ and ‘The Nicholson Street Push’ indicate a strong territorial affinity, with the word ‘forty’ a slang synonym for area or stamping ground.56 One larrikin haunt on Hoddle Street in Clifton Hill was even known locally during the 1870s as ‘larrikin corner’, a reference which further underscores the larrikins’ sense of connection with place.57 Other distinctive city spaces also invited occupation. Larrikin groups assembled underneath verandahs in Richmond, hung around the city’s unplanned network of narrow laneways, and postured at the corners of Melbourne’s many crossroads.58 In an exceptional but telling case, on the corner of Fitzroy and Gertrude Streets to the north of the city centre, perhaps Melbourne’s first larrikins utilized blocks of stone left over from the construction of nearby Granite Terrace to form a stage. ‘Fired with the spirit of emulation’, recalled ‘A Fitzroy Boy’ some time later, here city youth would act out their own scenes from popular theatre, turning to the pages of an old London song book they had acquired and belting out ditties including ‘The 51 See VPRS 937, Unit 338 (1893), bundle 3, letter dated 23 January 1893, and for comparison VPRS 3181, Series 1, Unit 674, Nuisances (1891), item 2144 (a complaint regarding persons congregating on vacant ground at the corner of Grattan and Cardigan Streets, also in Carlton). 52 See Police Offences Act 1890, s. 3. 53 Argus, 19 March 1910, p. 21. 54 Argus, 25 October 1899, p. 11. 55 Argus, 19 March 1910, p. 21. 56 See Baker, The Australian Language, p. 124; Age, 20 January 1891, p. 6; Age, 20 February 1896, p. 5; McConville, ‘Outcast Melbourne’, p. 137. 57 Argus, 23 December 1879, p. 5. 58 On verandahs see VPRS 937, Unit 338 (1892–1893), bundle 1. On laneways, refer to VPRS 937, Unit 308 (1882–1883), bundle 4, complaint regarding Little Collins Street (dated 2 March 1883). On street corners see Age, 20 January 1891, p. 6, and an 1899 newspaper observation that ‘one of the most noticeable features of Melbourne … is the crowd of larrikin-looking boys of all ages to be seen nightly congregated in the vicinity of street corners, on vacant pieces of ground, around lamp posts or in front of shop windows’. (Clipping in SLV MS 9910, box 41.)

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Leary Cove’ or the ‘The Leary Bloke’.59 The many ‘intricate paths and little open spaces’ between the stone slabs became ‘a favourite playground for boys of more than one generation’,60 the correspondent observed – evidence at least partially substantiated by the complaints of local residents concerning ‘young hopefuls’ occupying the location from morning to night, swearing and enjoying outdoor suppers of pilfered crayfish and brandy.61 To outsiders these street corner congregations of larrikins often looked purposeless, a squandering of time and leisure. Yet as Paul Corrigan has proposed, ‘doing nothing’ is in fact an intense experience, full of incident, anticipation and giving rise to ‘weird ideas’.62 It was here that plans might be hatched, brinksmanship encouraged and feelings of boredom or bravado channelled into antisocial activity. Interlopers who threatened the equilibrium or merely appeared ‘out of place’ stirred a defensive response. Adults and young children encountering larrikins were often forced to modify their own behaviour to work around a perceived and sometimes very real threat. Pedestrians had frequently to abandon the footpath and walk in the middle of street to avoid insults and jostling, while in April 1893 residents of Kew protested that larrikins from Collingwood were occupying the Walmer Street footbridge across the Yarra River, threatening Melbourne’s crucial topographical and social divide, and deterring the well-heeled ratepayers of Studley Park from using the crossing point.63 One of the complainants in the latter instance, prominent parliamentarian Sir Henry Wrixon, stated that ‘he would not allow any of his ladies to pass there alone in the evenings’ in light of the ‘rude and insulting remarks’ commonly made by larrikins.64 A more visible police presence was ordered, with instructions issued for a constable to patrol the footbridge twice daily for a fortnight, and also to ensure that the nearby Victoria Street bridge – which fearful locals were choosing as an alternative route across the river – remained clear of disreputable characters.65 Argus, 4 August 1896, p. 7. I am most grateful to Melissa Bellanta for bringing this source to my attention. Granite Terrace was erected in 1858. Cranwell (p. 76) notes a similar instance in London, with cardboard stages made by children for reprise performances of music hall scenes. 60 Argus, 4 August 1896, p. 7. 61 Argus: 1 May 1871, p. 7; 2 May 1871, p. 6. 62 Paul Corrigan, ‘Doing Nothing’, in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London, 1976), pp. 103–5. 63 On holding the footpath, see Age, 18 February 1896, p. 6, and Age, 20 February 1896, p. 5: ‘(Larrikins) infested the neighbourhood of Webb and Napier streets, and female pedestrians had to leave the footpath and walk in the middle of the road … Men were not safe from their insults either, and their rascality was generally vented in a severe and spiteful fashion on juveniles’. For the footbridge case, refer to VPRS 937, Unit 339 (1893), bundle 3. 64 Ibid., see report of Sergeant McGrath. 65 Ibid., see report of Constable Daly, attached time sheet and clipping from the Kew Mercury stating that ‘respectable people [go] round by the Victoria-street bridge’. A similar incident, involving ‘about thirty’ larrikins on a footbridge over the Merri Creek, is reported 59

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Nicholas Caire, Swanston Street Looking South (albumen silver print, c. 1880). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

As these examples attest, larrikinism was a phenomenon closely associated with public space. What, we may ask, made such spaces so alluring? For urban youth the street corner was the equivalent of the gentleman’s club: a place to meet, talk and be entertained.66 Freedom from parental supervision also featured as a motivation, as did the desire to escape the hot and stuffy conditions of cramped inner-city housing.67 The pull of the street played a part, too, for the desire to be seen was an integral element of the larrikin ethos. A Nicholas Caire photograph taken on Swanston Street around 1880 shows two larrikins posing for the camera (see Figure 4.1). In contrast to the purposeful activity of those around them, the in the Melbourne Herald, 16 March 1885, p. 3. Further, an Argus report in 1899 notes that during the 1870s it was ‘customary’ for larrikins from south Richmond to block the Chapel Street bridge over the Yarra and demand beer money from those wishing to cross (see 25 October 1899, p. 11). 66 A comparison also made by Melbourne reformer Alexander Sutherland (see Argus, 17 May 1887, p. 10). 67 ‘[T]he climate makes it impossible for them to spend the evening in their small and stuffy homes, after a day at the factory. [The] lads find their only source of recreation in the streets, and it is not difficult to see how quickly skylarking develops into crime’ – editorial from Age, 17 January 1899 (cutting located in SLV MS 9910, box 2).

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Postcard of Smith Street, Collingwood (c. 1906–1911). Courtesy Royal Historical Society of Victoria

larrikins are stationary, apparently just hanging around. Similarly, a view of Smith Street, Collingwood, in the first decade of the twentieth century (Figure 4.2) depicts a group of youths holding court on the roadway, claiming the street corner as their rightful domain. Note the defiant hands-on-hips posture adopted in both images (see Figure 4.3 for enlargements). Whether the larrikins were the intended subjects of these streetscape photographs, their subjectivity and defiant bearing are clearly evident. As Roland Barthes has argued, the photographic pose constitutes an intention for reading, an opportunity to present ourselves as we would wish others to see us.68 The visual equivalent of an autobiographical passage, the pose bears a message, transitory in nature to the photographer, continuous to those contemplating the scene thereafter. In these instances that message is insouciance. ‘Doing nothing’ is hence nothing of the sort – loitering in the street and striking a pose acquire a social significance that encapsulates the larrikin perspective. Disruption and Distraction Once they had staked their claims to outdoor space, Melbourne’s larrikins found ready resource for troublemaking in the piles of blue road metal deposited around the city for use in the upgrading of street surfaces. Leonard Stretton recalled 68 See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, pp. 22, 27; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London, 2000 [originally 1981]), pp. 10–15, 78–80.

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Fig. 4.3

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

Enlarged details from Figures 4.1 and 4.2

great heaps of this rock, ripe for plunder, lying about in the Sydney Road of his 1890s childhood, while in 1891 Edward Kinglake observed that hurling lumps of bluestone was one of the larrikin’s ‘favourite modes of attack’.69 In countless acts of petty rebellion, larrikins threw back at city fathers constituent parts of the very streets that city councils were trying to improve.70 Newly installed street lamps were a common target for the missiles, with larrikins smashing glass lamp cases at a faster rate than municipal authorities – petitioned by ratepayers for new lights in the hope that a warm glow of safety would ensue – could replace them.71 As the outspoken journalist ‘the Vagabond’ noted aptly, in Melbourne it was a mere ‘stone’s throw’ from squalor to opulence,72 and the gap was often bridged easily with the extension of an arm. Urban disorder accompanied built progress, with the larrikins from the back lanes rubbing shoulders with respectable city-goers bound for the club or for Collins Street. Particularly vehement treatment by larrikins was reserved for Salvation Army members in the early 1880s. Their marching took them into the heart of workingclass areas and their messianic tone roused strong feelings of antipathy. Larrikin gangs responded by forming their own ‘skeleton armies’, singing parodies of hymns or disrupting meetings.73 They also determined to humiliate passing processions 69 See Stretton, ‘Judge Stretton’s Reminiscences’: 18, and ‘Larrikins’, in Grant and Serle, p. 155. Convicted in 1881 for being a ‘rogue and vagabond’, Richard Watson was found with ‘seven or eight’ pieces of road metal and broken bricks in his pockets, having earlier struck a policeman on the head with a further stone. See Argus, 20 January 1882, p. 7. 70 See, for example, Argus, 10 January 1870, p.4; 1883 police report cited in McConville, ‘Outcast Melbourne’, p. 137; Age, 3 January 1890, p. 7. 71 VPRS 3181, Unit 459, Lamps (1885–1889) contains a petition (item 2128) requesting the erection of a street lamp at the corner of Grattan and Flemington Road ‘as a measure of protection to people passing along the street, which unfortunately at that particular spot is infested with larrikins and other bad characters’. 72 John Stanley James (‘The Vagabond’), The Vagabond Papers, ed. Michael Cannon (Melbourne, 1969 [originally 1877–1878]), p. 30. 73 The Salvation Army newspaper, The War Cry, makes many references to larrikins in the period – see for instance 14 July 1883, p. 3 and 4 August 1883, p. 4. Blair Ussher’s

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– ‘We seldom get through a march’, one Salvation Army captain complained in 1883, ‘without being covered in flour or eggs’.74 Some larrikins apparently even tailored their own uniforms for such occasions, wearing a white star on hat and breast, sometimes accompanied by the skull and crossbones.75 When a policeman accosted an estimated party of 300 larrikins marching down Queensberry Street in 1883, the larrikins claimed, with some justification, that they had as much right to parade there as the Salvationists.76 A greater contrast with the sanctioned use of the street in youth parades of the period (discussed in Chapter 5) would be hard to find. City entertainment venues drew in the larrikins on those occasions when they left their neighbourhoods, and particularly after dark. In this respect the rapid growth in mid- and late-Victorian Melbourne of commercial leisure zones, particularly around Bourke Street, proved crucial in nurturing larrikinism,77 providing a series of spaces to rival the vacant allotment or street corner in attractiveness. Billiard rooms, bars, dancing saloons and boxing contests attracted many,78 but greater numbers flocked to the theatres and markets. During the early 1870s, the Argus reported numerous incidents involving larrikins inside and outside Melbourne’s Theatre Royal. With the cheap seats located upstairs in the gallery, larrikins took the opportunity to fling rubbish over the balustrade and expectorate on unfortunate patrons below. Forged tickets were used in an attempt to gain entry, and scores of larrikins loitered around the theatre’s stage door on Little Bourke Street to jostle and jeer the actors.79 The melodramatic fare on offer inside the theatre included productions like Don Caesar and The Factory Girl of Melbourne: escapist spectacle in which the rich and powerful received their comeuppance.80 Veronica Kelly proposes that the popularity of melodrama in this period is related to the genre’s exploration of psychological ‘unfinished business’, with deliverance and justice offered forth thesis, ‘Religion and the Social Structure: An Analysis of the Salvation Army’s role in late Nineteenth Century Melbourne’ (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1979) contains further examples of larrikin disruption. 74 War Cry, 1 December 1883, p. 2. 75 Ussher, p. 101. 76 See McConville, ‘Outcast Melbourne’, pp. 234–5. 77 Underscoring this point, larrikin members of South Melbourne’s ‘Flying Angels’ drew their name from a popular amusement ride (akin to a ‘flying fox’) operating near the Eastern Market. My thanks to Melissa Bellanta for sharing this insight. 78 James, The Vagabond Papers, p. 30; Daily Telegraph, 5 May 1887, p. 5; Age, 25 March 1880, p. 3; Argus, 31 January 1882, p. 4. Also see Tocsin, 3 March 1892, pp. 4–5, in which ‘C.M. Gee’ purports to have spent an evening with larrikins at a dance hall in Nicholson Street. 79 Argus: 4 July 1870, p. 5; 24 June 1871, p. 5; 3 December 1872, p. 5; 10 January 1873, p. 5; 22 January 1873, p. 5. 80 See Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage 1829–1929 (Melbourne, 1983) for a discussion of nineteenth-century melodrama.

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as resolutions to common themes of love, loss and oppression.81 No surprise, then, that the socially slighted flocked inside, with working-class women just as conspicuous in their attendance as male larrikins.82 ‘[J]ust to see what it was like’, John Buckley Castieau, prison governor at Melbourne Gaol, purchased a cheap ticket to a Saturday night minstrel farce playing at Bourke Street’s St. James’s Hall in 1872. Upstairs he found about 150 spectators, ‘mostly apprentice lads’, laughing along uproariously to the noisy drama on stage. A handful of women identified by Castieau as prostitutes were also in attendance, constituent members in a rollicking scene that prompted the governor to caution that ‘I feel certain there must be a certain fastness if not absolute naughtiness about any night resort that will attract the larrikin & wanderer about town.’83 Castieau’s experience was not unusual; rowdiness frequently accompanied this congregation of sexes and classes, and during the 1880s some theatre operators raised door prices from sixpence to a shilling in an effort – only partially successful in its effects – to discourage unruly youngsters.84 Melbourne’s markets offered entertainment of a different sort. At the Western or ‘Rot Market’ there was mouldy fruit in abundance to be thrown about, whilst at the raffish Eastern Market traders on the lower flat welcomed the larrikin Saturday night crowd to their shooting galleries, bagatelle stalls and skittle alleys with a mixture of unease and fear. The Town Clerk received a steady stream of complaints regarding the latter site throughout the period. In 1875, 17 stallholders petitioned for action to be taken against ‘a gang of youths ranging from 10 to 16 years of age and comprising more than 20 in number’, whose small quick fingers, it was said, could soon rob a stall of its wares.85 Despite the reconstruction of the Eastern Market, the trouble continued; in 1894, Messrs Rampling and Greenlan complained of larrikins ‘filling paper bags with water … (& may be other than water)’ and throwing them into their premises, whilst on a separate occasion ‘a great crowd hunted a half witted man all through the Market and eventually into our shop’.86 Belying arguments that larrikins were motivated principally by a sense of working-class solidarity in their activities, in Melbourne rival pushes fought Veronica Kelly, ‘Female and Juvenile Meanings in Late Nineteenth-Century Australian Popular Theatre’, in The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture, ed. Ken Stewart (St Lucia, 1996), p. 113. 82 Ibid. 83 Mark Finnane (ed.), The Difficulties of My Position: The Diaries of Prison Governor John Buckley Castieau, 1855–1884 (Canberra, 2004), pp. 207–8 (entry dated Saturday 19 October 1872). ‘I could not help wondering’, Castieau continued, ‘at there not being some worthier style of entertainment available for the hundreds in Melbourne with shillings to spend & an anxiety to dispose of them.’ 84 Freeman, p. 77. 85 VPRS 3181, Unit 525, Markets (1875–1876), item 752. Petition dated 14 June 1875. 86 VPRS 3181, Unit 553, Markets (1894), unnumbered item, dated 23 August 1894. 81

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each other in public for territory and on occasion interrupted meetings at the Trades Hall.87 At Williamstown larrikins and ‘middies’ (midshipmen) came into conflict in the mid 1870s instead of uniting against a common class enemy, and even during the 1890 maritime strike larrikins were shunned as outcasts by unions keen to claim a moral high ground.88 Moreover, although most larrikins were indeed sighted in working-class areas, not all were working-class, at least if some sporadic contemporary accounts and the examples later cited by McLachlan are to be believed.89 Engagement in unskilled and semiskilled workrooms may have kindled class awareness, but it cannot be said that feelings of injustice were channelled or organized in any formal sense. As Connell and Irving suggest, larrikins were always ‘the least tractable element’ of the working class.90 To them the local and the fraternal were what mattered most, and the larrikin was defined as much by space, youth and gender as by class. The Aesthetics of Performance Larrikinism, evidence suggests, was largely a matter of public performance, albeit a phenomenon also linked to demographic growth and moral panic. In contrast with the officially authorized and well-regulated use of public space examined in the next chapter, larrikins represented a decidedly disorderly aspect of modernity. Larrikinism was not necessarily a full-time occupation; many of the young troublemakers brought before the Bench had day jobs as boot makers or shop assistants, engaging in public posturing when work was done.91 When they entered the public domain, larrikins set themselves apart by the type and style of clothes they wore, the group activities they indulged in and the slang they uttered. Together these elements represented what might be termed the ‘semiotics’ See McConville’s description of the ‘larrikin wars’ between Fitzroy and Carlton gangs in 1885 for instance (‘Outcast Melbourne’, pp.76–8), and also Argus, 7 August 1877, p. 5. 88 The Argus first reported a standoff on 5 October 1874 (p. 5). Police intervened a day later when a fight between a sailor and a larrikin triggered wider disturbances (Argus, 7 October 1874, p. 5). Trouble flared again the following year (Argus, 30 October 1875, p. 7). On larrikin disruption on the river wharves, see Age, 27 August 1890, p. 5. 89 Cornish, p. 94; Age, 25 March 1880, p. 3; Melbourne Bulletin, 21 July 1882, p. 9; and McLachlan, ‘Larrikinism’, pp. 37–9. 90 R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narrative and Argument (Melbourne, 1980), p. 191. 91 For instance, an 1871 warrant for the arrest of Richard Turvey (self-styled ‘King of the Richmond Larrikins’) noted that the 17-year-old worked as a boot maker (Argus, 17 February 1871, p. 5). Ann Larson, taking her cue in this regard from McLachlan, sees larrikinism as the result of high disposable income, a relatively secure billet at home with parents and frustration about vulnerability in the work marketplace. See Larson, pp. 148– 50, 190. 87

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of larrikinism, surface signs that could be read, described and subscribed to by larrikins themselves. Nat Gould, an acute observer of colonial mores, explained to his readers in 1896 that the larrikin ‘has a language, manners and dress peculiarly his own’.92 A range of sources can help retrieve elements of this larrikin style and further our understanding of larrikin activity. A typical press description of the larrikin look is found in a Melbourne Age editorial of January 1891: He is generally young and sturdy, with a grisly moustache, bell-bottomed trousers over a pair of light high-heeled boots, a slouch hat, more or less broad and stiff in the rim, and (especially in the case of what a police constable would describe as a thorough ‘buck’ larrikin) a handkerchief of flaming color round his throat without a collar … 93

Later in the decade the left-wing newspaper the Tocsin published a similar report, slightly more forbearing in tone: Height, about 5ft. 6½in.; style, ‘lairy.’ Slop-made suit, tight fit and cheap. Flower in slouched hat, well over eyes. ‘Silk’ rag round neck. Football colours, cigarette, much spit – a regular lad is your typical larrikin, gay and festive … Fond of sport – very … Cat-sharp and a bit of a bully. Good ear for music, but can’t sing for sour apples. An expert in great small talk. Smart with his everready back answers, that smacks low wit.94

Larrikins derived evident pride from their appearance, their clothing likely to be an attempt to buy immediate status among their contemporaries, or a form of compensation against the ‘hidden injuries’ of a lowly class position.95 When a number of waistcoats disappeared from a city tailor’s shop in 1871, police soon found the culprits, foolishly wearing the stolen items as they paraded around the streets before their peers.96 On this occasion instant kudos came at a high price, and a court appearance followed. High-heeled boots (mentioned often by larrikin observers) were another favoured item, simultaneously boosting the height of Nat Gould, Town and Bush: Stray Notes on Australia (London, 1896), p. 99. Age, 20 January 1891, p. 6. Note the connotations of the term ‘buck’, with its

92 93

allusions to youthful sexual potency. 94 Tocsin, 15 September 1898, p. 3. For comparisons with the attire of the ‘hooligan’ and the ‘hoodlum’, see Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London and New York, 1988), p. 20; Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan, pp. 92–9; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of San Francisco: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (London, 2004 [originally 1933]), p. 159. 95 A point informed by the useful introduction to the theory of dress in Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London, 2003 [originally 1986]). Also see Margaret Maynard Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, 1994). 96 Argus, 19 September 1871, p. 5.

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their adolescent wearers, indicating spending power and providing a weapon with which to kick if circumstance required. Above such footwear, tightly-fitting flared trousers (possibly stitched at work or run up in the home by sisters, mothers or girlfriends) had a different meaning, emphasizing the thighs and flaunting an excess of masculinity and sexual potential.97 Note the stance before the camera of the larrikin on the right of Figure 4.1 (above), his legs turned outwards to display his flares. Also observe the popularity of distinctive neckwear among the young prisoners in Figure 4.4, below. These images show prisoners ranging in age from 16 to 24, charged with ‘assault in company’ and other public order offences. They are wearing the clothes in which they entered Melbourne Gaol or Pentridge. As Margaret Maynard and Elizabeth Wilson have argued, clothing is central to concepts of identity and selfhood. ‘Garments do not merely cover the body’, Maynard contends, ‘they inscribe upon it signs of ownership … In addition, clothes are the material evidence of current preoccupations with appearance that speak of constantly changing relationships between the body and the performing self.’98 The finances of a tobacco packer like James Nesbitt may not have stretched to an expensive suit, but working-class youths like him could nonetheless afford a striking cravat or a patterned scarf.99 Brightly printed or otherwise distinctive neckwear would stand out strongly against the dark material of a jacket, and possibly served as a mark of allegiance within territorial larrikin gangs.100 Some evidence of personal grooming is also on display in these images. Note the carefully waxed hair of John Nash, an individual who cuts a striking pose with his chequerboard neck scarf and corduroy jacket. Observe, too, the Mohawk haircut sported by Alfred Moran, the diminutive Tasmanian (standing at 5’ 4 ¾″) who fashioned this arresting look whilst serving two years’ hard labour – with half the sentence spent in solitary confinement – during the 1890s. Moran, the prison register informs us, scribbled on his cell wall,

See Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 1994), pp. 117–20 for a similar analysis of masculine dress. On the production of larrikin attire, see Melissa Bellanta and Simon Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin: Street Style in Colonial Australia’, Cultural and Social History (forthcoming 2013). 98 Maynard, Fashioned from Penury, p. 6. Also see Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, pp. vii–xi. 99 Reinforcing this link, John Buckley Castieau (the prison governor) closely identified scarves with larrikinism, noting the appearance on an 1877 jury of an ex-prisoner ‘of the most decided Larrikin type’ with ‘the usual … flannel muffler’ (Finnane, ‘Castieau Diaries’, p. 1,128 [entry dated 9 July 1877]). In 1882, it was observed that such neckwear was sometimes fastened with a large bone ring, produced ‘as a rule’ in Pentridge and often featuring scrimshaw designs (Argus, 31 January 1882, p. 4). 100 Tattoos, noted often in prison registers, may have served a similar function: see Argus, 18 February 1908, p. 4 (regarding the Footscray ‘Heart and Arrow’ push); Bellanta and Sleight, ‘The Leary Larrikin’. 97

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Fig. 4.4

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Mug shots of larrikins serving time in Melbourne’s prison system, 1870–92. Top row: John Kenworthy, PROV VPRS 515, Unit 13 (1871), prisoner no. 9,084, p. 394; George Jenkins, VPRS 515, Unit 15 (1872), prisoner no. 10,024, p. 351; John Nash, VPRS 515, Unit 15 (1872), prisoner no. 10,025, p. 352. Middle row: James Nesbitt, VPRS 515, Unit 18 (1873–1874), prisoner no. 11,251, p. 169; Patrick O’Connor, VPRS 515, Unit 21 (1874–1876), prisoner no. 12,851, p. 421; James Duggan, VPRS 515, Unit 25 (1877), prisoner no. 14,441, p. 158. Bottom row: Alfred Moran, VPRS 515, Unit 45 (1891–1892), prisoner no. 25,252, p. 444. These images are © State of Victoria 2012. Reproduced with permission

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assaulted a warder and swore liberally during his time in prison.101 He did not yield easily to the system. Such larrikin attire contrasted sharply with that worn by other sections of society. In Breeches and Bustles, her illustrated history of clothes worn in Australia, Elizabeth Scandrett notes that the larrikin look was ‘the exact opposite of the respectable city man’.102 Especially in the last decade of the century, she argues, ‘respectability’ became all-important in appearance, with colours more sombre, suits dark, and narrow ‘peg-top’ trousers worn by dashing young middleclass men.103 Cartoonists delighted in playing on the differences of appearance, emphasizing and at the same time ridiculing the larrikin’s dress decisions. Figure 4.5, for example, illustrates an exaggerated or ‘ideal’ larrikin style; Figure 4.6 satirizes larrikin fastidiousness in regard to trousers. On occasions when public parading demanded extra precision, larrikins may well have ‘dressed to impress’, but in their caricatures the cartoonists exaggerated each and every flourish. For a more authentic assessment of larrikin fashion in dayto-day situations, we can turn to the ‘wanted’ descriptions in the Victoria Police Gazette. Some notices puncture the cartoonists’ image of sartorial outlandishness. An early example from 1872, for instance, lists the accused (identified as a ‘larrikin’) as of ‘shabby appearance’, wearing ‘dark tweed sac-coat, light-coloured trousers, [and] old slouched felt hat’.104 Two years later, pug-nosed Victorian Michael Walsh, aged 19 or 20 and sought by the police for assault, was described in similar terms: ‘dressed in shabby dark tweed suit, and of larrikin appearance’.105 Other wanted individuals, however, conformed more closely to the outré appearance of larrikins as drawn in the cartoons. In April 1874 an arrest warrant for 18-year-old Garney Cooper describes him as 5′ 3 or 4″ in height, wearing a soft black felt hat with a white horseshoe in the band, light tweed trousers and a ‘showy striped scarf’.106 Later that year, James Hansen, alias ‘Plucky Jim’, aged 15 and ‘a Collingwood larrikin’, is noted as having a side stripe on his trousers and a red silk necktie, while recently released Peter Farrell, a labourer in his early twenties, is described as ‘a flash kind of larrikin’.107 It seems the police were well aware of the elements of larrikin style, for some descriptions use shorthand in detailing suspects’ dress. In August 1879, for instance, the Gazette printed details of warrants for assault and described one of the accused, Richard Smith, aged 19, as ‘5 feet 7 inches high, small dark moustache, larrikin appearance’, whilst an See VPRS 515, Unit 45 (1891–1892), prisoner no. 25,252, p. 444. Elizabeth Scandrett, Breeches & Bustles: An Illustrated History of Clothes Worn in

101 102

Australia 1788–1914 (Melbourne, 1978), p. 118. 103 Ibid. Still the best discussion of ‘respectability’ is that found in McCalman, pp. 19–29. 104 Victoria Police Gazette, 29 October 1872, p. 281. 105 Ibid., 15 December, 1874, p. 265. 106 Ibid., 8 April 1874, p. 77. 107 Ibid., 8 December 1874, p. 259 and 21 July 1874, appendix following p. 157.

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Fig. 4.5

Ambrose Dyson, ‘Bugs O’Mara’, Bulletin, 1900. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection and reproduced from Patricia Rolfe, The Journalistic Javelin: An Illustrated History of the Bulletin (Sydney, 1979), p. 159

accomplice, Mark Marks, 21 or 22 and a little taller, is ‘clean shaved; wears white corduroy trousers, black hat and larrikin coat’.108 As the notoriety of larrikins grew, such attire may well have been deliberately selected to ‘astonish and impose, to ward off as well as attract’.109 Larrikin garb allowed its wearer to stand out from the crowd and in addition – as is the wont of the teenager – to clearly demarcate the Ibid., 27 August 1879, p. 216. A phrase borrowed from Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, p. vii.

108 109

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Fig. 4.6

155

‘The Latest Thing in Pads’, Melbourne Punch, 30 June 1892, p. 403. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

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younger generation from more senior members of society. Quite possibly larrikins also hoped their appearance would attract attention from rivals and impress the opposite sex. What inspired this larrikin look? Melissa Bellanta has recently thrown a revealing spotlight on the popular stage as a likely resource, noting the appearance in cheap theatres of larrikin acts performed by Will Whitburn and others and the international circuits that brought influential ‘coster’ and ‘coon’ shows from Britain and America.110 Substantiating these associations, tight-fitting black larrikin coats were sometimes simply referenced by the press in this period as ‘Tommy Dodd’ jackets, the name deriving from a swell character and associated comic stage song.111 A form of feedback loop, it seems, may well have characterized the relationship between sartorial displays on stage and street. As well as dressing distinctively, larrikins also used their own street-talk: a mixture of modified convict-era speech, east-end London rhyme and peculiarly local expression. In 1898 Irish republican Michael Davitt noted that ‘Sydney and Melbourne have their “larrikin” language, just as London has its “slang” vocabulary’.112 In the lingo of the larrikin, gleaned from slang dictionaries and poetry of the time, policemen were ‘traps’, a magistrate a ‘beak’ and a prison term ‘a stretch’ or ‘air and exercise’.113 The crossover with cockney slang of the era is evident, but Sidney Baker, the Australian lexicographer, also notes many local creations. Significantly, he references over 40 larrikin expressions – such as ‘stoush’, ‘dish’ and ‘blue’ – for fighting, and also lists the many denigrating terms, like ‘cab moll’, for prostitute.114 For folklorist Graham Seal, words such as these ‘reflected the uneasy existence along the fuzzy line between workingclass life and criminality’.115 A kind of negative logic operated, where what was least sanctioned by society’s moral guardians acquired the most prominence. Encountering the vernacular of the push, observers may well have concluded that illegality and violence were daily occurrences, and if not actually then at least Bellanta, ‘The Larrikin’s Hop’; Bellanta, ‘Leary Kin’. Argus, 20 January 1882, p. 7; Argus, 31 January 1882, p. 4; Times (London), 6 April

110 111

1869, p. 11 (latter for report of ‘roughs’ causing a nuisance and ‘singing hymns to popular tunes including “Tommy Dodd”’). 112 Michael Davitt, Life and Progress in Australia (London, 1898), p. 191. 113 See for example Cornelius Crowe, The Australian Slang Dictionary, Containing the Words and Phrases of the Thieving Fraternity Together with the Unauthorised, though Popular Expressions now in Vogue with All Classes in Australia (Melbourne, 1895), and Hugh Anderson (ed.), Ballades of Old Bohemia; An Anthology of Louis Esson (Ascot Vale, 1980). As in the case of dress, several such terms operated in international contexts. Compare for instance the glossary provided by Herbert Asbury in The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (London, 1928) with Crowe’s dictionary, Baker’s examples and the sanitized larrikin glossary in C.J. Dennis’ The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (Sydney, 1916 [originally 1915]). 114 Baker, The Australian Language, pp. 125–6. 115 Graham Seal, The Lingo: Listening to Australian English (Sydney, 1999), p. 44.

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rhetorically they would have been right. In social environments where reading skills are comparatively scarce, conversation acquires a heightened importance, conditioning cognition as well as communicating ideas.116 Words, seen in this context, presuppose deeds, and in the largely oral culture of the street, Davitt’s ‘larrikin language’ can be seen to have helped buttress larrikin activities. Baker’s pioneering examination of larrikin speech and suggestions regarding the larrikin’s costume led him to ponder the fine line between appearing tough and looking effeminate. He also noted in passing the masculine bias of nineteenthcentury Australia, mulled over the ramifications of so many slang terms for fighting and offered brief assessment of ‘the larrikin’s girl’.117 Revisiting and extending some of Baker’s ideas and infusing the discussion with more of the historical evidence that is now available allows the larrikin to be reimagined in a new way and for his female counterpart, the ‘larrikiness’, to step at least partially from the shadows. Larrikin Girls Girls, as the early chapters of this book have related, did not enjoy an equality of access to public space in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Melbourne. This resulted in part from societal attitudes about women’s proper place and related concepts of deportment, and also from women’s perceived vulnerability in the public realm. Supporting the latter point, two letters published by the Argus in 1868 stated that upon leaving work female factory hands needed protection from the sexual advances of young men. ‘Each evening, as we step out of our workshops’, wrote ‘Factory Girl’ in July that year, ‘we are accosted … We cannot avoid them; we are followed and teased.’118 ‘Wellwisher’ substantiated the story, stating that ‘on several occasions I have seen young men force themselves into the company of these young ladies’, and that in one instance personal intervention was deemed necessary to secure safe passage.119 A further incident, mentioned in the Victorian Parliament six years later, underscores the anxiety, with Frederick Godfrey reporting that his young female relation had been set upon by a band of larrikins who ‘pulled the feathers out of her bonnet, and threw them over a fence’ as she was walking home from school in St Kilda.120 Both physical danger and sexual menace can be inferred from accounts like these. Yet despite the perceived and actual imperilment caused by groups of loitering adolescent males, in cases where young females found in the company of larrikins were brought before the courts they received severe punishment. When Magistrate 116 Richard D. Sonn, ‘Language, Crime, and Class: The Popular Culture of French Anarchism in the 1890s’, Historical Reflections, 11/3 (1984): 351–72. 117 Baker, The Australian Language, pp. 119–30. 118 Argus, 8 July 1868, p. 7. 119 Argus, 11 July 1868, p. 7. 120 VPD, Session 1874, Vol. XVIII, p. 516.

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Panton sentenced Fanny Cummins and Lena Tekin to five years in a reformatory in 1870, for instance, he stated plainly his desire to ‘put a stop to such young girls going on the streets’.121 Girls associating with larrikins were widely assumed to be prostitutes or at risk of becoming so,122 and all girls were forced to select carefully their companions in public or risk being branded disreputable. Conjecture about the type of girls who might associate with larrikins was not without foundation, however, for many sources suggest that larrikins frequently consorted with prostitutes, visited brothels and touted their services.123 Although prone to sensationalism and filtered by middle-class prejudices towards the working classes and women in particular, the observations are given credence by the proximity of many larrikin haunts to Melbourne’s brothel districts.124 In the street language of the day, some larrikins were termed ‘pensioners’ or ‘bludgers’: pimps living off immoral earnings taken by agreement or by force.125 Others acted as touts for disreputable hotels or hung around the notorious ‘saddling paddocks’ in Melbourne’s cheap theatres.126 One might speculate as to the attitudinal effects for young men engaging with women in such sexualized circumstances: a diminishing respect for all members of the opposite sex; the belief that a woman’s sexual availability was a given; an inability to behave with civility towards women who were not prostitutes. Mindsets of this order were manifested in troubling behaviour on Melbourne’s streets,127 in accounts such as those discussed above, and also – as will be illustrated later – in a number of court cases involving bands of larrikins and allegations of sexual assault. Girls existed physically on the fringes of male larrikin street subculture, but symbolically at its centre. The historical record reveals only scant, albeit increasing,128 evidence of disorderly larrikinesses standing on street corners or assaulting pedestrians, and there is as yet no firm evidence of female gang leaders in Melbourne like those referred to by Herbert Asbury in mid-century New York.129 Donella Jaggs, however, refers to the case of Eliza O’Brien, a ‘“little girl” larrikin’ Argus, 22 March 1870, p. 6. Also see Argus, 4 October, 1865, p. 1 (supplement). See Daily Telegraph, 30 April 1887, p. 7 for opinion of Rev. J. Watsford. 123 For example: Argus, 15 April 1872, p. 5; Argus, 8 February 1875, p. 4; evidence of 121 122

Frederick Standish and Sergeant Dalton before the 1874 Select Committee on the Crimes and Offences Prevention Bill (SCoCOPB, Q. 3 and Q. 99); Gould, pp. 103–4; McLachlan, ‘Larrikinism’, p. 120. 124 McConville, ‘The Location of Melbourne’s Prostitutes’. 125 Crowe, p. 57; Seal, p. 46. 126 Noted by Joseph Schleman in Life in Melbourne, Australia (London, 1882), p. 44. 127 Note, for example, the unprovoked assault by John Collett in Elizabeth Street in December 1881. As he punched his victim, Mrs White, in the face, Collett is reported as saying ‘There’s a Christmas box for you’ (Argus, 20 January 1882, p. 7). 128 Bellanta, ‘The Larrikin Girl’, pp. 504–8. Also see Finnane, ‘Castieau Diaries’, p. 738 [entry dated 8 July 1872]), where the diarist reports receiving a number of young women in Melbourne Gaol, adding that ‘Larrikinesses I suppose is the proper term’. 129 See Asbury, The Gangs of New York, p. 240.

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who was hauled before the courts in 1881 for attacking a policeman with road metal. ‘The constable gave her a very bad character’, noted a local newspaper, ‘stating that she was constantly in the habit of assaulting police … and could gather a mob of bad characters quicker than anyone else of her class.’130 For contemporary observers, such girls shattered the boundaries of expected female decorum and inspired terminology which suggested they had become peculiarly unhinged. In April 1886, during the shop assistant ‘riots’ discussed in the previous chapter, Melbourne’s Table Talk described female participants in the street disturbances as ‘unsexed women’: an indication that through their public performances they were seen to have shed the delicate refinements deemed fundamental to their nature.131 In Manchester and Salford – where a detailed survey of court registers and newspapers in this period has revealed a greater proportion of female equivalents to the local male ‘scuttler’ – similarly striking, indeed exotic, language was employed, with rowdy girls termed ‘Amazons’, ‘vixens’ or ‘viragoes’. 132 Like their Melbourne counterparts, these girls were deemed to dwell beyond the pale and outside the confines of everyday speech. Though the female larrikiness is only sporadically witnessed in her own right, girls were an essential audience for male larrikins, whose masculine bravura, preoccupation with appearance and figure-hugging ‘fleshing’ or flared trousers advertised strength and awakening sexual potential. Street fights often ensued between competing male suitors, and in one of the only documents purporting to record a larrikin’s point of view the anonymous author stated that ‘ninety-nine out of every hundred larrikins go wrong about a girl’.133 The prospect of losing face in front of a female increased the likelihood of violent conduct. Where consorting between larrikins and girls did take place, such as at the theatre or dancehall, it was more likely that the girls in question were not full-blown equivalents of the male larrikin, but rather factory hands or shop assistants (see Figure 4.7). Though often regarded cautiously at best by ‘respectable’ adult society, they usually posed little physical threat and the discussion positioned them with reference to the supposed precocity of ‘the Australian Girl’. Early and easy sexual associations were here Jaggs, p. 61. Also see Margaret M. Pawsey, ‘Annie Wilkins: Life on the Margins in Nineteenth-Century Collingwood’, Victorian Historical Journal, 66/1 (June 1995): 7–8, for references to Susan and Margaret Wilkins, teenage sisters tried for multiple robberies of young children running errands in Collingwood in 1879. 131 Extract republished in Grant and Serle, pp. 152–3. Also see Morris, A Dictionary of Austral English, p. 262, for an 1892 reference to ‘the young larrikiness – that hideous outgrowth of Sydney and Melbourne civilization’ (my emphasis). 132 See Andrew Davies, ‘“These Viragoes are No Less Cruel than the Lads”: Young Women, Gangs and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’, British Journal of Criminology, 29/1 (1999): 72–89. Davies observes that of 717 young people charged with scuttling offences between 1870 and 1900, 93.7 per cent were male and 6.3 per cent female. He also notes that press reports may well underestimate female involvement given that police were likely to focus attention on arresting male troublemakers (see pp. 75–6). 133 ‘What a Larrikin Himself Thinks’, Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1887. Also see Argus, 11 March 1914, p. 15 for a description of conflict after a 14 year-old girl switched her affections from one larrikin to a member of a rival push. 130

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Fig. 4.7

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

A Will Dyson illustration of the larrikin girl from Edward Dyson’s novel Fact’ry ’Ands (Melbourne, 1906), facing p. vi. Courtesy Monash University Library, Rare Books Collection

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assumed to go hand-in-hand with the purchase of showy attire, an association later projected onto the figure of the ‘flapper’.134 ‘A False and Bastard Standard of Manliness’ There is a striking discrepancy between descriptions of larrikins as weak or stunted and the multiplicity of information detailing larrikin prize fights, assaults and fighting talk. Edward Kinglake, for instance, described the larrikin to his British readers as ‘generally a weedy youth, undersized, and slight, but like all Australians who are cast in a lanky not thickset mould, he is wiry and active.’135 One might locate in travelogues like this the origins of anxiety concerning city-bred children;136 equally, the accounts could be read as a concerted effort to undercut the larrikin’s tough streetwise self-image. As Martin Crotty argues, for white middle-class men ‘the labelling and marking of Aborigines, bushrangers, larrikins, and especially later, women, the English and potential invaders from Asia as “unmanly” all served to create a “them” removed from “us”’.137 Hence when W.M. Tomlinson expressed his fear in the Victorian Review that Australian boys ‘are copying the habits and manners of larrikins, and have set up for themselves a false and bastard standard of manliness’, the author had a clear impression of the true qualities that he believed made a man.138 In defence of the credo of ‘respectable’ middle-class and working-class masculinity, the suppression of another code – the disorderly, the ‘larrikin’ – proved essential. In a study of late nineteenth-century gangs in Britain, Andrew Davies proposes that far from seeing male ‘scuttlers’ as radical, it is more appropriate to view them as archly conservative in cultural terms.139 He identifies a number of working134 On clothes, see for example the comment by Harry Furniss in Windsor Magazine, VIII (October 1898): 580: ‘The “larrikinesses” … affect large hats and feathers and gaudy colours, and their ways are “loud”.’ Frank Bongiorno discusses sexual concerns about factory girls in The Sex Lives of Australians, pp. 74–5. On the ‘girl problem’ and 1920s ‘flappers’, see Judith Smart, ‘Feminists, Flappers and Miss Australia: Contesting the Meanings of Citizenship, Femininity and Nation in the 1920s’, Journal of Australian Studies, 25/71 (2001): 1–6. 135 Quoted in Grant and Serle, p. 155. Also see Gould, p. 100, and George Lacon James, Shall I Try Australia? Or Health Business and Pleasure in New South Wales (Liverpool, 1892), p. 271. 136 For a discussion, see Graeme Davison, ‘The City-Bred Child’, pp. 143–74. 137 Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920 (Melbourne, 2001), pp. 6–7. 138 Tomlinson cited in Crotty, p. 13. Similar sentiments were expressed by Gould (p. 104) and James (Shall I Try Australia?, p. 254): ‘There is an utter absence of all that is manly in most of the actions of larrikin “pushes”.’ 139 Andrew Davies, ‘Youth Gangs, Gender and Violence, 1870–1900’, in Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850–1950: Gender and Class, ed. Shani D’Cruze (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 82.

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class folk heroes of the period, particularly a succession of celebrated local boxers who taught by example that ‘violence was both a necessary and legitimate means of self-assertion’.140 With toughness prized as a ‘core virtue’ among the Salford working-class community, male scuttlers engaging in aggressive posturing and public violence were really just conforming to the masculine norms of their immediate environment. By contrast, girls who indulged in similar behaviour were the true rebels, shattering universal prescriptions of feminine decorum.141 In the Australian context we find similar role models, like Larry Foley and Albert ‘Griffo’ Griffiths, and sporadic incidents of open-air prize fights.142 A larrikin clearly had a strong desire to be regarded as a ‘hard doer’ or a ‘hard case’, values sponsoring the physical separation of the sexes, and prompting the open contempt sometimes displayed when judicial sentences were served.143 The larrikin, Sidney Baker asserted, ‘likes to keep his masculine world self-contained, to insulate himself from softening feminine influences, to retain a solid hard core in his soul against the fripperies and fancies of womanhood’.144 ‘Feminine influences’ could never be purged entirely, however, and perhaps the rather effeminate – indeed ‘camp’ – look of some larrikin attire represented an attempt to exteriorize tendencies running counter to a dominant chauvinist ethos.145 ‘What shall we do with our boys?’ was an oft-repeated question in colonial Australia, frequently accompanied by the injunction ‘Marry them to our girls!’.146 The quip suggested a potential solution for the equally pressing issue of what to do with the larrikin. Comic writer Edward Dyson observed in 1890 that ‘the married larrikin is a lusus naturae, and when he is discovered he ought to be stuffed or exhibited in a waxworks’.147 Moreover, Dyson continued: The refining influence of a large, determined woman, armed with a flatiron, tends greatly to curtail the excessive animation of the most rapacious ‘lary,’ and after a twelve-months’ trial he is usually met, tamely propelling the perambulator,

Ibid., pp. 74–5. Ibid., p. 82. Bellanta concurs within the Australian context: ‘The Larrikin Girl’,

140 141

p. 508.

See for example: Argus, 28 November 1876 p. 6; Argus, 4 February 1879, p. 5 (in which ‘about 30’ larrikins assembled on vacant ground in Carlton to cheer on two boxers). 143 John Lack cites an example from Footscray in which upon hearing of his punishment for assault with a knuckleduster, a larrikin turned nonchalantly to the bench and said “Thanks”. See ‘Working-Class Leisure’, The Victorian Historical Journal, 49/191 (1978): 59. 144 Baker, The Australian Language, p. 128. 145 For a discussion of literature and theory on the construction of masculine identities in group situations, see Robert A. Nye, ‘Western Masculinities in War and Peace’, American Historical Review, 112/2 (2007): 417–38, and R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Sydney, 1995), pp. 71, 83–4, 106–9. 146 Argus, 14 July 1862, p. 5. 147 ‘Silas Snell’ (Edward Dyson), ‘The Elevation of the Larrikin’, The Bull-Ant, 27 November 1890, p. 8. 142

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wearing a much less aggressive hat, and pants that have had the bell cut off to assist in maintaining the integrity of more important parts.148

To any self-respecting larrikin, Dyson’s farcical scene would have seemed a dreadful fate. Removed from the tightly knit male world of the street push and thrust into domestic duties; to have the flares of one’s prized trousers lopped off, the material destined for undergarments, trouser repairs or even perhaps nappies: this was akin to ritual emasculation. A similar terror is portrayed in early twentieth-century fiction and poetry exploring larrikin themes. Jonah, the protagonist of Louis Stone’s 1911 novel of the same name, unexpectedly finds himself a father following his courtship of local girl Ada. It is months before he can bring himself to visit his new family, Stone informs us, for ‘Jonah feared dimly that if he ventured inside the house he would bring himself under the law. So he … kept his distance, like an animal fears a trap’.149 Only much later, once beholden to ‘the sense of paternity, which Nature, crafty beyond man, had planted in him to fulfil her schemes’, does a reluctant Jonah agree to marry Ada on the quiet, quit the push and open a boot-making business to support his new family.150 C.J. Dennis’s ‘Sentimental Bloke’, enraptured by his ‘precious bit o’ fluff’, Doreen, undergoes a similar transformation, explaining: It’s wot they calls responsibility. All of a ’eap that feelin’ come to me; An’ somewhere in me ’ead I seemed to feel A sneakin’ sort o’ wish that I was free.151

One’s larrikin career might commence with youthful irresponsibility, therefore, but it would surely end with the duties of adulthood. Moral tales like these pivoted around the issue of wedlock; with the male age of marriage consistently high in colonial Melbourne,152 the character sketches of Dyson and company may have well have reflected a level of genuine reluctance among colonial youth to walk down the aisle. 148 Ibid. This excerpt is a rehearsal for a scene in Dyson’s later novel, Fact’ry ’Ands (Melbourne, 1906). In this case the larrikin (‘Chiller Green, amachoor bantam champyin iv the Port’) discards his coat and lowers his heels upon falling for the charms of Minnie. He is later spotted pushing a ‘pramberlater’ with a ‘pincher’ in it. See pp. 148–63. 149 Louis Stone, Jonah (Sydney, 1981 [originally 1911]), p. 13. Also see p. 29. 150 Ibid., p. 33. Bill Schwarz notes a parallel marital transition for Alf in the sensational English novel, Hooligan Nights (1899). See Schwarz, ‘Night Battles’, p. 104. 151 Dennis, Songs, p.66. Also see pp. 27–30. ‘No matter ’ow yeh start’, our protagonist muses further, ‘The commin end of most of us is – Tart’ (p. 30). 152 McDonald notes that in 1871 the median age of male marriage in Victoria was 28.2 years. Respective figures for 1881 and 1891 stood at 26.6 and 27.2 years. This compares with the corresponding figures for England and Wales of 28.1, 24.9 and 25.7 years. See Peter McDonald, Marriage in Australia, p. 105. Also refer to Peter McDonald and Patricia Quiggin, ‘Lifecourse Transitions in Victoria in the 1880s’, in Families in Colonial Australia, ed. Patricia Grimshaw et al (Sydney, 1985), pp. 64–82; and Davison, Marvellous Melbourne, pp. 193–7.

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Larrikins and Sex Crime Gender relations, as intimated above, did not always carry comic overtones. Instead larrikinism nurtured a dark underside, one exposed all too often in open ground around Melbourne. The lack of respect for women within larrikin subculture has already been discussed, the association with prostitutes mentioned, and the undercurrent of violence detailed. Together these elements mixed into a potentially explosive cocktail, resulting in a number of cases of actual or alleged sexual assault. In January 1873, the Argus reported the start of court proceedings against ‘four young boys’ for attempting to commit a rape upon ‘a woman named Phillips’. Three of the suspects were aged 16, the other was 17.153 As more details emerged over the following weeks, the trial itself and the tone of the subsequent newspaper commentary followed a pattern of misogyny so common in colonial Australia. The victim, who claimed she had been attacked at twilight in a secluded paddock somewhere between St Kilda and Caulfield, was labelled variously by the court reporter as ‘a middle-aged woman of very repulsive appearance’, ‘most unprepossessing’ and ‘an old woman’. ‘The prisoners’, noted the newspaper in contrast, ‘are quite boys, and from their appearance would not be supposed to be guilty of such an offence.’154 One of the accused decided to give evidence against the others and a second was given ‘the benefit of the doubt’ and released.155 Of the two that remained, both were found guilty, sentenced to six months imprisonment each, with instructions issued for them to be whipped twice during the first and last month of their terms.156 Passing reference is made in a police report to another gang rape ‘by four young men’ in 1884, and files from 1887 mention two sets of rape allegations centring on Richmond and Hotham.157 In the latter a 16-year old domestic servant claimed to have been raped on Princes’ Oval by a milk truck driver nicknamed ‘Sydney Bob’, then imprisoned in a nearby dairy and raped by ‘about 20 young men’ over the course of a weekend. A ‘very much stained’ petticoat is mentioned by a reporting constable, and the ages of four youths in the lock-up are given as between 15 and 19. ‘Some’, Constable Fitzpatrick wrote in the case file, ‘state they had to do with her but she was a consenting party.’158 A second investigating officer, Constable Corbet, doubted the validity of the girl’s claims, believing her to have ‘trumped up the story to shield herself’ when questioned by her parents regarding her absence from the family home on Saturday and Sunday.159 Following inquiries, Argus, 13 January 1873, p. 6. Ibid., and also Argus, 18 February 1873, p. 5. 155 Argus, 13 January 1873, p. 6. 156 Argus, 24 February 1873, p. 6. 157 VPRS 937/P6, Unit 7 (1884), bundle 1, report of Constable O’Callaghan; VPRS 153

154

937, Unit 320 (1886–1887), bundle 3 (containing two files). 158 VPRS 937, Unit 320 (1886–1887), bundle 3. Report dated 17 January 1887. 159 Ibid.

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arrests were made and seven youths – aged between 15 and 22 and described as ‘young larrikins’ by the Argus – appeared on summonses at the Hotham Court.160 In the courthouse, counsel for the defence maintained that because no screams were heard from the dairy, and medical evidence could not substantiate the use of force, the girl must have consented.161 Dr Lloyd, Chairman of the Bench, stated in his summing up that the case demonstrated ‘the most revolting depravity on the part of the prisoners’ and labelled their conduct as ‘filthy, unmanly, reprehensible’.162 Yet without more conclusive proof a trial could not proceed. No-one doubted, he said, that sexual intercourse involving the accuser and several male participants had occurred, but rape could not be proved. ‘The decision’, a report in the Argus concluded tellingly, ‘was received with much satisfaction by a large crowd of young people of the larrikin class, who had assembled round the closed doors of the court while the case was being heard.’163 Just days before the Hotham allegations were laid, four young men identified as larrikins were hanged in Sydney, convicted – along with five others treated less punitively – of the extraordinarily violent rape of another 16-year-old domestic servant, Mary Jane Hicks.164 The shadow of ‘the Mount Rennie case’, as it became known, lingered over the Hotham proceedings. Dr Lloyd stated his opinion that ‘the offence of which they [the Hotham defendants] had been guilty was an abomination nearly as outrageous as that which had recently brought four young men to the gallows in Sydney’, and further despaired that such crimes could be possible in the colonies, which had ‘the fairest climate and the most favourable conditions for the working classes’.165 The editor of the Argus, however, drew a different set of conclusions: Mount Rennie had encouraged girls who had ‘gone astray’ to make false allegations, and perjury charges should be brought ‘against unhappy creatures of this stamp … to protect women’.166 Respectable women, by inference, did not lie about rape. In her history of sexual violence in nineteenth-century Australia, Jill BavinMizzi states that of the 1,300 or so sexual assault charges referred to the Supreme Courts of Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia between 1880 and 1900, Argus, 19 January 1887, p. 7. Ibid. In its report, however, the Age noted that the girl’s hat and dress were torn

160 161

(Age, 25 January 1887, p. 5). 162 Argus, 25 January 1887, p. 9; Age, ibid. 163 Argus, ibid. 164 This incident has generated a considerable body of literature, including: David Walker, ‘Youth On Trial: The Mt Rennie Case’, in Pastiche I: Reflections on NineteenthCentury Australia (Sydney, 1994), ed. Penny Russell and Richard White, pp. 223–37, and Judith Allen, Sex & Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 54–64. See Juliet Peers, ‘Accept any Woman’s Word?: Rape and Republicanism: The Body beneath the Foundation Stone’, Journal of Australian Studies, 47 (1996): 123–46 for a critical view of this, and other, work. 165 Argus, 25 January, 1887, p. 9. 166 Argus, 25 January, 1887, p. 4.

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190 concerned rape, and 70 of these involved multiple defendants.167 Moreover, ‘while solo-rape defendants ranged in age from thirteen to sixty years of age, clustering between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four, gang rape defendants ranged from fourteen to thirty-three years of age, clustering between the ages of fourteen and twenty-six’.168 Bavin-Mizzi discusses in detail an 1889 gang rape in which the victim was attacked in Melbourne’s Studley Park, concluding that the assault was planned by the assailants in advance, and intended both as a form of retribution (the victim had prosecuted one of the rapists for verbal insult a year earlier) and as a public display of power (the attack occurred, not unusually for such crimes, in broad daylight and one of the perpetrators wore the victim’s hat as he assaulted her). Each of the four young men involved had previous convictions; two were sentenced to death, a penalty later commuted.169 Bavin-Mizzi concurs in conclusion with the suggestion made by Juliet Peers that ‘pack rape was an established larrikin push ritual’.170 This is indeed a possibility. But it is surely very unlikely, given the numbers of attacks that this would have entailed and the absence of sustained documentary evidence across the period. More plausibly, I think, larrikin subculture created an environment in which such brutal assaults could be countenanced with fewer of the moral safeguards that existed in wider society then as now. Not all larrikins were rapists or violent criminals – one must be careful not to repeat the moral panic of the late nineteenth century, and writers like Peers who explore the larrikin’s world from the starting point of sex crime blind themselves to the behaviour of the majority. The undoubted and appalling fact that some larrikins were capable of rape should not be ignored, however, and the research which emphasizes this aspect of larrikinism is a necessary corrective to the writings of earlier authors, poets and historians who either did not know about, or chose to ignore, these sexual attacks. Emphasizing the nexus between sex and power in larrikin culture serves as a reminder that in the identifying and labelling of ‘deviant’ juvenile behaviour, sexual anxieties are often to the fore. Recent work on young male convicts in Australia has held that ‘perceptions of deviancy, criminality and sexuality were closely entwined in the nineteenth century’, with boys and not just girls the repository for a tangle of middle-class concerns about the presumed early onset of puberty and subsequent sexual precocity of working-class youth.171 Superseding the figure of the transported child convict, it was the home-grown adolescent larrikin who in the final decades of the century best encapsulated such fears. ‘A great many of these Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victorian Australia (Sydney, 1995), p. 144. The author does not state how many offences occurred in each colony. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid., pp. 149–70. The ages of those involved are not stated. 170 Juliet Peers, ‘The Tribe of Mary Jane Hicks: Imaging Women through the Mount Rennie Rape Case 1886’, Australian Cultural History, 12 (1993): 131; Bavin-Mizzi, p. 170. 171 See Catie Gilchrist, ‘The “Crime” of Precocious Sexuality: Young Male Convicts and the Politics of Separation’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 8 (2006): 49–63. 167

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young vagabonds hang about after prostitutes’, Sergeant Dalton observed in 1874, ‘and boys of 14 or 15 are often found about brothels in the same way’.172 Free to roam the city at leisure from a young age, it seemed the larrikin was also exploring a budding sexual appetite. Turning off the main thoroughfares and heading for the side streets in October 1881, how apt that larrikins and larrikinesses should be sighted in uproar at a venue called the Adam and Eve Hotel, tasting the forbidden fruits of passion whilst precociously propping up the bar.173 A Literary Redemption Often manifested away from the epicentres of public space, larrikinism nevertheless occasioned a prominent national echo in the public sphere. Politicians fretted about the consequences of what might happen when ‘the larrikin comes on the stage’, able to vote, while social commentators offered gloomy prognostications linking the larrikin to the fortunes of ‘Young Australia’.174 Anthony Trollope surmised that Australia was in danger of ‘weak maturity’, and others agreed.175 Larrikins ‘are tending to degrade young Australia’, concluded a Bulletin columnist, and in the wake of sex attacks upon women – often at times of the day when the youths ‘ought to have been industriously at work in some honest occupation’ – a fear was expressed that a new and distinctive ‘Australian Crime’ had emerged.176 Seen in this context, for Australia’s reputation to be safeguarded the larrikin needed to be redeemed, softened, and changed from the subject of moral panic to a source of moral pride. It might also be argued that because larrikinism seemed to illustrate that the male sex did not always behave ‘rationally’, it was necessary for men to remake the figure to stave off the feminist assertion that women represented the true arbiters of public morality. This contention is not necessarily weakened by the fact that it was a female nationalist author, Ethel Turner, who helped spark the rehabilitation process with the publication in 1896 of The Little Larrikin.177 Turner’s publisher expressed unease about aspects of her story, notably the determinedly apologetic stance taken towards the youthful transgressions of ‘Lol’, the book’s SCoCOPB, Q. 99. Recorded in VPRS 937, Unit 305 (1881–1882), bundle 3, item dated 22 October

172 173

1881.

174 Robert Lowe to Gavan Duffy, quoted in Serle, The Rush to be Rich, p. 229. For a similar comment, refer to Argus, 7 March 1877, p. 5. 175 Trollope’s opinion discussed in C.M.H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History 1851–1900 (Sydney, 1955), p. 813. For comparison see for example Argus, 25 January 1882, p. 9 (where larrikinism is described as ‘eating out the vitality in the rising generation that might otherwise become of incalculable value to the country’.) 176 Bulletin, 17 June 1882, p. 2. Also see the Bulletin’s ‘The Larrikin Residuum’, 8 January 1881, reprinted in Clark, ibid., pp. 686–8. On the ‘Australian Crime’, see David Walker, ‘Youth on Trial: The Mt Rennie Case’, Labour History, 50 (May 1986): 31–2. 177 Ethel Turner, The Little Larrikin (London, New York & Melbourne, 1896).

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protagonist, a rough-and-tumble character who scraps, tortures animals and tricks adults.178 ‘A little English experience’ was recommended to help Turner ‘correct the free and easy, somewhat rowdy associations’ characterizing the novel’s overall tone, but the author declined the invitation.179 The moment of publication is perhaps significant. Contemporary commentary noted a declining incidence in crimes of violence, and related a perceived diminution of larrikin activity to the widespread economic depression of the 1890s. This had caused Melbourne’s population growth to stall, with those seeking work (including larrikins, it was claimed) forced to leave the city or at least to reappraise their outlook in an insecure job market.180 A declining incidence of larrikinism would have made the general public more amenable to a literary redemption, one presumes, and even if a 1910 feature article announcing the death of the larrikin push was premature,181 the activities and anxieties of the 1870s and 80s were indeed fading. Ethel Turner had been encouraged in her endeavours by the Bulletin, the nationalist journal which, despite its shameful attitude towards the victim of the Mount Rennie outrage, indulged in its own larrikin moral panic before and after the Sydney trial.182 Famous for their evocation of the qualities of bush-bred children and conscious construction of the bushman,183 Bulletin writers nonetheless also repositioned the urban larrikin in a positive light in the years after Mount Rennie. Henry Lawson and Melbourne’s Louis Esson, for example, wrote reassuringly of the larrikin’s coarse nature but innate goodness, while C.J. Dennis – who first tested out his characters in the Bulletin – achieved phenomenal popular success with the publication during the Great War of two books of poetry concerning Melbourne larrikins.184 Running themes in these tales include the tightly knit world of the street push, an open contempt for ideas of respectability, and the down-to-earth irreverence of Ibid., pp. 19, 27–8, 32, 56. Brenda Niall, Seven Little Billabongs: The World of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant

178 179

Bruce (Melbourne, 1979), pp. 22–3, 99. 180 Argus, 25 October 1899, p. 11 (‘The larrikin, as we knew him in the eighties, is no longer a force …’); Outpost, 3 November 1900, p. 7. 181 ‘Larrikinism: A Lost Art’, Argus, 19 March 1910, p. 21. On the persistence of larrikin activity in Melbourne in the 1910s and 1920s, see: Salisbury, p. 27; McCalman, p. 132; Bellanta, Larrikins, ch. 6. 182 On this see George Morgan, ‘The Bulletin and the Larrikin: Moral Panic in LateNineteenth Century Sydney’, Media International Australia, 85 (1997): 17–23. 183 By contrast with the ills of ‘“town raised” boys’, the journal opined, ‘youths bred in the bush are almost uniformly well-behaved’ (Bulletin, 28 May 1881, p. 2). 184 For instance: Henry Lawson’s ‘A Visit of Condolence’ (1892), ‘Two Boys at Grinder Bros’ (1892–1893), and ‘Two Larrikins’ (1895–1896) in Henry Lawson: Short Stories and Sketches 1888–1922, ed. Colin Roderick (Sydney, 1972), and also Esson’s poems ‘Back ter Little Lon’ (1907) and ‘Jugger’ (1912) in Anderson, Ballades of Old Bohemia. Also see C.J. Dennis, Songs and The Moods of Ginger Mick (Sydney, 1916).

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the larrikin protagonists. To these aspects, Dennis is commonly assumed to have supplemented the concept of the larrikin as Australian hero, dressing his character ‘Ginger Mick’ in military uniform before sacrificing him for the national cause on the slopes of Gallipoli. However, a much earlier short story, inspired by a different overseas conflict, can be seen to have rehearsed all the key moments in Mick’s journey from anti-hero to icon. ‘Dick Kelly – Larrikin’, written by ‘G.B.’ and published in the Weekly Times in April 1902, sets the scene in Melbourne, where its protagonist is leader of Collingwood’s Vere Street push and under police watch.185 Dick, we are informed, has a violent past, having previously assaulted reputable citizens and ‘stouched’ interfering policemen. But early on it is also established that he possesses valiant qualities, for ‘[when] a boatload of merrymakers was capsized in the river, near Studley Park, it was Dick, who by his pluck and coolness rescued the whole party from imminent danger of drowning’.186 Desiring freedom from competing ‘donahs’ attracted by his dancing prowess and motivated also by a spirit of ‘selfexamination’, Dick decides to ‘clear out’ with the next volunteer contingent bound for the Boer War. Once there he finds a purposeful channel for his combative inclination, and manages to hold his tongue when given orders by superior officers. Wounded at one encounter with the enemy, Dick gives up his horse to a mate at the next battle before finding himself outnumbered and falling in a hail of bullets. As his life ebbs away, Dick’s thoughts return contentedly to the streets of Collingwood where the sense of fraternal loyalty rendered so valuable on foreign soil was first acquired. From captain of the push, in danger of being ‘despised by all honest folk’, Dick has turned his life around and made himself useful to the nation.187 Just over 30 years earlier, when the larrikin first burst into popular consciousness, who could have envisaged such absolution? At the hands of writers like ‘G.B.’, C.J. Dennis and Louis Esson, ‘larrikin’ was slowly changed from a damning epithet to a complimentary characteristic. Yet while the nationalists may have rescued the literary larrikin, so cleansing ‘Young Australia’ of its perceived taint, they left behind the real youngsters who would carry on their rough and ready coming-of-age on the city streets. For them the ethos of larrikinism would continue to prove an attractive outlet for as yet unrecognized adolescent urges. In modern appraisals of identity formation, considerable attention has focused upon interstitial spaces as sites of subjectivity. Rosi Braidotti writes for example that ‘in-between spaces … spatial and temporal points of transition, are crucial to the construction of the subject … The intervals … are facilitators and, as such, they pass unnoticed, though they mark the crucial moments in the whole process

‘G.B.’, ‘Dick Kelly – Larrikin’, Weekly Times, 26 April 1902, p. 6. Ibid. 187 Ibid. 185 186

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of becoming a subject’.188 Similarly, for Homi Bhabha ‘“in-between” spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity’.189 Occupying gaps and crossing points within Melbourne’s urban frame, the city’s larrikins likewise made their claims for group recognition as vanguard players in a broader generational contest over public space. Performing for each other and to the community at large in various locations across the city, larrikinism heralded the noisy arrival of working-class youth in the public sphere. Larrikin activities, and the reactions they elicited in the wider community, helped drive a permanent wedge between the life phases of child and adult. Henceforth the teenage years would be forever problematized, and the ‘youth problem’ embedded on the social agenda. Caught in a moment of generational transition, larrikins can also be seen to have represented a transitional moment in Victoria’s history. As the first- and second-generation descendants of gold rush immigrants, larrikins epitomized the tensions created by the quirks of the colony’s demographic structure and the fears surrounding the native-born. Just as the old Melbourne of muddy streets and horse-drawn cabs was giving way to a new city of gas-lit thoroughfares and cable trams, larrikins seized their opportunity to claim the stage. At once radical and conservative, they epitomized the mixed blessings of the modern era. Located betwixt and in-between in so many ways, Melbourne’s larrikins forced members of the older generation to quicken their steps in public and to recognize changes affecting the structure of a city still seeking a sense of cohesion.

188 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, 2002), p. 40. 189 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York, 1994), p. 1. Also see p. 217.

Chapter 5

‘For the Sake of Effect’: Youth on Display and the Politics of Performance Melbourne’s Bowen Street stirred early on the morning of 18 February 1890. Outside the premises of the Gordon Institute – home at that time to one of the city’s leading child rescue agencies – 17 horse-drawn carriages lined up while over 350 boys and girls, waiting inside Gordon Hall, sang and performed recitations.1 Shortly before 9 a.m. the singing ended and William Forster, the Institute’s founder and leader, directed the children towards the various conveyances. At the head of the convoy, boys of the Try Excelsior Brass Band, wearing scarlet uniforms and carrying their instruments, climbed aboard a drag pulled by four horses. Benefactors and friends of the Institute filled the next two carriages in line, followed in turn by a group of city newsgirls and newswomen. Behind them the mainstays of the Institute, a large assembly of ‘neatly dressed’ working boys aged between 9 and 17, occupied the remaining 13 vans. To the sounds of marching music, cheering and more songs, and with flags fluttering in the summer morning breeze, the procession moved off on the hour. Its ultimate destination was Glenroy, 10 miles to the north, where a farmstead owned by patrons of the organization would host the main event of the day: the Gordon Institute’s fifth annual picnic. Instead of turning right on Swanston Street, however, and heading out of the city towards journey’s end, the procession wheeled left and travelled south, first along Swanston Street and then west along Collins Street, Melbourne’s most prestigious thoroughfare. Only after the party had passed the city’s finest shopping arcades, banks and office buildings did it bear right once more and make directly for Glenroy. A journalist reporting the occasion explained the rationale for the detour. The route was chosen, he noted, ‘for the sake of effect’.2 By parading through the heart of the city the organizers had clearly determined to make a statement. Before occupying the scenic space of the picnic grounds, the Institute’s children and their guardians would claim the symbolic centre of Melbourne and, in the process, attract the attention of its citizens. ‘For the sake of effect’: this chapter examines this comment in detail, assessing the intended and actual impacts of civic displays exhibiting young Melburnians. It demonstrates that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries young city-dwellers were increasingly called forward to promote and validate a number of causes by performing in public. In contrast to previous chapters where young 1 Information from Evening Standard, 19 February 1890, SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. 2 Ibid.

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people’s self-motivated activities in the public domain were often seen as disorderly, the occupations of urban space assessed here were highly scripted, scheduled and organized. Adults were quick to realize the representational potential generated by focusing public attention in this way, and the following analysis asserts that the marshalling of city youth was innately political in nature, designed to support a variety of patriotic and institutional goals. Youthful agency, uncovered in abundance in preceding sections of this book, features less obviously here, with coordinated displays usually disclosing more about adults’ intentions than young people’s interests. Only sporadically were young people able to perform en masse on their own terms, and in these instances an alternative set of meanings flowed from spatial occupation. ‘Saved from the streets!/Saved from the streets!/So many Arabs saved from the streets!/Saved from the reeking filth and sin.’ So began the poem published by Melbourne’s Try Society in 1894 in celebration of its rescue efforts.3 But removal constituted only part of the interventionist narrative, albeit the aspect most widely analyzed.4 What happened when young people were returned to the streets, either by child savers proud of their redemptive efforts or by state or religious organizations keen to usher the city’s youngest onto a public platform? In concert with a discussion of the broad contours and commonalities of young people’s orchestrated appearances, this chapter explores a number of specific events, including the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 and the Federation festivities of 1901, to address this question. As will be shown, the appearance of youth on the city stage became intimately related to the unfolding of Australia’s national ‘purpose’, its place within the British Empire and, at a more local level, to the civic identity of the Victorian capital. The entrenched gender divisions of urban performances are also revealed, with boys dressed in khaki for military purposes and girls donning white dresses to celebrate the virtues of individual, national and imperial ‘purity’. The Processional Script Existing scholarship on processions and other forms of public display has seldom considered the discrete experiences of young people during these events or the latent symbolism that such occasions engender.5 Nonetheless, a number of useful theoretical approaches to pageantry have been elaborated and the legislative The poem is widely cited in accounts of the period. See for example Crotty, p. 177. See: Jaggs; McConville, ‘Outcast Children in Marvellous Melbourne’, pp. 39–48;

3 4

Scott and Swain. 5 A notable exception is Richard Trexler’s study Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980). Here the author discusses the ‘salvational work’ of young Florentines in fifteenth-century processions and their role in depicting grace and proper piety to approving city fathers (see pp. 367–87). For the modern period, David Pomfret has also considered the comparative roles of young people in celebrations of the English monarchy (in Nottingham) and the French Republic (in Saint-Etienne) between 1890 and 1940. See Pomfret, pp. 153–98.

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frameworks within which organizers were forced to operate laid bare. For Susan Davis, author of a study concerning nineteenth-century Philadelphia, parades represented a ‘popular mode of communication’, a spatial acting out of a message which shared traits with other public iterations like sermons and riots.6 Michael Berlin, by contrast, examines the idea of the parade in early modern London as ‘a living mirror’, a shifting reflection that captures the shape of the body politic at a specific moment.7 But mirrors depict only what is placed before them and the analogy casts little light on the power relationships at play in bringing parades to the street in the first place.8 Indeed, as Susan Davis, David Glassberg and Mary Ryan have observed, processions give the illusion of consensus whilst in reality representing a narrow range of viewpoints and agencies.9 The very function of the ceremonial event, in fact, is to actively even out difference and present a united front, and hence when consensus is fractured – as occurred, it seems, due to ethnic rivalries in several American cities during the mid-nineteenth century – the community procession labours to contain discord and fails as a unifying force.10 Intriguingly, this challenge to the processional message took place as a curtain-raiser to the period characterized by Eric Hobsbawm as witnessing ‘the invention of tradition’, a process in which political elites fabricated new rituals (like Bastille Day in France from 1880) and clothed them with long-established symbols in an attempt to shore up the social order and present the performances as time-honoured and customary.11 In Australia, with its relatively short history of white colonization, this practice was especially significant. The importation of British ‘traditions’ like Druids galas or royal holidays helped make manifest the ties of kinship and suggested a continuity of physical settlement which was in truth fictitious. It is also worth noting in this regard that the annual Empire 6 Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 5–7, 14–16, 33–4. 7 Michael Berlin, ‘Civic Ceremony in Early Modern London’, in Urban History Yearbook, ed. David Reeder (Leicester, 1986), p. 15. 8 See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, in The Polity Reader in Social Theory (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 111–12; 116, 120 for a discussion of the importance of power relations across social spaces. 9 See Davis, Parades and Power, pp. 13–14; David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1990), p. 2; and Ryan, Women in Public, p. 73: ‘The chaste, domesticated, altruistic feminine image displayed in public ceremonies could not accommodate the diverse manifestations of womanhood on the public streets, especially not those females who took their very identity from those social spaces – the streetwalkers, the public women’. Also see Mary Ryan, ‘The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order’, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 131–53. 10 On this fracture see Ryan, ‘The American Parade’, pp. 145–7. 11 See the three chapters by Hobsbawm and David Cannadine in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 2002 [originally 1983]) for a description of this process (p. 271 for the Bastille Day example).

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Day (replete with flag salutes by schoolchildren, processional displays and the inculcation of imperial mantras) was held first in Canada and Australia (the latter from 1905) before being celebrated at ‘Home’ in Britain.12 Appearances, then, can be deceptive, and the historian needs always to question the rationale for each occasion, read between the lines of the processional script (in which subsequent newspaper reports represent a component part) and consider what is not on display as well as what is. As the editors of a recent collection of essays assert, public performances can either affirm or challenge the social order.13 The relationship with structures of power is hence inextricable, and with the displayed body acquiring tremendous (albeit transitory) significance as public site,14 the study of such occasions can help to reveal the motivations of organizers, the intended effects upon spectators and the idealized place of young people within society. Analyzing the use of processional space in Melbourne, Andrew BrownMay has identified 11 categories of street parade in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and highlighted the steady decline in the range and repertoire of processions after the tightening of municipal restrictions in 1879.15 By the early 1880s, processions were often constrained in terms of timing, permissible noise and the distribution of handbills, with the laying of tram tracks later in the decade and strengthening police hostility further narrowing the space available to parade organizers.16 The tightening of street directives chimed with the increased regulation of other urban spaces like the parklands where crowds sometimes rallied in preparation to march, or else gathered after a parade to hear speeches. Civic authorities expressed an eagerness to clamp down on any unsanctioned Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, 1901–1942: The Succeeding Age (Melbourne, 1993 [originally 1986]), pp. 132–3. 13 Maryrose Casey, Martin Crotty and Delyse Ryan, ‘Colour, Movement and Jostling in Public’, Journal of Australian Studies, 89 (2006): 1. 14 Cameron White, ‘Promenading and Picnicking: The Performance of Middle-Class Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Sydney, Journal of Australian Studies, 89 (2006): 40. 15 Brown-May’s thesis, ‘“The Itinerary of Our Days”: The Historical Experience of the Street in Melbourne, 1837–1923’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1994), contains the most detailed treatment of the issue, and provides a list of all processions noted in the Melbourne City Council archives as having been granted or refused permission between 1879 (when permits were first required) and 1923 (see pp. 407–92). Reworkings of this material can be found in: Melbourne Street Life, ch. 7; Andrew May, ‘Theatrum Urbis: Melbourne Street Processions’, Victorian Historical Journal, 63/2 and 3 (1992): 64–85, and in a co-authored piece with Maja Graham, ‘“Better than a Play”: Street Processions, Civic Order and the Rhetoric of Landscape’, Journal of Australian Studies, 89 (2006): 3–13, 163– 4. Also refer to the consolidated Unlawful Assemblies and Processions Act 1890, especially s. 3, 6 and 10. The Act prohibited assemblies of more than 50 people in the city centre for the purposes of protesting, and restricted events ‘relating to or connected with any religious or political distinction of differences between any classes of Her Majesty’s subjects’. Harmony, order, and the defence of the status quo were clearly the desired outcomes. 16 May, ‘Theatrum Urbis’: 78. 12

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assemblies in these locations, even for the purposes of group picnicking or casual team sport.17 Yet in spite of these restrictions, civic performances remained an integral and commonplace part of the metropolitan scene, and those that had the blessing of the authorities prospered. ‘If the city street was the theatre of urban life,’ Brown-May observes, ‘the procession had a permanent booking.’18 A variety of historical evidence can help contextualize and reimagine these occasions and the various other forms of public display with which this chapter is concerned. Newspaper articles, for instance, often give detailed accounts of those events considered by the editor to be newsworthy (not, it should be noted, a comprehensive list), and scattered personal reminiscences also enable the historian to get a feel for how contemporaries perceived and understood individual episodes. Photographic evidence, moreover, can help bridge the gap between textual accounts and actual instances of public performance, and this type of source material forms a particularly important part of the following assessment. Like processions, photographs convey continuous messages, lending any given event a kind of second or deferred reality and in the process transforming spectacle into history.19 As outlined in the Introduction, photographs require just as much critical evaluation as any other type of source, and it is well to remember Raphael Samuel’s injunction, noted earlier, to put ‘quotation marks’ around each image.20 Nevertheless, to realize the scale and scope of an event, perceive the spatial patterning it engendered, and to get an idea of which sections of society turned out to watch, the photograph is invaluable. New developments in camera technology opened up the public domain to this powerful medium at exactly the moment when public events became such a significant facet of city life. Dry-plate camera equipment (freely available from the 1880s) represented a giant step forward in this regard, allowing the photographer to capture a number of views and develop them later, rather than on the spot as had been necessitated by the older wet-plate process.21 Ever improving lenses, Kodak roll film (from 1888), and easily portable cameras like the ‘Facile’ continued the transformation and democratization of photography until century’s end, rendering the city and citizens susceptible to a powerful form of social document.22 See for example the 1885 draft regulations for various city parklands contained in VPRS 3181, Series 1, Unit 749, Parks (1893), item 445: ‘No public meeting or assemblage of people for any purpose shall be held … without the sanction of the Trustees.’ 18 Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, p. 175. 19 On this see Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 17, and the discussion in Chapter 1 of this book. 20 Samuel, ‘The Eye of History’, p. 329. 21 On the liberating effect of this change, see Jack Cato, The Story of the Camera in Australia (Melbourne, 1955), pp. 62–3. Cato notes that by 1884 ready-prepared dry plates (which used gelatine to hold the light-sensitive silver) could be purchased in Melbourne from Thomas Baker’s Austral Plate Company, based in the suburb of Abbotsford. 22 See G.H. Martin and David Francis, ‘The Camera’s Eye’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, Vol. 1, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London and Boston, 1973), 17

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Newspapers editors and child rescue agencies soon realized the potential of the camera to give visual expression to their respective business agendas, and their photographers could be found alongside amateur operators keen to document particular events and people. Each group helped facilitate a broad shift to a ‘culture of display’,23 leaving as a legacy a valuable archive of urban encounters. Though framed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by their makers, and often scratched or badly peeling, the images in this archive nonetheless help give colour to the past and enhance critical analysis. ‘A Never Fading Memory’: Youth and Urban Spectacle Before considering those occasions on which young people took centre stage, an assessment of young people’s roles as spectators in the processional undertakings of adults is warranted. Contemporary sources illustrate that events including circus parades and parades in honour of visiting dignitaries or royal birthdays drew children inexorably towards them, with many memoirs recording such spectacles as peak experiences. The journey by the Duke of Edinburgh through the streets of Melbourne in 1867 formed the basis of Eliza Mitchell’s earliest memory, for example, with her autobiography later recalling moving crowds and a sea of brightly-coloured flags.24 For young Frank Walker, this same occasion was all the more memorable for an accident witnessed while taking in the scene from on high. In his ‘Victorian Reminiscences of the Sixties’, Walker writes: I can readily recall the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to Melbourne in 1867, when as a ‘nipper’ I watched with wandering eyes the procession through the streets of the city in honour of the distinguished visitor. The densely crowded streets, the bursts of cheering, the closely packed throng of sight-seers, and the discordant music of several bands, is all the more impressed on my memory because I was a horrified spectator of the collapse of a verandah-awning, laden with people, at the corner of Collins and Swanston-streets, directly opposite the window where I stood … [A] loud crack [was] followed by a stupendous crash …25

To gain good vantage points children often occupied similarly elevated positions (see Figure 5.1), or alternatively stepped down onto street level to watch – or indeed tag along with – passing parades. In January 1877, ‘numbers of delighted p. 237, and Bill Jay, Victorian Candid Camera: Paul Martin 1864–1944 (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 20–24. The Australian Photographic Review, 7/2 (21 February 1898): 43, includes an illustrated preview of the ‘Eastman Folding Pocket Kodak’ – ‘marvellously compact … flat like a book, 1 ⅝ inches thick, and goes into any pocket’. 23 See Simon J. Bronner (ed.), Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 (New York, 1989), pp. 100–110 for a discussion of this concept. 24 Mitchell, Three-Quarters of a Century, p. 8. 25 Walker, ‘Victorian Reminiscences of the Sixties’, p. 1.

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Fig. 5.1

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Charles Rudd, Procession in Honour of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee 1897. Looking South West from the Corner of Swanston and Bourke Streets (printing out paper, 1897). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

boys and girls’ followed a lively procession by ‘Cooper and Bailey’s Menagerie and Circus’ right around the city and through the suburbs of Fitzroy, Collingwood and Carlton. A docile lion, three elephants hauling a float and a noisy calliope (or steam piano) constituted just some of the attractions on display. Little wonder, then, that this particular street pageant and others like it proved a great hit with young Melburnians.26 Many parents determined that young children should witness civic celebrations – particularly those of a more stately character – as part of their social education. Hence the decision by Alan Mickle’s father to take his 5-year-old son along to see gaslight illuminations in honour of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, or the trip by young Emily Kannuluik and her family to view a torchlight procession 26 The parade is reported in Argus, 19 January 1877, p. 6. In her autobiography, Nancy Adams records her own childish preference for Melbourne’s regular – and similarly thrilling – Chinese parades, which she viewed through the windows of a house on the corner of Exhibition and Collins Streets. ‘This was our favourite procession’, she recalls, ‘– better than even the Eight Hours’ Day or St Patrick’s. In these the men might carry banners but they were soberly clad’ (Adams, Family Fresco, p. 51). These processions might also feature children – see for instance the report in Argus, 6 August 1887, p. 10.

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marking Hawthorn’s declaration as a city in October 1890.27 Where imperial occasions were concerned, moreover, contemporaries spelt out the hoped-for effects of immersing young people in pomp and ceremony. In August 1887, the Secretary of the School Boards of Advice expressed his conviction that the recent schoolchildren’s jubilee fête would be ‘deeply impressed on the minds of the rising generation’, while in May 1901 a correspondent for the British Australasian newspaper stated that children: remember the processions and the shouting, and wonder; they remember the deference paid to the two central figures, the careful preparations for their comfort … They ask for explanations, and, getting them from parents or teachers in full flush of loyalty, make somehow out of this material an ideal of royalty for themselves. And so there comes to them what has hitherto been lacking in Australian children – the sense of reverence.28

The benefits, then, were perceived to be multiple: events would transmit imperial values whilst at the same instilling discipline and respect for one’s elders. Often, although not always,29 a sense of occasion rubbed off on young minds. Victoria Cross winner William Joynt, for example, commences the first page of his memoirs with the firm declaration that ‘Undoubtedly my early childhood experiences influenced the forming of my character and laid the foundation of my Royalist beliefs and love of all things British. Amongst these early experiences was the enthusiastic celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’.30 Seated aboard a horse-drawn drag with his friends and family: [we] joined the cavalcade … to take part in the festivities and see the illuminations. At walking pace we traversed the streets of the city, proceeding first down Collins Streets and saw such marvellous sights, all gaslit with naked flames, some of them a foot high or more, outlining the decorations – the design of the Imperial Crown, the Union Jack and pictures of Her Majesty, and words such as ‘God Save The Queen.’ To my young mind a never fading memory of devotion to the Crown and the Motherland.31

See Mickle, p. 2, and Kannuluik, p. 9. Details of the Hawthorn celebrations – which also included, earlier in the day, the serenading of Governor Hopetoun by 3,000 schoolchildren singing the British national anthem as he passed Grace Park – are further discussed in Victoria Peel, Deborah Zion, and Jane Yule, A History of Hawthorn (Melbourne, 1993), pp. 103–4. 28 W.G. Reynolds’ statement is found in a letter to the Mayor of Melbourne filed in VPRS 3181, Unit 82, Ceremonials (1893–1897), item 2691, letter dated 7 August 1897. The observations by the correspondent are in British Australasian, 16 May 1901, p. 790. 29 For an expression of disappointment with the trickle-down effect of civic festivities, see Federal Australian, 31 March 1881, p. 4 and discussion of this episode in Chapter 2. 30 Joynt, p. 1. 31 Ibid. 27

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By the advent of the Boer War later that decade, William’s youthful fervour had reached its apex. He followed with eagerness the dispatches of Argus correspondent Donald Macdonald (father of the precocious Elaine) and twice joined cheering crowds to see off contingents bound for battle. Leaning out from a window in Elizabeth Street during one march-past, William gave full voice to his feelings and shouted out encouragement for the troops below to ‘Give the Boers rats!’.32 He was not alone in harbouring such sentiments, for the war stimulated the passions of many young Victorians. Ola Cohn’s brother acquired a sizeable collection of lead soldiers, which he drilled and marched in miniature processions,33 while Frank Matthias and his friends went one better, dressing up as wounded soldiers and nurses. ‘The wounded were placed in prams and billy carts’, he recalled, ‘and paraded the streets for a coin collection to provide aid for the Red Cross.’34 Photographer James Fox Barnard encountered just such a group in the streets of suburban Melbourne in 1900 (see Figure 5.2). Elsewhere a detachment of boys armed with replica pistols toured St Kilda in the wake of the war-bound Bushman’s Contingent, posing for another cameraman in the process (Figure 5.3). And during the jingoistic celebrations which followed the relief of Mafeking in May 1900 children were again to be seen in the streets, waving Union Jacks and sharing with their parents in the revelry of the moment (see Figure 5.4).35 ‘All is Right when Dad is Sober’: Temperance and the Marshalling of City Youth The Boer War images show young Melburnians participating in, and interpreting for themselves, events that were essentially adult-oriented in nature. More significant for the purposes of this analysis were those occasions when young people assembled en masse and performed either as a separate component of wider festivities or else as the centrepiece of a stand-alone event. To celebrate British assent in 1850 to the separation of Victoria from New South Wales, between 5,000 and 6,000 children processed across the Yarra River, each child receiving bread

Ibid., see pp. 7–10. Ola Cohn, ‘Me in the Making’, SLV MS 8506, box 1023 (c. 1950), pp. 55–6. Ola

32 33

and her young friends also constructed an imitation cannon using the axle of a tip dray, two wheels from an old perambulator and a clothes prop to represent the gun. She notes that some children even possessed model replicas capable of live firing, and that one such cannon exploded, killing a boy of her acquaintance. 34 Matthias, p. 4. 35 For further details of the celebrations (which climaxed in tumultuous scenes of disorder on Melbourne’s streets), see Joynt, pp. 9–10; Adams, Family Fresco, p. 63; and Randolph Bedford, Naught to Thirty-Three (Sydney, 1944), pp. 327–8. Two other photographs by Barnard accord young people a prominent presence in the street celebrations: see .

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Fig. 5.2

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

James Fox Barnard, Boys Playing Soldiers (glass negative, 1900). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

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Fig. 5.3

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George Rose, At the Junction, St. Kilda (albumen silver stereograph, 1900). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria. Note the figure on the right, taking aim at the photographer

buns to mark the occasion.36 This event, though, was exceptional for the time: until the second half of the 1880s, processions exhibiting young people were generally sporadic and small scale. Hence in April 1871 an excursion and picnic undertaken by the short-lived Young Traders’ School Society consisted of just two horse-drawn lorries and little fanfare. Returning to Melbourne after a day spent at Brighton Beach, the very novelty of the juvenile convoy drew a crowd of onlookers, with the cheering and ‘enthusiastic hurrahs’ of the boys rising above the humdrum noise of normal street traffic.37 Subsequent annual outings by the society, incorporating children from the training ship Nelson and a city-based state school, grew in size,38 but attracted no more attention. Similarly, an early foray into the public domain by the volunteer cadets of Melbourne Grammar School in 1885 caused nothing but confusion, with participants complaining that their navy uniforms with red collars were too easily mistaken for the outfits of messenger boys.39 Slowly but surely, however, the scope of young people’s organized activities in the public sphere was increased, a shift designed to heighten the dramatic impact of the spectacle and symptomatic of the growing influence of youth organizations in the Victorian capital. Particularly significant in this regard were Melbourne’s many juvenile abstinence societies such as the Band of Hope and the Order of 38 39

Argus, 19 November 1850, p. 1. Reported in Argus, 17 April 1871, p. 5. For details, see Argus: 28 April 1873, p. 5; 18 April 1874, p. 7; 20 April 1874, p. 5. Noted in Philip C. Candy, ‘Pro Deo et Patria: The Story of the Victorian Cadet Movement’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 64/1 (1978): 44. 36 37

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Fig. 5.4

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

James Fox Barnard, Relief of Mafeking, Procession, Melbourne (glass negative, 1900). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

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the Sons of Temperance. Active from the 1850s, these bodies (often affiliated to Victoria’s powerful Nonconformist Sunday Schools) constituted the city’s first youth movements.40 From the outset each was overtly political. By focusing their efforts on children, organizers aimed at a double reformation: to save the child from the clutches of alcohol through early instruction, and – by elevating the child to the status of paragon – to issue a message to the wider community (including the child’s parents) about the sanctity of the temperate path. In Britain, where the Band of Hope had originated, children’s temperance groups were not a major element of anti-drink campaigns during the 1830s and 40s, but after failing to make much impact on the consumption habits of adults the movement’s leaders looked to the younger generation.41 By the final decades of the century, British children were unashamedly being deployed as weapons in the fight for temperance,42 a move mirrored in Melbourne where sister societies followed suit.43 Regular parades featured placard-bearing children moving through the city en route to temperance meetings where lectures were given on the evils of alcohol and those present encouraged to ‘take the pledge’. In an early show of force, some 1,600 Band of Hope children marched to Government House in 1861, while a later rally coordinated by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in November 1894 saw around 1,000 Band of Hope children, carrying ‘toy flags’ and dressed with sashes and ribbons, process from Flinders Street Station to the Town Hall. Once gathered there, Rev. W.M. Alexander ‘delivered addresses adapted to the minds of children and couched in terms suggestive of the advantages and propriety of adhering to temperance throughout one’s earthly course’.44 A year later a similar 40 Kociumbas notes that during the 1870s, 60 per cent of all Victorian children aged between 5 and 14 attended Sunday School, with lower proportion, 40 per cent, attending in New South Wales (see Jan Kociumbas, ‘Children and Society in New South Wales and Victoria 1860–1914’ [PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1983], p. 42). Also refer to Swain’s entry on ‘Temperance’ in Brown-May and Swain, The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, p. 714, and to W.W. Phillips, ‘Religion’, in Vamplew, pp. 432–5. These figures suggest that Victoria’s various Methodist Sunday schools were historically at their most powerful from 1870 to the early 1900s. 41 Lilian Lewis Shiman, ‘The Band of Hope Movement: Respectable Recreation for Working-Class Children’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 18/1 (1973): 51. 42 Ibid., see pp. 57–70. For further analysis of the aims and impact of Band of Hope and other organizations with similar objectives in Britain, see Stéphanie Olsen, ‘Raising Fathers, Raising Boys: Informal Education and Enculturation in Britain, 1880–1914’ (PhD thesis, McGill University, 2008), pp. 71–83, 154–5, 20–22, and Horn, pp. 171–2. 43 The first parade by the Band of Hope in Melbourne appears to have occurred in 1859 (Argus, 21 February 1861, p. 5). On the Australian history of the rival Independent Order of Rechabites (which in 1910 claimed 6,688 juvenile members in Victoria, the most in any Australian state), see Anon., Independent Order of Rechabites: 75th Anniversary Souvenir, 1835–1910 (Manchester, 1910), pp. 43–7. 44 Argus, 21 February 1861, p. 5; Age, 19 November 1894, p. 5. In 1892 the Band of Hope claimed almost 30,000 members in Victoria, but estimated that 160,000 children aged between 7 and 15 fell outside its reach (Argus, 20 April 1892, p. 6). Later reports

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gathering marched with a banner bearing the slogan ‘Beware King Alcohol, we shall grow up’; in October 1911 a more elaborate parade included floats, narrative tableaux, ‘a sturdy lad’ holding a standard reading ‘Bread is better than beer’ and a little girl waving a flag on which was written ‘Total abstinence steadies the hands’.45 White outfits on such occasions carried connotations of moral purity, the message amplified in the minds of organizers by their preference for parading in inner-city locations – predominantly working-class areas densely populated with pubs and viewed by middle-class evangelicals as rife with drunkenness and sin.46 Figure 5.5 features a comparable motto, held by a young boy posing for the camera. This photograph is dedicated to the Rev. George Mackie, Presbyterian minister at South Yarra and a prominent member of the Independent Order of Rechabites, the crusading temperance organization inspired by an Old Testament sect. The boy in the photograph is not Mackie’s son, for he had two daughters.47 Instead it seems likely that the child is either a studio model or else belongs to one of the temperance organizations with which Mackie was involved. The key piece of information regarding the photograph’s provenance is not the boy’s identity but rather the fact that it was submitted to the Victorian Patents Office for copyright as a carte de visite: a small and easily reproducible image, ideal for distribution.48 Ushered in this instance into the studio rather than towards the street procession, the boy pictured here nonetheless carries a message for mass consumption, and serves to illustrate the campaigning potential of city children. William Forster, leading light with three different child rescue agencies – the Try Society, the Gordon Institute and the City Newsboys’ Society – also encouraged his boys to ‘take the pledge’, printing up cards for the purpose.49 In addition, he arranged for his young charges to perform on stage in fundraising events where children were again expected to aspire to reformers’ ideals. While group hymn singing on such occasions conveyed a Christian message, and tableaux of woodworking and boot-repairing indicated the inculcation of industrious habits, other performances hinted at more subtle interpretations of children’s proper place. In February 1897, for instance, a Try Girls Society concert in Prahran featured a chart a decline in membership, with a combined count for the Victorian Band of Hope and Junior Total Abstinence Society putting the total at only 6,187 in 1912 (Argus, 20 August 1912, p. 10). 45 See Age, 18 November 1895, p. 5; 23 October 1911, p. 13. 46 The Salvation Army targeted similar locations in its drive to save souls. The efforts of Melbourne’s larrikins to disrupt the Army’s ‘civilizing mission’ are discussed in Chapter 4. From the late 1880s, Catholic children in Melbourne also paraded for the cause of temperance, under the auspices of the League of the Cross. See Argus, 14 March 1892, p. 3 for a report. 47 Noted by Alan Dougan in his entry on Mackie in ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 172–3. 48 In 1865 the Argus observed with regard to cartes de visite that ‘we see them everywhere, in albums, in every house … there is nothing more universal, in fact, than these cards’ (22 September 1865, p. 1 [supplement]). 49 For an example, see SLV MS 9910, box 1, c. 1897.

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Fig. 5.5

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Ready to march – a young boy conveys a temperance message. (Not attributed; albumen silver carte de visite, 1872. Original dimensions 10 x 6.5 cm.) Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

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rendition by Miss Floren Wilson of ‘The Curfew Bell’: a suggestion, perhaps, that dusk was a time when children ought to be indoors, and a precursor to the 1900 Street Frequenting Children’s Restriction Bill, discussed in Chapter 2.50 As well as including orchestrated set-pieces, gala evenings sometimes also gave a free hand to children to perform on their own terms, and here insights can be gained into the street culture of working-class youth. At one event a boy satirized the police by singing (with thick Irish brogue) the comic number ‘I’m a Bobby’; on a different occasion ‘street witticisms’ were exchanged; at further performances boys played self-made instruments, engaged in ‘canary whistling’ and sang favourite music hall numbers.51 Taking the child from the streets was one thing; taking the streets from the child clearly quite another, and event organizers were wise to recognize the popular appeal of allowing their young associates time to perform in the limelight as they pleased. As a case in point, 7-year-old M. Partlin’s rendition of the song ‘Please give us a penny, Sir’ – a ballad which harked back to romanticized ideas about the lives led by street waifs – caused a sensation when performed in 1889 during the first annual newsboys’ gala at Melbourne Town Hall. The effect of the piece on the audience was instantaneous, noted a newspaper reporter, with the barefoot soloist occupied for some time in scooping up the coins showered onto the stage ‘from all parts of the house’.52 He reprised the song the following year, eliciting the same response.53 Clearly a tug on the heart strings could open many wallets. Back outside at street level, by the late 1880s young Melburnians were firmly established as processional players. In 1886 Victoria’s voluntary cadet units held their first large-scale public reviews, at Fawkner Park in April and Albert Park in November (the latter occasion featuring over 2,000 secondary school boys under command), and Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee the following year occasioned further displays of young people in city spaces, with several thousand Sunday school children processing from four directions to the Exhibition Building to sing patriotic hymns.54 Placards were not required for these events. Instead the cadets shouldered rifles and the Sunday school children waved Union Jacks, processional props which made their statements just as clearly as any temperance banner. But in case they were still unsure as to the purpose of the day, children at the jubilee celebration received a leaflet from the Bishop of Melbourne. Pre-empting any alternative interpretations, the Bishop gave a laudatory review of their monarch’s Concert reported in Prahran Telegraph, 13 February 1897. See SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. 51 See Ibid.; Australasian, 30 October 1897, p. 970; Age, 6 April 1886, p. 6; Herald, 26 November 1898, p. 3. 52 Reported in a cutting dated 12 October 1879 and pasted in SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book. 53 Ibid., undated cutting. 54 See Argus: 7 April 1886, p. 4; 20 November 1886, p. 9; and Age, 25 June 1887, p. 9. On the origins of the Victorian cadet movement, refer also to Candy. 50

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reign, beginning ‘You will shortly assemble in your thousands to show your loyal affection to good Queen Victoria’.55 These sentiments, allied to all the flag waving, speeches and songs, left little room for confusion. Young people had now moved towards the forefront of Melbourne’s celebratory undertakings, but it would take another jubilee year and the onset of Federation in 1901 for them to really claim top billing. By the final years of the century young Melburnians would become central to the ritual identity of both their city and the incipient Australian nation coalescing around them. The Diamond Jubilee City-dwellers witnessing an annual procession of children belonging to the Good Templars temperance movement on Easter Saturday in 1897 could likely scarce imagine the scale of events to come two months later. Though April’s spectacle – which featured around 170 children and 60 adults parading through Swanston and Bourke Streets en route to Temperance Hall in Russell Street – was not insignificant in itself, by comparison with the lavish events to come it served as only a small appetizer.56 By late June, Melbourne stood ready for a week of rejoicing during which massed ranks of young people would claim greater attention than ever before. On 23 June, towards the beginning of what was termed ‘Jubilee week’, some 6,500 school children paraded from across the city to a jubilee fête at the Exhibition Building. After an address by the Governor, Lord Brassey, the singing of the National Anthem and ‘some salvos of very shrill and penetrating cheering’, each child received a commemorative medal and a bag containing lollies, pastry and fruit. A programme of activities outside in the grounds then filled the afternoon, with boys engaging in tug-of-war and ball kicking games while girls participated in foot races and club swinging contests.57 Suburban schools were not forgotten by jubilee organizers, with several hundred more children attending separate fêtes the following afternoon in Brighton, Caulfield and Heidelberg.58 On 25 June, two days after the Exhibition fête, three separate events occurring within just a few hours saw Melbourne’s young citizens claiming a hitherto unprecedented share of the city’s processional space. That morning a force of 900 school cadets marched from Spencer Street to the intersection of Swanston and Flinders Streets, before combining with a similar number of veteran soldiers in a parade to the Exhibition Building. Wet weather necessitated the wearing of capes, it was reported, but the senior cadets’ military band and a group of young buglers ensured that the marching rhythm was not broken by the rain.59 57 58 59 55 56

A copy of the bishop’s speech is carried in Age, ibid. The procession is reported in Age, 19 April 1897, p. 5. See Age, 24 June 1897, p. 5 for a report. Ibid. Details drawn from Age, 26 June 1897, p. 10.

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The procession concluded with an address by Alexander Peacock in which the Minister of Education and prominent nativist expressed confidence that the people of Melbourne would be surprised by the cadets’ strength and discipline. The men of the tomorrow, he predicted, would surely look back with pride and pleasure on the day’s activities – a sentiment reportedly greeted with cheers by those present.60 Perhaps the most telling part of the parade was its conclusion, which continued the theme of generational transition. ‘Seeing the old soldiers and sailors leaving the ground’, an Age journalist observed, ‘the cadets flung a farewell after them with three hearty cheers, the clear little voices ringing out across the green. It reached the old men as they went; the little band of war worn veterans stopped and turned in their tracks, and then joined their voices in an answering cheer.’61 To eyewitnesses and those imagining the scene from newspaper reports, the old soldiers’ recognition might have seemed proof positive that colonial youth, if sufficiently drilled, need not always be the subject of agonized conjecture. In the afternoon the Exhibition Building – which served throughout this period as Melbourne’s surrogate city square – again functioned as the setting for a congregation of young Melburnians. Around 18,000 children turned out for a united Sunday schools demonstration of singing and pageantry, to be greeted in turn by a huge crowd of parents and onlookers. ‘Each child carried a miniature Union Jack,’ the Weekly Times noted, ‘and, as most of the children wore white dresses, the sight presented was a magnificent one.’62 ‘The children were on their best behaviour’, added the Age. ‘The contrasted colors (sic) of the young ladies’ dresses, sashes, hat gear and feathers, and the rosettes worn by the boys and gentlemen superintendents made the scene a very bright one.’63 Nine hymns, a doxology and the British national anthem followed, with the Bishop of Melbourne reprising his role of 10 years earlier in attaching to the printed programme the ‘lessons’ of the Jubilee.64 Reiterating the imperial message, a specially composed piece engaged everyone present in singing aloud an imperial mantra. Its opening lines indicate a reverential tone:

62 63 60

Ibid. Ibid. Weekly Times, 3 July 1897, p. 12. Age, 26 June 1897, p. 10. The consistent appearance across the period of Sunday school girls in white dresses (sometimes, as here, with sashes) was a legacy of the Whitsun (‘White Sunday’) tradition in Britain, when from the 1840s churchgoers paraded through the streets en route to baptisms or simply to illustrate moral purity. The ‘Whitsun Walks’ were in turn a concerted response to the pre-industrial ‘Whit-Ales’, a time of drink and irreverence. See: Alun Howkins, ‘The Taming of the Whitsun: the Changing Face of a Nineteenth-Century Rural Holiday’, in Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure, ed. Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (Brighton, 1981), pp. 187–208; Horn, pp. 170–71; Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, pp. 124–6. 64 Age, 26 June 1897, p. 10. 61

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Hark! A mighty Empire singing! Round the globe the song is ringing, On the air this cadence flinging – Homage to our Queen. Nations young and nations hoary Rise to tell the noble story. Sing her radiant reign of glory. Homage to our Queen.65

Whether moved by a shared sense of kinship or through witnessing their offspring so dutifully arranged, in ‘absolute order’, at the centre of events, an observer reported that ‘there were many in the crowds whose emotions got the better of them, for they were visibly affected’.66 Melbourne’s Sunday school children had come to symbolize all that ardent imperialists held most dear. Less ‘magnificent’, perhaps, but no less striking as a spectacle, a torchlight procession through the city by Melbourne University students rounded out the day’s extraordinary sights. Somewhat undercutting the moral gravity of earlier proceedings, the 300 or so undergraduates wielded neither rifles nor Union Jacks but instead carried various anatomical exhibits liberated from the medical faculty. In a burlesque show, arm and thigh bones and an effigy featuring an old skull wearing a varsity cap were paraded around the city, the boisterous scene causing ‘no little stir’ amongst those who encountered it.67 Whether the students intended to poke fun at the venerable age of the Jubilee girl is unclear, but whatever the purpose, the students’ procession was certainly (to borrow the phrase of a contemporary observer) ‘studiously unconventional’.68 There was still room for somewhat ambivalent expressions of loyalty, though: a marching band received praise for its ‘forte rendering’ of ‘Rule Britannia’, and outside the offices of the Age in Collins Street the parade made a temporary halt for a verse of ‘God Save the Queen’.69 One cannot know the sincerity of these performances, it should be noted, and the waving of old bones as conductors’ batons must have diminished the high-flown gravitas of the national anthem. But the very ambiguity of the undergraduates’ parade – was it light-heartedly patriotic or deeply subversive? – only heightened the rigorously orchestrated certainty of the earlier events. It not only lightened the mood after a day of solemn expressions of loyalty, but it was a conspicuous display of the greater licence afforded to undergraduates – because of both their age and their class – to organize their own pageant. Here was a carnivalesque moment that served to reinforce the everyday power relations that were so explicit in the management of younger children.

67 68 69 65 66

Reprinted in Weekly Times, 3 July 1897, p. 12. Age, 26 June 1897, p. 10, and Weekly Times, ibid. See Age, 26 June 1897, p. 10. Ibid. Ibid.

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Jubilee celebrations did not just display young people, of course. The biggest event of the week was not the torchlight parade or the cadets’ exhibition but a procession the following morning during which a phalanx of cyclists led the Governor and his wife, numerous trade and friendly societies, a bullock team and various other formations through the city.70 No single group or demographic cohort received the undivided attention of onlookers in this instance, however, and the processional message was more diffuse as a result. By contrast, the three phases of celebration the previous day had each privileged the role of youth in proclaiming that Melbourne’s young people were loyal imperial subjects ready to fight for the Empire, God-fearing and deeply patriotic (albeit capable, at times, of impertinence). As their various processional movements criss-crossed the city these themes received clear spatial expression.71 Only the onset of Federation in 1901 would eclipse the Jubilee episode in scale and scope, adding in the process a further layer of symbolism to young people’s ceremonial presence. Here youth would also represent national ideals, and embody the aspirations of the infant Australian Commonwealth. Indeed, Australia’s self-conscious association with the future gave young people a particular responsibility in symbolizing the newborn nation. The Federation Pedestal During the years preceding the great act of political union, young Melburnians appeared with increased regularity wearing outfits of ‘Australian’ character at public functions. Whilst a juvenile ‘Fancy Fete’ organized in St Kilda in 1862 had featured nothing inspired by the local scene,72 a similar event hosted by the Mayor at Melbourne Town Hall in 1884 saw the sporadic flowering of native pride. Alongside the usual array of fancy dress standards – Little Red Riding Hood, European peasant girls, sailors and Little Boy Blue – one guest arrived dressed as a ‘Victorian Footballer’ and another boy, Master Blackham, came as an See Weekly Times, 3 July 1897, p. 12 for a full description. Figure 5.1, above, captures the steady stream of participants in the parade, and suggests that the crowd size may have exceeded the estimated 320,000 people who turned out for the Golden Jubilee a decade earlier. Crowd estimate noted in VPRS 937, Unit 321 (1886–1887), bundle 3, ‘Report re. Jubilee Illuminations’. 71 There are parallels here with 1887 Golden Jubilee celebrations in Nottingham, as discussed by Pomfret (pp. 156–60; 178–83). In Nottingham young people also figured prominently, although here their appearances were tied to local efforts to acquire official city status by royal charter and underscored by concern to promote social cohesion. In a further contrast with Melbourne, event organizers in Nottingham also determined to locate ritual activities on the outskirts of the city, regarding the central Market Square as no place for children. 72 A report of the costumes worn at this event features in Illustrated Melbourne Post, 25 April 1862, p. 27. 70

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Fig. 5.6

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Children’s tableaux for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Weekly Times, 3 July 1897, p. 11. Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria

‘Australian Cricketer of the Future’: ‘red, black, and yellow cricket uniform, cap with gold kangaroo badge and motto, “How’s that, umpire?”’.73 As the movement towards a united Australia gathered pace in the 1890s similar costumes became more common. A Federation tableau created by the Australian Natives Association (ANA) processed alongside a tableau of Britannia at the Diamond Jubilee, for example (see Figures 5.6 and 5.7), with a separate section of the parade featuring children on bicycles to represent imperial colonies and dominions.74 Mrs Green’s juvenile fancy dress ball later that year also included a federal aspect, and an elaborate ‘Federation Ballet’ (Figure 5.8) earned critical praise for its striking display. Melbourne’s Weekly Times described the scene for its readers:

Reported in Melbourne Bulletin, 17 October 1884, p. 14 and 24 October 1884, p. 6. Cyclists’ involvement noted in Age, 26 June 1897, p. 10.

73 74

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Fig. 5.7

Children’s tableaux for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Weekly Times, 3 July 1897, p. 11. Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria. Note the ‘Advance Australia’ banner – a motto synonymous with the ANA – and the inclusion of a girl with an ‘N.Z.’ placard: an indication that some nativists still held out hope for New Zealand joining a colonial union

The Misses Pearl, Carey, Mills, and Silverman … represent the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, and West Australia. A tennis tournament is supposed to be in progress, and while the ball of Federation is being manipulated by these four colonies, Queensland is standing by, an interested spectator … At [the] conclusion, the removal of a screen revealed a very pretty and effective tableau. Miss Florrie Green dressed to represent Britannia was seated on a raised platform. On either hand were bannerettes on which were inscribed the words ‘Unity is Strength,’ and ‘Australia Federated’. The effect was heightened by the waving of flags and the playing of national music, and the applause was vociferous.75 75 Weekly Times, 25 December 1897, p. 13. Queensland’s reluctance to play is probably explained by the colony’s failure to send delegates to a conference discussing federal prospects earlier in the year.

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Fig. 5.8

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Federation Ballet, Weekly Times, 25 December 1897, p. 10. Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria. Placard right of centre reads ‘Unity is Strength’

The discussion about ‘Young Australia’, so long conducted in the abstract, had now found flesh-and-blood form, with young people posing as metonyms for individual Australian colonies, albeit still with Britannia positioned prominently. In a rehearsal of roles for the festivities to come, it was clear that boys and girls were once again to act as standard bearers for the affairs of their elders. In 1901, when the big moment arrived, the new nation’s attention focused at first on Sydney rather than Melbourne. It was here, on 1 January, that the Commonwealth was inaugurated and Edmund Barton sworn in as Australian Prime Minister. With the language of youth saturating political commentary,76 it seemed only proper that young people should give their own ceremonial blessing to these momentous events by turning out in public. Outside Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral, ‘2000 little girls, all clad in white, shook 2000 little white handkerchiefs’ at the passing procession to Centennial Park, and during the swearing-in ceremony that followed a massed chorus of children was enlisted to serenade the waking infant.77 Two days later ‘10,000 little people, upon whom must devolve the task of developing our new nation and defending its shores’ assembled at the Sydney cricket ground for a patriotic display.78 After 5,000 girls (once again ‘all dressed in pure white’) had gone through the motions of callisthenic exercises and flagwaving displays, 5,000 boys practiced with dumbbells and marched with swords and rifles. The show climaxed with the unfurling of a giant human Southern Cross 76 See for instance: ‘Arrival of the New Baby’, Bulletin, 14 July 1900, front cover; Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Young Queen’, Times (London), 1 January 1901, p. 6; Stewart, ‘The Language of “Youth”’. 77 Age, 2 January 1901, p. 5. 78 Ibid., 4 January 1901, p. 5.

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in the middle of the ground – a final example of the carefully sequenced movements that had characterized the day.79 Watching from the stands, the new Australian Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, liked what he saw, ‘expressing his complete surprise at seeing so many children in such perfect order’.80 In comparison with the self-motivated, opportunistic and at times disorderly occupations of urban space witnessed by contemporaries at other moments, the scheduled routines must indeed have posed a striking counterpoint. Sydney may have outshone Melbourne in January, but the southern city had a trump card up its sleeve for May. In the negotiations preceding political union, Melbourne secured the right to host the national parliament until such time as a new home could be found and a new building constructed. The Victorian capital had no intention of letting the moment pass without all due fanfare and readied itself well in advance. A month out from the main event, for example, as builders and architects prepared a series of triumphant arches across the city, a substantial parade was laid on for the arrival of the Australian Governor-General. After processing around a city he had last encountered as Victoria’s Governor, Hopetoun rode up to his old residence at Government House and passed on his way a guard of honour laid on by Melbourne’s junior cadets.81 Another warm-up event featured 6,000 children marching in procession from Prahran Town Hall to ‘Como’ house in Toorak, while in Kew the local mayor sent out invitations for a thousand children to attend a ‘biograph entertainment’ and flag-raising ceremony.82 Elsewhere across the city, as the time neared for the arrival by steamer of the Duke and Duchess of York, parents took their offspring to see the finished arches erected to honour the distinguished guests.83 As the first of several big days arrived for Melbourne in May, another huge procession brought the royal guests into the city. After disembarking at St Kilda pier on 6 May, the Duke and Duchess processed by carriage along the Esplanade, up Fitzroy Street and then along St Kilda Road towards the city centre. Entering Hoddle’s street grid, the royal party then toured the length of Collins and Bourke Streets before heading back down St Kilda Road and turning left at the Domain for Government House.84 It was at this point of the parade that that they encountered ‘perhaps as pretty a feature of the pageant as could be found anywhere in the whole route of the procession’.85 On the sloping parkland flanking the road over 30,000 Sunday school children had assembled, each child holding a Union Jack. As the carriages passed by, the children burst into a rehearsed song, sending forth the following, rather stilted, greeting: 81 82 83

The Leader features a photograph of the scene: 12 January 1901, p. 2. Age, 4 January 1901, p. 5. Argus, 3 April 1901, p. 5. Noted in Age, 4 May 1901, p. 12. As depicted for example in a photograph by Gustav Damman: ‘Arch across street, with the words France Welcomes Australian Federation’ (glass plate, 1901). Item held at State Library of Victoria, . 84 A map of the processional route is featured in the Age, 6 May 1901, p. 3. 85 Age, 7 May 1901, p. 6 (supplement). 79 80

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Fig. 5.9

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The Royal Review at Flemington Race-course. Cadets Marching Past (not attributed; gelatine silver, 1901). Courtesy Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

With three times three we coo-ee, The Prince we meet again; Our Princess May we welcome, With heart and voice amain.86

‘Probably not one of those who sang so lustily had witnessed the previous visit of his Royal Highness’, the Age remarked, ‘but the sentiment was a good and proper one all the same.’87 Three days later on 9 May, after a Chinese procession and a parade by stockmen had taken place, the royal party left Government House for the formal opening of Parliament, pausing to review 4,000 cadets en route.88 The cadets mustered again the following day, leading a march-past at Flemington racecourse (see Figure 5.9), and rallied once more for a state school fête at the Exhibition Oval on 11 May. A Ibid. Ibid. 88 Noted by Candy, p. 52. 86

87

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Fig. 5.10

State School Fete, Exhibition Building: Maypole Dance Opposite the Royal Box (not attributed; gelatine silver, 1901). Courtesy National Library of Australia, PIC/3341/1-21

crowded programme at this latter event included firing exercises, bayonet drill, a mass display of maypole dancing by girls (see Figure 5.10) and the presentation of gold medals to commemorate Federation to all 12,000 performers.89 A schools’ prize-giving ceremony at the Exhibition Building the following Tuesday (14 May) completed the suite of public appearances involving Melbourne’s children, with the Duchess of York giving the signal a little after midday for the simultaneous hoisting of ‘The Grand Old Flag’ (that is, the Union Jack) on every state and public school throughout Australia.90 Two days later the royal couple were gone, bound for Brisbane, leaving behind a city still draped in bunting and doubtless nursing more than a few sore feet. Contemporary commentators drew pride from the various displays. Observers noted that the young cadets ‘bore themselves with the spring and alertness of trained troops’ and boasted that ‘no such muster of boy soldiers has ever been held Detailed in British Australasian, 16 May 1901, p. 798. Noted in Age, 4 May 1901, p. 11.

89 90

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in England as that which His Highness saw at Flemington’.91 With royal visitors in town, Melbourne’s Federation events were imperial showcases, presenting a priceless chance to show off what the new nation had to offer. As cadets conducted drill and girls danced around maypoles, organizers ensured that the Duke and Duchess had plum seats. Watching the performances from an adjacent position, the Queen’s representative in Australia, Lord Hopetoun, perhaps recalled what was said at a London banquet held in his honour in October 1900. With the Boer War in mind, and with a number of recuperating Australian soldiers listening at the dining tables, the Earl of Selbourne had declared that ‘To this partnership we of the old country and the colonies both bring a priceless contribution. We bring the history, the tradition, and the experience of well nigh fifteen centuries; they bring the enterprise, the self-confidence, and the enthusiasm of youth’.92 Six months on here was supporting evidence for the Earl’s assessment. Australia appeared ready for future imperial commitment. What all this meant to the young participants is less clear. No-one at the time appears to have asked them for their opinion, and little specific detail can be gleaned from personal reminiscences of the period. Frank Matthias mentions his father hanging a large Union Jack outside the upstairs windows of their house to greet the royal visitors, for instance, but neglects to discuss his own response as an observer to the passing parade.93 Similarly, E. Morris Miller, aged 19 in 1901, recounts his enthusiastic attendance of ANA meetings in the lead-up to Federation, but skips over the event itself.94 The lack of firsthand recollections, however, does not prevent a reading of the Federation festivities as ritual texts since their meanings were concocted by adults. First and foremost, as the examples discussed above illustrate, Federation events privileged the place of youth. The British Australasian’s Victorian correspondent, writing predominantly for a British-based readership, was quick to grasp this emphasis, reporting in his dispatch that ‘A notable feature of the Commonwealth celebrations is the extent to which the rising generation is being enabled to participate in the enthusiasm’.95 Whether dressed in school uniform, sporting white dresses or wearing military fatigues, young city-dwellers appeared as special attractions in adult processions and as the main drawcard at four major events (one in Sydney and three in Melbourne). At one level their sequential movements proved the benefits of early training; at the same time their public appearances kept the link between ‘the young country’ and its young citizens towards the forefront of popular attention.96 Young people’s ceremonial duties 93 94 95 96 91

Unattributed source quoted in Candy, p. 79. See British Australasian, 4 October 1900, p. vii (supplement). Matthias, p. 5. Miller, p. 43. British Australasian, 16 May 1901, p. 802. This association is in contrast to the rationale for similarly timed festivals privileging youth in Saint-Etienne. There events including the fête de la muse were linked not to assumed youthfulness but to fears of decline – hence composer Gustave Charpentier’s hope of fostering an atmosphere to ‘rejuvenate our old cities’ (see Pomfret, p. 173). 92

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also pre-empted the advice on ‘adolescence’ given by American G. Stanley Hall in 1905. Hall championed the benefits of maypole dancing for girls in early puberty and stated with regard to military training that ‘never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions’.97 Gender divisions were strictly enforced. Girls dressed in white and performed tasks emphasizing grace, order and health in a mass idealization of middle-class notions of girlhood. Boys marched in khaki as evidence of their readiness for national and imperial defence and as proof that, ‘at an age where they are liable to go to the bad’, discipline provided an answer.98 Federation festivities, therefore, could serve multiple purposes – instilling a sense of pride amongst spectators whilst at the same time fostering respect for authority and channelling adolescent urges. An absence rather than a presence comprises the other principal characteristic of the Federation events. Given the reason for holding the celebrations in the first place, and the antecedents discussed above, the lack of overt Australian symbolism seems strange. Aside from the human Southern Cross formed by children in Sydney, the stockmen’s procession and the intermittent ‘coo-ees’ that issued from the Domain in Melbourne, there was little in ceremonial terms to set the occasion apart as specifically national. Instead the Federation celebrations were cast as imperial events, marking the birth (or was it the coming of age?) of a new family member in the imperial household. Underlining the point, it was the Union Jack rather than anything home-grown that fluttered on the thousands of sticks held aloft by children; not until 3 September, long after the royal party had departed, did the winning entry in an Australian flag competition fly for the first time from Melbourne’s Exhibition Building.99 At the state school fête a children’s tableau reiterated the dominant imperial agenda. Where ardent Australian nationalists might have hoped to see costumes inspired by the local context, they instead encountered a more cosmopolitan scene (see Figures 5.11 and 5.12). Although a female representation of ‘Young Australia’ (in white dress and sash) stands towards the centre in each image, she shares the spotlight with Britannia, girls wearing Scottish highland and Welsh folk costumes, soldiers, sailors and others in nondescript attire. As a reflection of the imperial relationship at that moment one might argue that it serves well. Britannia’s shield, in tandem with the presence of the sailor boys, remind those present of Britain’s protective naval power, while the colours of the Union Jack, draped by Britannia around the shoulders of her imperial daughter, render the model Southern Cross held by ‘Young Australia’ rather feeble. Knowing one’s place appears the order of the day, and the voice of Australian nationalism seems muted as a result. See Jan Kociumbas, ‘Children and Society’, p. 275, and G. Stanley Hall, pp. xii, 223. Lacking the age-specific terminology of G. Stanley Hall, here General Tulloch

97

98

nevertheless proposes a similar rationale for the cadet movement in Victoria. Tulloch comment (from late 1880s) cited in Candy, p. 49. 99 Noted by Gavin Souter in Lion and Kangaroo – Australia: 1901–1919, The Rise of a Nation (Sydney, 1976), p. 190. The flag was officially gazetted in February 1903.

‘For the Sake of Effect’

Fig. 5.11

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Children’s Tableau in Half Circle. At the Exhibition Building, Melbourne, 1901 (not attributed; albumen silver, 1901). Courtesy National Library of Australia, PIC/13117280-8

Surface signs, however, do not reveal the whole picture. Looking beyond individual outfits or processional props, we find another reason for the scarcity of overt Australian symbolism. Through their repeated public appearances during the Federation celebrations, city children had themselves come to embody a national ideal, thereby lessening the requirement for them to bear emblems of nationhood. Put another way, young people were performing a metonymical function, standing for Australia’s present and future aspirations. By occupying ceremonial space they sent a series of messages about Australia’s military ideals, its concern for national fitness and purity,100 and its loyalty to Britain. Banners or wreaths of wattle were hence superfluous, for the very presence of such large numbers of young people on a public stage was itself charged with meaning.

For further discussion on role of symbols of white ‘purity’ in these events as markers of race, gender and class, refer to Avril Kyle, ‘Images of Girls: An Examination of Some Representations of Girls Produced in Britain and Australia, 1855–1915’ (PhD thesis, Monash University, 2000), pp. 73–8, 152. 100

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Fig. 5.12

Fancy Dress and National Costume, Melbourne Federation Celebrations (not attributed; albumen silver, 1901). Courtesy National Library of Australia, PIC/13117280-22. A close-up image of the main group pictured in Fig. 5.11, taken elsewhere on the same day

Imperatives of Nation: Child Rescue and the Grand Picnic Challenges to the dominant ceremonial uses of city space produced by large-scale events like Federation and the Jubilee celebrations were few and far between. On one occasion in 1883 the city’s larrikins embarked on a motley parade down Queensberry Street (an incident alluded to in the previous chapter), and eight years later a number of Melbourne’s newsboys took to the streets to champion their rights as workers (discussed in Chapter 3). But these displays were spontaneous, fleeting and unsanctioned. Licensing authorities, on the contrary, were determined that street processions should be orderly affairs with predictable outcomes. In this regard the decision to refuse consent for a shop assistants’ rally in July 1886 is revealing.101 After the ‘riots’ over the issue of early closing across the northern suburbs that April (analyzed in Chapter 3), the risk that further trouble might ensue The refusal of a permit is noted in Brown-May, ‘“The itinerary of our days”’,

101

p. 488.

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was evidently seen as too great, and a permit was denied in consequence. Only the annual parades by Melbourne’s undergraduates presented a regular contestation by young people of the prevailing processional themes of orderliness and tight discipline, with the striking students’ jubilee pageant of 1897 setting the tone for later events.102 The May Day demonstrations of socialists – which often featured children prominently positioned in red costumes or political tableaux – added another discordant note in the first decade of the twentieth century,103 but these occasions also stood as exceptions to the rule. Instead the new century saw processional space largely given over to events which fulfilled a state agenda built around nation and empire. Seen in this light, the parade of 10,000 Sunday school children through Melbourne in March 1902 to celebrate the unification of Australian Methodists can be regarded as something of a last hurrah; henceforth it was the state rather than the Protestant churches that dominated public proceedings with regard to young people.104 Given the gradual decline in Sunday school membership in Victoria from the turn of the century and increased attendance in the state school classroom, this shift should not surprise us, but it is significant nonetheless.105 Catholic youth groups, including the League of the Cross and the youth wing of the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society, seem to have better maintained a processional profile in the early years of 102 Brown-May notes that the first record of an official application by the students to the Mayor for permission to process occurred in April 1891 (ibid., p. 431). Earlier parades (presumably lacking official sanction) had occurred, however, with one such incident in 1890 recorded in P.A. Jacobs, A Lawyer Tells (Melbourne and London, 1949), p. 21. In April 1906 the Age described a 500-strong students’ procession as ‘one of the most ludicrous displays ever witnessed in the streets of Melbourne’ (see 25 April, 1906, p. 8), and a similar burlesque show is discussed in Andrew May, ‘Structures with Actors: An Approach to the Historical Experience of the Street in Melbourne’, Melbourne History Journal, 18 (1987): 9–10. Each event was characterized by irreverence and the sending-up of authority. 103   A small procession to Flinders Park in May 1907, for example, featured children in red and white costumes (see Age, 2 May 1907, p. 9). In a march from the Eight Hours monument in Spring Street to Flinders Park the following year, ‘the chief feature … was a gaily garlanded lorry, atop of which were seated ten children – seven girls clad in white and holding aloft florally decorated hoops, and three boys, wearing red blouses and white pants. Some thirty children walked, carrying red bannerettes, on which were inscribed the groups to which they belonged, as the Marx group, the Tolstoi group, the Liberty group, &c.’ A maypole with red and white streamers was set up upon arrival at the park, but the appearance of a vocal mob of youthful ‘hoodlums’ interrupted the planned speeches. (See Age, 3 May 1909, p. 8, for a full report.) Brown-May notes that the Mayor had given permission to this latter gathering only with reluctance (see ‘“Better than a Play”’, p. 10). 104 See W.F. James, Souvenir of a Great Historical Event: The Union of the Methodist Churches of Australasia, Consummated in Melbourne, February 25, 1902 (Melbourne, 1902), pp. 29, 33 for a report of the occasion. Indicating the extent of the parade, Rev. W.H. Fitchett described the scene as ‘two miles of the Methodism of to-morrow’ (ibid., p. 29). 105 For statistical support, refer to Phillips, ‘Religion’, pp. 432–5 and footnote 40, above.

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the twentieth century (a profile associated almost exclusively with the nationalist celebration of St Patrick’s Day),106 but here again school organization came to dominate.107 Parading the strength of numbers now under its direction, on 24 May 1905 the Australian government commenced its annual Empire Day festivities, marking the late Queen Victoria’s birthday.108 The following year, in September 1906, the Victorian Government decided that the benefits of the ‘New Education’ also required a public face, laying on a series of events featuring school children at and outside the Exhibition Building to espouse scholastic achievement.109 F.C. Eddy, a schools inspector, drew attention to the increasing emphasis on physical health and its relationship to national fitness, a preoccupation in the aftermath of the Boer War.110 ‘Most of the competitors in the races’, Eddy observed, ‘showed good limb and chest development, endurance, and speed, and gave evidence that, in the course of time, they would become stalwart citizens of the State.’111 In a shift also recognized by Martin Crotty,112 public displays were now an occasion to demonstrate physical prowess as much as moral worth. Generating somewhat less attention than these spectacular celebratory undertakings, but no less significant for the fact, working-class children affiliated to Melbourne’s various child rescue agencies were also rendered increasingly visible in the decades either side of Federation, and here the imperatives of nation can also be detected. Seaside picnics offered children exercise and a chance to escape the city; parades en route to them proved ever more popular, demonstrating in a public way the community benefits of charitable enterprise as well as the benevolence of its patrons. A newsboys’ picnic in January 1898, for instance, saw nine vans head to the Brighton sea baths, where swimming, sandwiches and Punch and Judy shows engaged those present before runners in a 440-yard race competed See Argus: 17 March 1913, p. 11; 18 March 1907, p. 9. In this regard, a parade of 2,000 Catholic school cadets in 1909 can be seen as

106 107

foreshadowing far greater federal involvement in the military training of boys from 1911. See Argus, 18 March 1909, pp. 5–6 for a report. 108 For a photograph depicting state school children marshalled for the occasion in suburban Surrey Hills (and featuring a rigid spatial division between the older cadets, the younger boys and their female classmates), see History Nook group, Surrey Hills: In Celebration of the Centennial 1883–1983 (Melbourne: 1983), p. 29. 109 Refer to Charles R. Long (ed.), Record and Review of the State Schools Exhibition held at the Exhibition Building, Melbourne, September 5th to 22nd, 1906 (Melbourne, 1908) for a souvenir synopsis of the various events. 110 On this refer to Bentley B. Gilbert, ‘Health and Politics: The British Physical Deterioration Report of 1904’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 39 (1965): 143–53, and Davison, ‘The City-Bred Child’, pp. 144–50. 111 Long, Record and Review, see p. 73. 112 Crotty, pp. 220, 262. In reaching this conclusion, Crotty credits Stuart Macintyre in identifying a still bigger shift from a ‘society unified by faith to one joined in citizenship’ (see p. 222).

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Fig. 5.13

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A break from the city: newsboys about to depart for their annual picnic in 1908. Reproduced from SLV MS 10034, box 1602, Melbourne Newsboys’ Club Foundation, newspaper cuttings book. Courtesy Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria. Edith Onians, the vigorous Secretary of the Newsboys’ Society, is pictured fourth from the left on the quay

for a suit of new clothes.113 Venturing further afield a decade later, the Newsboys’ Society set sail across Port Phillip Bay for Portarlington. Figure 5.13 captures a scene of excitement as the sizeable party boards a steamer for the outward journey. A montage of images from Melbourne’s Weekly Times in December 1899 also highlights the public relations and nationalist agendas of these seaside outings. In capturing the day’s events on film, The Ragged School Children’s Picnic (Figure 5.14) melds together several aspects of late-Victorian photographic sensibility and concepts of display. A range of framing devices is used: the streetscape shot; the portrait; the apparently candid ‘snapshot’; the carefully created vignette. Although captions are provided, the photographs presented are clearly intended to make sense without detailed textual support and presuppose a pre-existing sense of visual literacy. Two types of journey – literal and symbolic – are illustrated here. Reading the montage as a narrative – a parade of images, in effect – the story of the day commences in the top left corner as the picnickers set off from the School’s headquarters in La Trobe Street. Almost 1,500 children crammed aboard 47 vans before the party processed through the city to the coast at Sandringham.114 A day of semi-structured play and hearty refreshments lay in store, beginning in the tale told here with tea and games on the beach. Superintendent and Secretary, F.W. Minton, figures prominently early on, and in the bottom right-hand corner of the sequence a group photograph of staff and honorary workers provides a further visual prop. These images position the adults as expert overseers, a theme embellished by the Herald, 14 January 1898, p. 7. Weekly Times, 2 December 1899, p. 14.

113 114

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Fig. 5.14

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

The Ragged School Children’s Picnic (Weekly Times, 2 December 1899, p. 10). Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria

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most prominent photograph in the montage: ‘The Peacemaker’. Here a man in policeman’s uniform (Minton himself, perhaps?) holds two boys by the collar. The photograph is obviously staged and serves by its placement to anchor the surrounding images, connecting them to themes of discipline and respect for authority. This is especially significant given that the title of a neighbouring image – ‘Feeding the Push’ – alludes to unruliness and larrikinism. The comedic elements of ‘The Peacemaker’ shot and the use of the word ‘push’ suggest that the perception of larrikinism was softening by 1899, and at the same time remind the viewer of the Ragged School’s day-to-day work with street children who might otherwise fall into law-breaking larrikin habits.115 Further subtitles assign distinct roles: boys make up ‘the push’, girls are ‘little maids’, and adults are identified by their jobs in running the charity. The remaining images are less didactic, balancing the careful crafting of the portrait shots and the ‘Peacemaker’ photograph with the natural exuberance of children at play, paddling in the water or relaxing on the beach. Readers of the Weekly Times are shown a successful charitable enterprise under the steady guidance of Minton and his colleagues. The sequence of images, then, both retells the literal journey of the day – the passage from the city to the seaside – and at the same time alludes to an overarching transition effected at a group level: the rescue and redemption of street children. Put in other terms, this display of youth is represented as nation-building work. In her thesis on the social reform movement in Melbourne between 1890 and 1914, Anthea Hyslop discerned a shift in emphasis among reformers from alleviation of distress through poor relief in the 1890s to preventative health measures in the early 1900s.116 Suffusing the transition, she argued, was a spirit of ‘melioristic nationalism’, a telling phrase which helps reveal how national imperatives increasingly dominated the agendas of child rescue agencies and created common ground for welfare advocates of different political persuasions.117 Seen in this context, the public aspect of child rescue work can be regarded as aligned along the same nationalist axis as the callisthenic performances and athletic competitions featuring state school children. Both types of display promoted health, vitality and the construction of ‘productive’ citizens, pre-empting the later philosophies of prominent reformers including Charles Barrett and W.G. Spence.118 Organizations like the Try Boys Society and the Gordon Institute, 115 To this end, it is interesting to note that the following year the Home included the Weekly Times images in its promotional material. See VPRS 3181, Unit 90, Charities (1898–1903), item 2276, ‘Latrobe St Ragged Boys Home’. 116 Anthea Hyslop, ‘The Social Reform Movement in Melbourne 1890 to 1914’ (PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1980), p. 11. I take the term to mean charitable intervention underscored by nationalist concern. 117 Ibid., see pp. xiii, 224 for discussion of the shared purpose of W.G. Spence (radical trades-unionist and author of the influential 1908 publication The Child, the Home and the State) and the conservative Charity Organisation Society. 118 Ibid., see pp. 23, 224 for an introduction to the activities of these reformers.

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furthermore, were quick to realize that by promoting their work as beneficial both to the welfare of the individual and to the well-being of the state, leverage could be gained in promoting the cause of charitable intervention. As Scott and Swain observe, this nationalist inflection contrasts with British child rescue efforts. There the emphasis lay more in attempting to tackle the lower class ‘residuum’ than in building a new nation.119 Reformed and Ready ‘Proof’ of the transformative benefits of child rescue work for the nation is further demonstrated in Figure 5.15. In this instance, the first of the two photographs (dated ‘9.11.94’) depicts its subject, Alfred Sullivan, as he prepares to leave Melbourne for a country work placement arranged by the Try Society. The mock rural setting created in the studio – replete with rustic wooden fence and scenic backdrop – suggests a pastoral haven free from the squalor and danger of city life. The photographer has evidently prompted Alfred to interact with the objects around him, and by resting a hand on the fence he is seen to acknowledge his acquiescence in the forthcoming departure. Pasted below is a larger portrait taken six years later, in 1900. Again its subject is preparing for a journey. Alfred Sullivan is now a Victorian Imperial Bushman, dressed in military fatigues, and soon to leave for battle in South Africa. The message of this mini-narrative requires no supplementary text: interaction with the Try Society has remade young Alfred into a model citizen. Rescued from a life on the streets, he now realizes his place within the nation and his importance to a wider imperial cause. Through the medium of photography, Alfred Sullivan is depicted as an exemplary case, self-evident visual verification of Try Society enterprise. Written sources suggest that Forster arranged for photos like this to be taken door-to-door around Melbourne to raise funds, and he is also known to have directed attention to such images during interviews as evidence of successful intervention.120 On occasion, boys in the Try Society’s own printing class could also be found producing quarto cards bearing ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs, similar in concept to the Alfred Sullivan images.121 In a network of performance and publicity, the young trainees were thus complicit in issuing powerful messages about their friends, and perhaps even themselves. Scott and Swain, p. 54. Door-knocking is noted in a critical article, ‘Professional Philanthropists. Living

119

120

on “Waifs and Strays”’ printed by the Age in February 1905 (see SLV MS 9910, box 2, cuttings book). Regarding the interviews, in February 1899, Forster directed an Age journalist to ‘Look at these photographs’ (see Age, 8 February 1899, SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book). An undated newspaper clipping (probably from the Herald) also states that Forster produced photographs during the latter stage of an interview. The images, noted the journalist in response, ‘afford striking evidence of the value of Mr Forster’s work’ (SLV MS 9910, box 41, cuttings book). 121 Noted in a news cutting dated 19 March 1893, contained in SLV MS 9910, ibid.

‘For the Sake of Effect’

Fig. 5.15

207

Reformed, remade and ready for departure – Alfred Sullivan as child and man, c. 1900. Reproduced from SLV MS 9910, archive of William Forster Try Boys Society, box 1, loose scrapbook sheet. Courtesy Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria

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Displaying the virtues of intervention in an even more striking manner (and exemplifying special state interest in the public activities of boys before the Great War), the new century also witnessed Melbourne’s cadets parading in ever longer columns, with consecutive record turnouts occurring in 1912 and 1913. In each instance some 18,000 boys marched through the streets (see Figure 5.16), with the latter occasion expressly arranged to demonstrate to a group of visiting British MPs (and any sceptical locals) the blessings of new federal legislation for compulsory military service.122 On 30 June 1911 the voluntary cadet system had ended under the terms of the 1909 and 1910 Defence Acts.123 Henceforth all Australian males between 12 and 18 were required to attend a minimum number of drill and training days each year and in so doing show their worthiness to serve the nation. The parades had the desired effect, if not always on the intended participants then at least on the spectating public.124 ‘You could not see a sight like this in any other country in the world’, enthused one member of the British delegation, impressed by the seven-mile line of khaki which had passed before him through the city.125 ‘I only wish we had the whole of the House of Commons present to see what I have seen’, gushed another delegate, L.S. Amery (champion of imperial defence); ‘If that were possible, I am convinced we would have the same thing in Great Britain in two years.’126 Laden with rifles in these historical moments, images of Melbourne’s cadets are now loaded with pathos. Within just a couple of years of being photographed, many of the older boys would be marching again, this time to the drums of war and towards bloody conflicts at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Prepped by their numerous public appearances and enforced drill routines, each ‘ANZAC’ (as Australian soldiers became known) would sign up voluntarily. A shift in the context of processions from an earlier religious, voluntary, and moral motivation towards nationalist, compulsory, and state-sponsored appearances had taken effect. Young Melburnians were now not only to display grace and respectability, but also to be seen as contributing to the nation. Child reformers backed the switch of emphasis. Saving children from city streets had become as much a cause of the state as a matter of individual salvation, as Figure 5.17 illustrates with clarity. ‘Were these not worth saving?’, this composition asks, above a series of five portraits. A caption beneath the photographs answers the question, revealing that these are ‘Some of Our Former Boys – Now at the Front. Doing Their Duty to the Empire’. Saved not See for comment and description Age: 18 November 1912, p. 5; 22 September 1913, pp. 8, 12. 123 See The Defence Act 1909 and The Defence Act 1910 (both passed at the federal level). 124 For diverging views on the reception of the compulsory system by young people and their families see John Barrett, Falling In: Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’ 1911– 1915 (Sydney, 1979) and Thomas W. Tanner, Compulsory Citizen Soldiers (Sydney, 1980). 125 Delegate quoted in Age, 22 September 1913, p. 12. 126 Ibid. 122

‘For the Sake of Effect’

Fig. 5.16

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Australia’s Young Army: conscripted cadets turning into Collins Street in September 1913 (Age, 22 September 1913, p. 12). Courtesy Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria

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Fig. 5.17

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

‘Were These Not Worth Saving?’: the national imperatives of child rescue, as perceived by Melbourne’s Gordon Institute, Gordon Boys, December 1916. Courtesy State Library of Victoria

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for themselves but for a national and imperial cause, these individuals have traded a life amongst the laneways for life in the trenches. Girls and young women were not permitted to share so explicitly in this very public compact with a militarizing nation. Instead they were expected to cultivate an outward poise based in part on the suppression of inner sexual desires;127 to be ready, both physically and morally, to produce the next generation of citizens. Looking back – both at the marshalling of youth recounted in this chapter and at the broader spectrum of young people’s public activities discussed earlier in this book – it seems no coincidence that during this period young Melburnians should come to occupy such a prominent place in the ceremonial life of their city. It had taken time, but spurred on by a variety of factors including the increased assertiveness of youth organizations, the celebration of successive imperialnational events and the expanding power of the state, young people had acquired a new level of public visibility. On a city stage bearing local signposting but conveying national meaning, young Melburnians came to embody the aspirations of their elders. This public aspect was not symptomatic, however, of a widening acceptance of the child’s right to unfettered access of the public domain. Temperance children, state school boys and girls, ‘rescued’ street children and conscripted cadets all generated a transitory space for the purpose of parading, but it was not a space of their own in instigation. Only the undergraduates enjoyed that privilege on a regular basis. Rather, in something of an underhand twist, young people’s heightened ceremonial visibility occurred in concert with the legislative curtailment of youth’s independent freedoms. In a reflex also identified by Jan Kociumbas and David Pomfret, as the city spaces freely accessible to children diminished so organized events for children increased.128 Faith in the role of cities as places to nurture children had dwindled, and adults determined to control the patterns in which young people would occupy urban space, along the way attempting to overwrite with new associations the inner-city thoroughfares where the working class gathered. Although called upon to represent – indeed embody – institutional, national and imperial themes, young Melburnians enjoyed little say in their orchestration.

127 For discussion, see Judith Smart, ‘Feminists, Labour Women and Venereal Disease in early Twentieth-Century Melbourne’, Australian Feminist Studies, 7/15 (1992): 25–40. 128 See Kociumbas, Australian Childhood, p. 101; Pomfret, pp. 183, 289, 292.

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Conclusion

Fig. C.1

Thomas Kennington, Homeless (1890) (oil on canvas, 165 x 151 cm). Picture held in Collection at Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria (purchased 1906). Courtesy Bendigo Art Gallery

Homeless, helpless, a passive victim of the urban environment – this is a dominant image of youth at large in the late-Victorian city. Raised up from wet paving stones by a compassionate passer-by, this fallen child appears feeble, an object for pity and necessary rescue. The portrait’s tone is elegiac: the female figure is dressed in ‘widow’s weeds’, the garments of mourning, and the child’s limp posture

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and vacant gaze suggest that death may be near at hand. In the distance the grey gasworks, belching chimney and diagonal crane frame the location as industrial. Nature is a sparse commodity here; even the solitary tree in the painting is leafless, its lower branch snapped, its stone casing restricting room for future development. Nothing, we are invited to infer, can grow normally in this setting. No visual clue is given by the artist regarding the precise whereabouts of these characters. It could be any street in any industrial city of the Victorian era. This gloomy streetscape in fact belongs to London. Composed there in 1890 by British artist Thomas Kennington, Homeless soon transcended national boundaries by arriving in Melbourne in 1892 for a large Anglo-German display at the city’s Exhibition Building. The painting attracted considerable critical acclaim: Melbourne’s Argus stated that it was ‘full of pathos … both a poem and a sermon’, while the Age drew attention to the face of the child, describing it as ‘a chef d’œuvre of artistic power and human sympathy … a face … that expresses all the patient suffering of a whole class, amongst whom the inheritance of sorrow and privation is patiently accepted and endured’.1 Homeless serves to illustrate the traffic of ideas around the British world in the late-Victorian era and the international frames of reference in which discussions about young people and the urban environment took place. The painting implies – like so many other cultural artefacts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – that the fates of youth and the city are intertwined. Equally significant, it presents a compelling manifesto for outside adult intervention into the lives of children. Like Thomas Kennington, I have also focused on the public presence of young people in a metropolitan setting. Yet my findings challenge his rendering of the urban scene and dispute the child savers’ image of the outdoor city as intrinsically detrimental to children’s growth. Episodes and experiences retrieved from the archives and examined throughout this book instead tell other stories. For the children who built their own adventure playground from found objects in 1896, for example, the public domain represented a space of fun, not danger. In sight of the Exhibition Building where Homeless had hung four years earlier, the children’s seesaws and contented play signified a sense of possibility rather than fatalism. For Melbourne’s newsboys and their fellow street traders, the city likewise served as a resource. To them it was an open-air workplace, a setting where a living could be made and a sense of solidarity acquired. Scurrying along the streets to meet a customer’s needs, or bellowing out the particulars of the day’s events, the lively newsboy presents a striking contrast to Kennington’s pallid child. Similarly, for Elaine Macdonald and May Stewart – whose written accounts cast a crisp light on the experience of growing up in this era – the public realm promised adventure, independence and the chance to develop relationships on their own terms. At large See Argus, 2 March 1892, p. 6, and Age, 3 March 1892, p. 6. A reproduction of the painting also featured on the front page to a special supplement in the weekly Australasian newspaper, carrying the image beyond the city limits to country Victoria (see Australasian, 5 March 1892). 1

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in the city, they found room to explore their desires and extend their horizons. In turn, they shared the street corners and laneways with the larrikins, those bands of working-class youths who regarded the city as a series of rival territories and who publicly refuted the quiet compliance that their age and class position might have entailed. Eluding adult control in such circumstances, some young people inevitably went astray. Others found no solace in the public domain or met with tragedy when the metropolis proved unforgiving. But the desire for outdoor activity could not be contained. Young Melburnians staked claims to space all across the city. Shifts both in the nature of city space and in the perception of its youthful occupants meant, however, that by the early years of the twentieth century the outdoor city was becoming a less welcoming place. Though new spaces of consumption were opening up, the gradual filling in of the vacant plots that both young children and older larrikins had occupied saw the range of locations freely accessible to young city dwellers begin to diminish.2 The extension of police powers allied to rising school attendances further limited the scope for autonomous activity, and the advent of the motor car also started to reduce space for children in the streets. One urban commentator has argued that it was the physical dangers associated with motorized transport that first made adults apprehensive about children’s abilities to negotiate urban hazards, resulting in increased supervision and curbed freedoms.3 Yet in truth the car’s impact really only exacerbated existing trends; as my analysis has shown, anxieties about children at large on city streets long preceded the age of the automobile.4 The gradual tightening of restrictions on street trading was one manifestation of this concern, serving slowly to close down avenues for open-air enterprise. Powers granted to child savers in 1887 to apprehend anyone deemed to be ‘neglected’ and the unsuccessful attempt in 1900 to impose an evening curfew on the city’s children further indicate a deepening urban unease. Caution now increasingly infused adults’ views of the young people in their midst. Attempting to pull the youthscape in new directions were the city’s children. It was they who were often first to embrace changes in the city’s architecture, colonizing areas on or alongside tram or train tracks, for instance, or frequenting the burgeoning Eastern Market – a place where many adult entrepreneurs encouraged A phenomenon noted by ‘Vesta’ (Stella May Allan) in 1909. See Argus, 24 March 1909, p. 9: ‘Almost every vacant spot of land in our suburbs is utilised by the children of the neighbourhood for their play. But, unfortunately, building work has gone on at so great a rate in many of our suburbs that even in the newer ones the vacant allotments are disappearing rapidly’. 3 A.E. Parr, ‘The Five Ages of Urbanity’, Landscape, 17/3 (1968): 7. 4 Note here the initiation – but not until the 1920s – of ‘Safety First’ campaigns by the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria and the Victorian Education Department. See: Argus, 2 March 1925, p. 11 (‘The belief once held that the pedestrian had a prior right to the roadway will not now hold … The safety message of today is to parents and school teachers, “Do not allow children to play in the streets”’); Argus, 22 December 1922, p. 10. 2

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their patronage. Trying to contain and reverse these changes was a coalition of child savers and conservative-minded politicians. Where the young people saw potential and fun, they perceived danger and lack of purpose. By 1914, interventionist adults were gaining the upper hand, an ascendancy perhaps best expressed by the introduction of universal military service for boys in 1911. Doubtless catching the mood of many of his conscripted peers, one young Melburnian wrote to the Age in May 1912 to air his grievances about the new system and its impact on his leisure time. ‘I think it very unfair that all our Easter holidays are to be taken up with drill’, stated the correspondent, who signed himself ‘Compulsory’. ‘Being in an office where we have to work every other holiday, I don’t think it right to take up the few that we do get.’ With parades and competitions coming up, drill training had been scheduled for ‘every Monday, Wednesday and Friday night, also every Saturday afternoon’.5 The state had made work for idle hands, and the question, asked often in colonial Australia, of ‘What shall we do with our boys?’ had at last been answered. The pendulum had swung for the time being in the direction of social control, but one wonders whether girls – not required by the state for rifle practice – expanded their range of public activities as a result, before the opportunities yielded to them by the onset of war.6 Just as the city pulsed with life, then, so too it vibrated from a tension of opposites, periodically expanding and contracting the social space allotted to its young charges. On those occasions when youth did appear en masse in the city, adults were now increasingly likely to be the instigators, attempting to script appearances and channel spatial occupations towards ‘national’ ends. Gone were those fleeting moments when Melbourne’s newsboys, shop assistants and larrikins rallied in protest; in their stead reform-minded adults arranged the parades and looked on approvingly as a series of religious, ameliorative and increasingly militaristic agendas were fulfilled. Growing up through the 1890s and early 1900s, a child in Melbourne was thus likely to experience less scope for autonomy in public than had been enjoyed by the first generation of children born to gold rush migrants in the 1860s and 1870s. There were exceptions to this trend, of course, with older girls in particular beginning to sample the fruits of a new freedom by the start of the twentieth century, and youth of all ages and both sexes defying an ideology of dependency by seeking spaces in the city for play, companionship and excitement. Nonetheless, as the child in the public domain became ever more an object of public policy, the parameters for outdoor activity narrowed, instigating a process by which city children began to lose their customary access to the outdoor urban realm. Even the onset of the playgrounds movement in Melbourne from 1907 Age, 2 May 1912, p. 8. For discussion of similar responses, see Tanner, pp. 192–222. John Barrett (pp. 211–53) provides an alternative view, arguing that most young Australians accepted and often enjoyed compulsory military service. 6 Judith Smart argues that despite heightened anxieties regarding young females as purveyors of immorality and sexual disease, new patterns of work and leisure meant that ‘The war … normalised the public presence of young women’. See Smart, p. 2. 5

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was aimed at organizing children’s games, confining them to fenced-off spaces and intended, in the memorable words of one advocate, ‘to make free play unconsciously purposeful’.7 Was this altered autonomy necessarily regressive? If the state now took an increasingly interventionist role in children’s welfare, removing young Melburnians from dangerous or abusive situations (though often, it should be noted, ushering them into alternative locations of institutional imperilment), improved life outcomes may well have resulted for at least some, and possibly many.8 Further research would be needed to establish whether the incidence of street accidents, as a case in point, declined as a result of governmental watchfulness. What can be stated with more certainty is that such intervention helped advance a changing understanding of Western childhood, one that would resonate across the twentieth century. In Viviana Zelizer’s conceptualization, by the 1930s children aged 14 and under were increasingly regarded as economically worthless but emotionally priceless.9 They were deemed worthy of special protection from the presumed hazards of spaces in the process of redefinition as ‘adult’, workplaces and thoroughfares now included. Government officials acting in loco parentis sponsored the shift in Australia, but it is highly questionable whether the traditional informal supervision offered to children in working-class areas – Jane Jacobs’ celebrated ‘eyes upon the street’ – proved less effective than the monitoring and intervention of outsiders.10 Towards the beginning of this study, I assessed Henri Lefebvre’s influential writings on spatial production; here I return to his work. Lefebvre contends that ‘groups, classes or fractions of classes cannot constitute themselves, or recognize one another, as “subjects” unless they generate (or produce) a space’.11 This statement, applicable in the first instance to Lefebvre’s principal concern with the working-class experience of adults, also holds true for young people – though here the relationship is more complex. To serve purposes including play, congregation and commercial transaction, young Melburnians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had made spaces of their own, thus collectively positioning them as ‘producers’ in Lefebvre’s spatial economy. They appeared, in short, as actors, and expressed a subjectivity too often denied or ignored in urban history writing. In consequence, these literal territories helped produce a conceptualization of youth (and, tentatively, of ‘adolescence’) as a ‘space’ of life with its own special possibilities and problems. Young city-dwellers hence became vehicles for the hopes and fears of adults, with these feelings reinscribed spatially through the Mrs Herbert Brookes, quoted in Davison, ‘The City-Bred Child’, p. 159. Compare here Scott and Swain, Confronting Cruelty and Musgrove, ‘The Scars

7 8

Remain’. 9 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, 1994), p. 3. 10 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London, 1962), pp. 35, 50. 11 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 416.

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processions and parades investigated in Chapter 5. Here on a public stage youth was visualized more clearly than before as a category, and brought into sharp focus as a national concern. As I have argued, however, accessing space brought no automatic right of entry to the decision-making processes which affected young people’s lives and the construction of the built city. Because the youthscape was highly ephemeral, it was vulnerable to attack. It yielded those who crafted it little say in shaping the urban landscape over the long term, and provided fertile territory for adults wishing to intervene ever more directly. Constituted as ‘subjects’, then, according to Lefebvre’s configuration, young people were nevertheless not to enjoy the usual level of influence that stems from spatial occupation. The ramifications of all this may lead us to ask: what is a city for? Is it merely, as Max Weber termed the city of the Middle Ages, a ‘fusion of fortress and market’;12 is its function instead chiefly administrative; or should it aspire to higher ideals? The purpose of the urban is a question that has occupied the minds of thinkers for centuries. Aristotle thought men gathered in the ancient city ‘to live the good life’; Walter Benjamin, by contrast, conceived the modern metropolis as a place of promise and magical illusion.13 Rarely have children’s requirements been given credence in these imaginings, yet it is they who most need the city to perform well in its guise as cradle, playground and outdoor classroom. For a period of around 15 years from the early 1960s – a little over the halfway point between the ‘then’ of this book and the ‘now’ of today – a number of international scholars researching the use of the public domain implored urban planners to show greater appreciation for the sensory requirements and physical well-being of children.14 Perceiving the negative impacts of trends which commenced in the colonial era, these writers called for a radical rethink and the restoration of the ‘lost educational functions’ of the outdoor metropolis.15 Instead of containing urban youth in discrete and functionally dull sites, they urged, we should ‘help them climb out of the sandbox and into the city’.16

12 Max Weber, The City, trans. and ed. by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: 1966 [originally 1958]), pp. 77–80. 13 See Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London, 1961), p. 111; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1999). 14 See: Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, pp. 74–88; A.E Parr, ‘The Child in the City’; A.E. Parr, ‘The Happy Habitat’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 6/3 (1972): 25–38; Kevin Lynch, ‘The Spatial World of the Child’, in The Child in the City: Today and Tomorrow, ed. William Michelson, Saul V. Levine and Ellen Michelson (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1977); Ward, The Child in the City. 15 A.E. Parr, ‘Lessons of an Urban Childhood’, The American Montessori Society Bulletin, 7/4 (1969), no pagination (closing comment). Parr is thinking here of his own childhood in Norway, and experiences like the regular cross-town trips to the fish market recounted in Chapter 2. 16 Ward, The Child in the City, p. 211.

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It seems, alas, that these calls have gone unheeded, with negative implications for the sociability of our cities.17 In his 2007 study No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society, Tim Gill finds that ‘the logic of containment’ has only strengthened in the West in recent years.18 What he terms a ‘deficit model’ of childhood – the view that younger children and those in their early teens are essentially vulnerable – is now deeply ingrained, a situation in which a general ‘retreat from the outdoors’ denies children the everyday interactions with public space through which competencies are learned and confidence is gained.19 He blames this predicament on society’s ‘collective failure of nerve’, fuelled (among wider social, cultural and economic changes) by a lack of awareness about the valuable part that risk plays during growing up.20 Only by embracing a philosophy of resilience – ‘an affirmation of the value of children’s ability to recover and learn from adverse outcomes’ – does Gill believe can we hope to strike a healthier balance.21 These views illustrate the extent to which perceptions have moved full circle. From accusations of neglect in the nineteenth century through allowing children to roam, adults are now charged with the same crime by confining their offspring indoors. Childhood, in the eyes of best-selling British author Sue Palmer, is now ‘toxic’.22 ‘Our children are increasingly battery-raised … rather than enjoying the free-range existence they could expect even twenty-five years ago.’23 Recent discussion in the Australian context echoes these concerns,24 though it appears that they are not yet as keenly felt, or are at least less studied. Research suggests, nonetheless, that young people are themselves aware of this diminution of experience and desire access to a more expansive and usable public

On this, see Marco Hüttenmoser, ‘Children and Their Living Surroundings: Empirical Investigations into the Significance of Living Surroundings for the Everyday Life and Development of Children’, Children’s Environments, 12/4 (1995): 403–13. 18 Tim Gill, No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (London, 2007), p. 14. 19 Ibid., pp. 38, 53. 20 Ibid., p. 61. Following this, one might argue that reduced opportunities for everyday risk-taking in public spaces push contemporary youth into more extreme locations and activities, including train-surfing (noted in Chapter 2). 21 Ibid., p. 82. 22 Sue Palmer, Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About It (London, 2006). For the United States, also see Richard Louv, The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (London, 2010 [originally 2006]). 23 Palmer, p. 62. 24 See for instance: Fiona Stanley, Sue Richardson and Margot Prior, Children of the Lucky Country? How Australian Society has Turned its Back on Children and Why Children Matter (Sydney, 2005), pp. 168–70 and 173–85; Sunday Age, 21 May 2000, p. 6; Geoffrey Woolcock, Brendan Gleeson and Bill Randolph, ‘Urban Research and ChildFriendly Cities: A New Australian Outline’, Children’s Geographies, 8/2 (2010): 177–92. 17

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realm.25 ‘Stop building so many houses and ugly buildings,’ demanded one 11-yearold girl in England when asked for her opinion, ‘’cos children want space to play and they can’t be expected to stay indoors for the whole of their time – children have to have space.’26 Such appeals amplify current debates on urban ‘rights’. The inverted commas are needed here to distinguish ratified entitlements from aspirational ‘rights’. The former include important United Nations enactments, most particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child, composed in 1989 and ratified by Australia in 1990. Applicable to those ‘children’ aged 18 and under (a revealing demarcation), Article 31 recognizes the ‘right of the child to … engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child’, and Article 15 recognizes ‘the rights of the child to freedom of association and to freedom of peaceful assembly’.27 These clauses carry implications for the management of public spaces, though the UN Convention does not specify the outdoor urban as an essential setting for childhood play or youthful companionship. Related, but at once more ambitious and idealistic in tone, consistent appeals have been made in recent years for the granting of ‘the right to the city’, defined by one protagonist as ‘not just a movement for material rights … but the right to shape, intervene and participate in the unfolding idea of the city’.28 First proposed in Lefebvre’s 1968 publication of the same title, and subsequently championed by scholars including Don Mitchell and David Harvey,29 ‘the right to the city’ movement advocates equal access for all to an urban commons. For Lefebvre, the phenomenon that is the city could best be understood as an ever-changing ‘oeuvre’: the collective product of the activities of its citizens and ‘close to a work 25 On Newcastle, Australia, see C.A. Tandy, ‘Children’s Diminishing Play Space: A Study of Inter-Generational Change in Children’s Use of their Neighbourhoods’, Australian Geographical Studies, 37/2 (1999): 154–64; on Italian cities, see Francesco Tonucci and Antonella Rissotto, ‘Why Do We Need Children’s Participation? The Importance of Children’s Participation in Changing the City’, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 11 (2001): 414–16; on London and south-east England, see Margaret O’Brien, ‘Regenerating Children’s Neighbourhoods: What do Children Want?’, in Children in the City: Home, Neighbourhood and Community, ed. Pia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien (New York, 2003), pp. 144–7. 26 O’Brien, ‘Regenerating Children’s Neighbourhoods’, p. 144. 27 ‘United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’ (1990), . Article 31 further stipulates that signatories encourage ‘the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity’. 28 Paul Chatterton, ‘The Urban Impossible: A Eulogy for the Unfinished City’, City, 14/3 (2010): 235. 29 Henri Lefebvre; ‘Right to the City’, in Writings on Cities, selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996 [originally 1968]), pp. 63–181. Also see: Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York and London, 2003); David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, 53 (2008): 23–40; Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis and London, 2010).

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of art’. Architects, he stated, could not predetermine a city’s social relations, and civil servants possessed no right of synthesis.30 Instead all city dwellers, regardless of wealth or status, were entitled to share an equal right to urban participation based on nothing more than their residence in the metropolis.31 Following Lefebvre and considerable further theorization and discussion, a ‘World Charter for the Right to the City’ has been drafted (in 2005), and a collective right to the city decreed in Brazil in 2001.32 For all its egalitarian merits, however, the movement has so far had more intellectual than practical impact, and the success or otherwise of the Brazilian initiative is unclear.33 Nevertheless, both the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the more recent rekindling of interest in the ‘right to the city’ manifesto have helped foster a related and ongoing programme of arguably greater purchase for the public undertakings of city youth. Originating in 1996 and hosted in Italy, the Child Friendly Cities initiative aims to promote children’s participation in making cities around the world better suited to their collective needs.34 From a public space perspective, this means healthier, safer and more playable environments for younger children and more welcoming locations for older youth. Scores of municipalities around the world have so far implemented projects inspired by these aims.35 Within Australia, a 2009 study noted that four local governments in Victoria had embraced the scheme wholesale and by formal commitment.36 The study judged that the adoption of Child Friendly Cities policies had made a positive impact on planning for and with children, but that the potential for enhancing children’s independent mobility remained ‘as yet largely unrealized’.37 A Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City’, pp. 101, 117, 132, 151. Lefebvre also stressed the importance of play within the city: see ibid., pp. 171–2. 31 By this Lefebvre meant access to space and ‘appropriation’ of space (which he was careful to distinguish from property rights). See ibid., pp. 173–4. More recently, David Harvey (following Lefebvre), defines the right to the city as ‘a right to change ourselves by changing the city’ and considers this facility a human right. See Harvey, p. 23. 32 For the Charter, ; on the City Statute in Brazil, see Edésio Fernandes, ‘Constructing the “Right to the City” in Brazil’, Social and Legal Studies, 16/2 (2007): 201–19. 33 Fernandes, p. 215. 34 As defined by the Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, a ‘Child Friendly City’ is ‘a city or community where children’s voices, needs and rights are integrated in laws, policies, regulations, programmes and budgets’. See . 35 Examples can be found on the official UNICEF website: . 36 Whitzman et al., ‘Walking the Walk’,p. 8. The remaining three local authorities are specified as Greater Bendigo, Brimbank and Port Phillip. Ballarat was also noted as having by this time implemented selected Child Friendly Cities policies and Hobson’s Bay City Council has since engaged with the project. 37 Ibid., p. 37. The authors further observed a gap in policies for children aged 8 to 14 and the need for a major shift in thinking among local government practitioners and the general public for more thoroughgoing outcomes (see pp. 35, 32). For the purposes of the report, ‘children’ were defined as aged 18 and under and ‘youth’ as aged 13 to 25. 30

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

recommendation by the authors for the Victorian State Planning Policy Framework to explicitly refer to the rights of children to use and enjoy public space is also yet to be implemented,38 although at the time of writing an updated version of the guidelines does specify that ‘open space is designed to accommodate people of all abilities, ages and cultures’.39 Amidst this planning and policy debate, what of Melbourne’s youthscape, the phenomenon outlined in this book? Has it now disappeared under the combined forces of adult intervention and adult anxiety? Is its fate now solely in the hands of policy makers? On the contrary, look hard enough – in the laneways filled with street art, for instance, or in the evening hangout at Tivoli Arcade on Bourke Street – and the youthscape can still be found in the contemporary city. It continues to operate as an underlying, overlapping and competing set of territories to those produced by adults, although it is much changed since colonial times. Instead of utilizing the whole city, the spatial occupations of young people (and especially under 16s) are now more fractured, often constricted to urban islands where surveillance is routine. Seeing and being seen have always been attractive aspects of metropolitan space for some city youth – with one such vista captured in Figure C.2 – but the regimes of electronic monitoring that now operate in many locations are of an entirely different order. Sometimes, as shown by the episode involving the skateboarders and the Dean with which this study began, tools of observation like the camera phone can be turned on adults, but more regularly the power dynamic operates in reverse.40 Although young people continue to write their designs on urban space, paralleling my determination to write them into urban history, the scope with which they are allowed to do so has undoubtedly narrowed. Whether a move towards making the whole of Melbourne a ‘Child Friendly City’ can reverse this trend remains to be seen. From playground city in the colonial era, then, to a modern city of playgrounds. Yet as one door closes, another opens. Young Melburnians are now increasingly seeking online the autonomy that their forebears searched for outside, and trying, as ever, to stay one step ahead of the authorities called to police this virtual domain.41 Ibid., p. 39. Victorian State Government, ‘State Planning Policy Framework’, clause 11, p. 7

38 39

(last accessed 20 February 2013). 40 Indeed, in 2008 at least one city council in Australia toyed with the idea of installing a device called ‘the Mosquito’ to deter young people from loitering in public spaces. The machine emits a discomforting high-pitched noise audible only to those aged up to their early 20s. See (article dated 14 February 2008) and (12 February 2008) for discussion within the British context. 41 See Sun Sun Lim and Lynn Schofield Clark, ‘Virtual Worlds as a Site of Convergence for Children’s Play’, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 3/2 (2010): 4–19; and, on the ‘digital spatial turn’, Simo Laakkonen, ‘Asphalt Kids and the Matrix City: Reminiscences of Children’s Urban Environmental History’, Urban History, 38/2 (2011): 322–3.

Conclusion

Fig. C.2

223

Jeff Carter, Young People Idling on the Steps at Flinders Street Railway Station (gelatine silver, c. 1990–99). Courtesy Jeff Carter Estate and National Library of Australia, PIC/9828/42

224

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

Fig. C.3

Yesterday’s games? Chalked hopscotch grids in Melbourne’s Fawkner Park, 11 March 2007. Photographed by the author

Today’s young city-dwellers still play their games in public spaces – embracing their freedoms and maintaining the culture of childhood – but many now prefer to explore an expansive virtual arena, populating the highways of the internet as their forebears populated the pathways of the city. This ‘city of bits’ forms an expansive territory, one of altered interactions and shifting protocols.42 ‘Dead public space’ – the dystopian vision of sociologist Richard Sennett – may follow such a retreat from the street, affecting us all and the liveability of our cities.43 But as Don Mitchell reminds us, there is always a dialectic between the end of public space and its beginning.44 One suspects that the virtual arena will only partly satisfy the desire for sociability among current and coming generations. Cities, like the young people within them, are perpetually evolving, forever open to new possibilities. It is still too soon to write off the prospects of the public domain. Hope and its close cousin youth spring eternal. Stepping back into the urban past offers us insights into young lives lived through place, and perhaps also glimpses of latent futures. I have borrowed this phrase from William J. Mitchell via Don Mitchell, The Right to the City, p. 144. Also see (for application to Manchester), Joanne Massey, ‘City of Bits: Young People, Cyberspace and the City’ (conference paper at Liverpool John Moores University, 2009). 43 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London, 2002 [originally 1977]), pp. 12–16. 44 Mitchell, The Right to the City, p. 36. 42

Appendix

Table A.1

Children’s urban range, calculated from cases recorded in the files of Melbourne’s Town Clerk, 1892–1900 Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

Name

Age

Frederick Raphael

7–10 Male

74 Bell St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

1.88 km

Breaking into tool 25/06/92 shed; theft

Offence occurred on a Saturday afternoon. Windows smashed; pruning knives, cups and trowels taken

Ralph Raphael

7–10 Male

74 Bell St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

1.88 km

Breaking into tool 25/06/92 shed; theft

Caught in company with above. Parents ‘seem to be indifferent’

Halo Powell

7–10 Male

30 Derby St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

1.22 km

Breaking into tool 25/06/92 shed; theft

Caught in company with above

William Heale

12

Male

391 Victoria Parade, East Melbourne

Fitzroy Gardens

0.36 km

Destroying a tree

27/06/92

Thomas Heale

9

Male

391 Victoria Parade, East Melbourne

Fitzroy Gardens

0.36 km

Destroying a tree

27/06/92

Caught in company with above

Name

Age

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Reginald Oldfied

9

Male

104 Grey St, East Fitzroy Gardens Melbourne

0.52 km

Destroying a tree

27/06/92

Caught in company with above

Alfred Hooper

9

Male

106 Grey St, East Fitzroy Gardens Melbourne

0.49 km

Destroying a tree

27/06/92

Caught in company with above

Alfred Bilston

13

Male

54 Rokeby St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

1.00 km

Robbing birds’ nests

18/10/93

‘... songsters in our Public Gardens are getting scarce’

William White

8

Male

45 Langridge St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

0.90 km

Robbing birds’ nests

18/10/93

Caught in company with above

William Bates

14

Male

24 Leveson St, King/Hawke Sts North Melbourne

0.35 km

Climbing and damaging trees

11/01/94

Cautioned at trial

William McIndoe

14

Male

14 Chetwynd St, King/Hawke Sts North Melbourne

0.67 km

Climbing and damaging trees

11/01/94

Cautioned at trial

Alexander 10 Renfrew

Male

193 Gertrude St, Fitzroy

0.88 km

Stealing plants

24/12/94

Four pansies taken

Fitzroy Gardens

Date of reported offence Other information

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

John Elder 9

Male

137 Gertrude St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

1.07 km

Stealing plants

24/12/94

Caught in company with above

Charles Archibald

9

Male

139 Gertrude St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

1.04 km

Stealing plants

24/12/94

Caught in company with above

Frederick Blythe

–

Male

211 Dudley St, West Melbourne

Flagstaff Gardens

0.59 km

Stealing plants

15/10/97

Pulled up geraniums and roses; has passed plants on for sale in the past

Albert Hayes

16

Male

37 Wellington St, Fitzroy Gardens Collingwood

1.10 km

Stealing plants and goldfish

15/10/97

Offence occurred on a Saturday afternoon; initially gave false name to foreman

Patrick Bloomer

15

Male

47 Wellington St, Fitzroy Gardens Collingwood

1.16 km

Stealing plants and goldfish

15/10/97

Caught in company with above

Thomas Murray

14

Male

22 Cambridge St, Fitzroy Gardens Collingwood

0.99 km

Stealing plants and goldfish

15/10/97

Caught in company with above

Name

Age

Name

Age

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

Arthur Skeats

12

Male

80 Smith St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

1.19 km

Stealing plants and goldfish

15/10/97

Caught in company with above

John 12 McInerrey

Male

141 Gore St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

1.06 km

Stealing plants and goldfish

15/10/97

Caught in company with above

John Carroll

16

Male

44 Valiant St, Abbotsford

Fitzroy Gardens

3.15 km

Climbing a tree

15/10/97

‘After thrushes nests’

Bertie Corfe

16

Male

13 Paterson St, Abbotsford

Fitzroy Gardens

2.89 km

Climbing a tree

15/10/97

Caught in company with above

Bertie Hoey

10

Male

141 Victoria Parade, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

1.17 km

Robbing nests and 30/11/98 cutting bamboo

Caught with nest holding two live birds and eight bamboo canes (for use as fishing rods)

James Marston

12

Male

50 Napier St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

1.02 km

Robbing nests and 30/11/98 cutting bamboo

Caught in company with above

Name

Age

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

Victor Townsend

15

Male

393 Victoria Parade, East Melbourne

Fitzroy Gardens

2.00 km

Robbing nests and 30/11/98 cutting bamboo

Caught in company with above

Thomas Heaney

9

Male

10 Napier St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

0.93 km

Robbing nests and 30/11/98 cutting bamboo

Caught in company with above

William Sanders

12

Male

663 Drummond St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.31 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Frank Sanders

10

Male

663 Drummond St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.31 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

John Quilty

12

Male

102 Newry St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.32 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

Thomas Gilbert

12

Male

135 Newry St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.26 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

Henry Leonard

–

Male

123 Newry St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.23 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

Name

Age

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

Patrick Crow

10

Male

634 Drummond St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.35 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

Bernard Killen

9

Male

670 Drummond St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.32 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

George Dawson

13

Male

66 Newry St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.20 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

Percy Flagg

10

Male

68 Newry St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.21 km

Climbing trees

19/07/99

Caught in company with above

Norman Shannon

10

Male

68 Bridge Road, Richmond

Fitzroy Gardens

1.35 km

Stealing flowers

31/10/99

Flowers offered for sale in Clarendon St. Prosecuted

Thomas Shannon

13

Male

68 Bridge Road, Richmond

Fitzroy Gardens

1.35 km

Stealing flowers

31/10/99

Caught in company with above. Prosecuted

James Parsons

11

Male

5 Moorhouse St, Richmond

Fitzroy Gardens

1.36 km

Stealing flowers

31/10/99

Caught in company with above. Prosecuted

Name

Age

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

Malcolm Parsons

13

Male

5 Moorhouse St, Richmond

Fitzroy Gardens

1.36 km

Stealing flowers

31/10/99

Caught in company with above

Eliza Meeham

10

Female

34 Little Collins St, Melbourne

Fitzroy Gardens

0.96 km

Collecting rhododendron flowers

25/11/99

Accompanied by another 10-year-old (address unknown)

William Smith

12

Male

32 Stanley St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

1.85 km

Damage to hosepipe

05/12/99

Incident took place on Sunday at 5 p.m. Cut hose with knife

Thomas Lawler

11

Male

1 Bendigo St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

2.97 km

Damage to hosepipe

05/12/99

Caught in company with above. Held the hose

Charles Sharp

10

Male

23 Stanley St, Collingwood

Fitzroy Gardens

2.22 km

Damage to hosepipe

05/12/99

Caught in company with above. Drank through the hole

Evan Baillie

11

Male

69 Gertrude St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

1.26 km

Damage to hosepipe

05/12/99

Caught in company with above. Played with hose

Name

Age

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

Victor Cook

10

Male

121 Smith St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

1.80 km

Damage to hosepipe

05/12/99

Caught in company with above. Played with hose

Ernest Roule

11

Male

5 Hood St, Fitzroy

Fitzroy Gardens

2.06 km

Damage to hosepipe

05/12/99

Caught in company with above. Played with hose

Richard Allen

10

Male

3 Bloomburg St, Abbotsford

Fitzroy Gardens

1.72 km

Damage to hosepipe

05/12/99

Caught in company with above. Played with hose

James Phillips

–

Male

10 Palmer St, Fitzroy

Carlton Gardens

1.79 km

Climbing trees and damaging branches

11/12/99

Fined five shillings before Carlton Bench

Wallace Dunn

–

Male

12 Palmer St, Fitzroy

Carlton Gardens

1.84 km

Climbing trees and damaging branches

11/12/99

Fined five shillings before Carlton Bench

‘Hettie Miller’

11

Female

96 Exhibition St, Melbourne

Carlton Gardens

1.04 km

Breaking branches 02/10/00 from tree

Gave false name and address; real name Letitia Keating (see below)

Name

Age

Male / Home address Female (x)

Place of reported Distance Nature of offence (y) from x to y reported offence

Date of reported offence Other information

‘Lilly Miller’

3

Female

96 Exhibition St, Melbourne

Carlton Gardens

1.04 km

Breaking branches 02/10/00 from tree

False name supplied by elder sister. Real name unknown

Letitia Keating

11

Female

35 La Trobe St, Melbourne

Carlton Gardens

0.32 km

Breaking branches 02/10/00 from tree

The correct details for ‘Hettie Miller’. Fined 5/-

W. Wilson 12

Male

2 Verity St, Richmond

Yarra Park

0.96 km

Damaging trees

01/11/00

Authorities told of damage by boy cricketers playing nearby

Berty Pritchard

12

Male

2 Egan St, Richmond

Yarra Park

1.12 km

Damaging trees

01/11/00

Caught in company with above. Broke a six-foot branch

Horace Pritchard

12

Male

121 George St, East Melbourne

Yarra Park

2.01 km

Damaging trees

01/11/00

Caught in company with above. Seen climbing a tree

John Hennesy

10

Male

120 Princes St, Carlton

Curtain Square

0.44 km

Damage caused during game of hide & seek

17/12/00

Offence occurred 7.50 p.m. Four others involved

Bibliography Manuscript Sources a) Public Record Office Victoria (PROV): VPRS 515: Central Register of Male Prisoners (1871–1903). VPRS 516: Central Register of Female Prisoners (1871–1903). VPRS 545: Juvenile Offenders Register (1893–1917). VPRS 675: Register of Correspondence (Victoria Police) (1894). VPRS 807: Inward Correspondence Files (Victoria Police) (1893–1894). VPRS 937: Inward Registered Correspondence (Victoria Police) (1868–1893). VPRS 1226: Inward Registered Correspondence (Chief Secretary) (1855–1979). Box 107: ‘Age of Consent Report 1909’. VPRS 3101: Health Committee Reports and Returns of Attendance (1898–1901). VPRS 3181: Town Clerk’s Files, Series 1 (covers period 1842–1909). Files consulted: Abattoirs; Baths; By-Laws; Cemeteries; Ceremonial; Charities; Festivities; Fines; Lamps; Lanes; Markets; Miscellaneous; Nuisances; Parks; Public Buildings; Railways; Statistics; Street Cleansing; Street Stalls; Street Standings; Streets; Town Hall; Trams; Trams and Railways; Wharves. 221 boxes in total. VPRS 4025: Town Clerk’s Outward Letter Books (1870–1901). VPRS 4032: Parks and Gardens Committee Minutes (1884–1901). VPRS 5690: Annual Reports (Industrial and Reformatory Schools) (1882–1901). VPRS 8369: Correspondence, Photographs and History Sheets of Certain Criminals (1862–1902). VPRS 8908: Subject Index to Town Clerk’s Letter Books (1896–1901). VPRS 8911: Proceedings of Council Meetings (MCC) (1870–1903). VPRS 8912: Indexes to Proceedings of Council Meetings (1871–1898). VPRS 9461: By-Laws, Regulations, Legal Opinions and Other Assorted Papers (North Melbourne) (1870–1905). VPRS 10933: Reformatory Register (1890–1893). b) Royal Historical Society of Victoria (RHSV): Macdonald, Elaine (Mrs Whittle), ‘Journalist’s Child’ (1945), RHSV MS 198, box 53. Mickle, Alan D., ‘The Late “Eighties”’ (n.d.), RHSV MS 363, box 127/9. Ricketts, Dudley, ‘My Story’ (c. 1981), RHSV MS 621, box 7/4. Walker, Frank, ‘Victorian Reminiscences of the Sixties’ (1933), RHSV MS 5282, box 130/17.

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Stansell, Christine, ‘Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850–1860’, Feminist Studies, 8/2 (1982): 309–35. Stewart, Ken, ‘The Language of “Youth”’, in The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture, ed. Ken Stewart (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996). Swain, Shurlee, ‘Selina Sutherland: Child Rescuer’, in Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Melbourne: Penguin, 1985). ———, ‘Development of Child Welfare Policy in Australia’, in The World of Child Labor: An Historical and Regional Survey, ed. Hugh D. Hindman (Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2009). Swain, Shurlee, and Renate Howe, ‘Locating the Colonial Child’, Interlogue, 5 (1994): 49–54. Tandy, C.A., ‘Children’s Diminishing Play Space: A Study of Inter-Generational Change in Children’s Use of their Neighbourhoods’, Australian Geographical Studies, 37/2 (1999): 154–64. Teeter, Ruskin, ‘The Travails of 19th-Century Urban Youth as a Precondition to the Invention of Modern Adolescence’, Adolescence, 23/89 (1988): 15–18. ———, ‘Coming of Age on the City Streets in 19th-Century America’, Adolescence, 23/92 (1988): 909–12. Tonucci, Francesco and Antonella Rissotto, ‘Why Do We Need Children’s Participation? The Importance of Children’s Participation in Changing the City’, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 11 (2001): 407–19. Tuan, Yi-Fu, ‘The City: Its Distance from Nature’, Geographical Review, 68/1 (1978): 1–12. Twomey, Christina, ‘Gender, Welfare and the Colonial State: Victoria’s 1864 Neglected and Criminal Children’s Act’, Labour History, 73 (1997): 169–86. Valentine, Gill, ‘Children Should be Seen and Not Heard: The Production and Transgression of Adults’ Public Space’, Urban Geography, 17/3 (1996): 205–20. Walker, David, ‘Youth on Trial: The Mt Rennie Case’, Labour History, 50 (May 1986): 28–41. ———, ‘Youth’, in Australians 1888, ed. Graeme Davison, J.W. McCarty and Ailsa McLeary (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987). ———, ‘Youth on Trial: The Mt Rennie Case’, in Pastiche I: Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Australia, ed. Penny Russell and Richard White (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994). Whisnant, David E., ‘Selling the Gospel News, Or: the Strange Career of Jimmy Brown the Newsboy’, Journal of Social History, 5/3 (1972): 269–309. White, Cameron, ‘Promenading and Picnicking: The Performance of Middle-Class Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Sydney, Journal of Australian Studies, 89 (2006): 27–40. Winchester, Hilary P.M., Pauline M. McGuirk and Kathryn Everett, ‘Schoolies Week as a Rite of Passage: A Study of Celebration and Control’, in Embodied

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———, Innocenti Research Centre, ‘Child Friendly Cities’: . ‘United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’ (1990), . Victorian State Government, ‘No-go zones for skaters’: . Last accessed 18 February 2008. ———, ‘Results of Skate Safe Trial in Docklands and Implementation of Skate Safe Ambassadors’ Program’: . ———, ‘Skate Safe Code of Conduct’: . ———, ‘State Planning Policy Framework’, ‘World Charter for the Right to the City’: . The Young Ones – Bodgies and Widgies (produced by Michelle Rayner for Hindsight series, ABC Radio National, 19 March 2000). YouTube: .

Index Note: An ‘n’ following a page number indicates a footnote; ‘f’ indicates a figure; ‘t’ indicates a table. Aborigines displacement of 4, 48 importance of place/space for 8–9 Lydon on photographs of 17 abstinence societies 181, 183–84, 185f, 187 accidents 59n46, 82–83 Ackermann, Jessie 82 Adams, Nancy 76–77, 177n26 Addams, Jane 90, 112 adolescence 39–43, 82, 89, 129, 132, 198, 217 adults; see also reformers anxieties of, about unsupervised children 82–83 complaints by, regarding children at play 58, 65 as organizers of children’s parades 211, 216 age as neglected in historical analysis 12 as social category 3, 28 age of consent 42n73 Alexander, W.M. 183 Alomes, Stephen 33 Amery, L.S. 208 amusement parks 118 Archibald, Charles 70 Aristotle 218 Asbury, Herbert 158 assaults 146–47, 158n127 Australian Colonies Government Act 36 Australian Natives Association (ANA) 34–35, 191–92 Australian Women’s Work Exhibition 49n4 automobiles see cars autonomy; see also urban range and consumerism 130 of newsboys 105–6, 108

restrictions on 74–75, 84–86, 111, 215–17 and wage earning 127 Baker, Sidney 156–57, 162 Band of Hope 181, 183 Barnard, James Fox 179 Barnett, Oswald 70n94 Baron, Geoff 1–3 Barrett, Charles 205 Barrett, J.G. 49 Barron, Gertrude 82 Barry, Dan 109 Barry, Redmond 33, 138 Barthes, Roland 17n65, 145 Barton, Edmund 193 Baudelaire, Charles 10 Bavin-Mizzi, Jill 165–66 Beckett, E.W. 25n9 Belich, James 26 Bellanta, Melissa 137, 156 Benjamin, Walter 10, 66, 95, 218 Benson, J.A. 94 Berlin, Michael 173 Bhabha, Homi 170 Bickford, Nicholas 47n89, 68–69 Bilston, Alfred 69–70 Block, the 78, 103, 120, 122–23 block boys see street sweepers Boer War Boys Playing Soldiers (Barnard) 180f as impetus for parades 179 At the Junction, St. Kilda (Rose) 181f Relief of Mafeking (Barnard) 182f Bolt, Andrew 1n3 bootblacks 97–98, 100n60 Bourke Street 112–20 Bowie, Frank 107 Boys’ Trading Brigade 94 Braidotti, Rosi 169–70 Braybrook 74 Breward, Christopher 124

268

Book Title

Brookes, Mabel 76 Brown-May, Andrew 5, 11, 15, 98, 174–75, 201n103 Burgin, Victor 17 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 41 Byrne, Denis 8–9 cadets 186, 195–97, 208, 209f Callender, William 122 cars 215 Carter, Paul 140–41 cartes de visite 184n48 Castieau, John Buckley 148, 151n99 Cato, Jack 175n21 census figures see demographics Chabon, Michael 9 Charpentier, Gustave 197n96 Chauncey, George 8–9 Child Friendly Cities initiative 221–22 child savers see reformers Child Welfare Exhibit (1911) 5 childhood 9, 12, 14, 40 42–45, 130, 217, 219, 224 children see larrikins; young people Children’s Court 63 Chinese parades 177n26 Chinese people 72, 73f Chinn, Sarah 34 Chudacoff, Howard 43 circus 177 cities cars as hazards in 215 children’s participation in ‘youthscape’ of 218–24 as dangerous to youth xv, 45–48, 82–84, 90, 112–14, 213–14 sexual asymmetry of 8 sexual topography of 8 as vast playgrounds 53 City Newsboys’ Society 91, 115 Clarke, Marcus 31, 54 class and children’s entertainments 120 and children’s vandalism 69 and courtship 122–23 and cramped living conditions 52–53, 69n90 and larrikins 149 and legislation on street trading 110–11

and markers of childhood 45–46 and parades and processions 202–3 and time limits on play 65–66, 85 and urban range 75–76 Clayton, John 15n57, 49 climatic factors 41, 144n67 Cohen, Stanley 60n50, 134 Cohn, Ola 179 Collett, John 158n127 Connell, R.W. 149 consumerism and autonomy 130 on Bourke Street 112–14 at Eastern Market 115–20 and thrift 128–29 Convention on the Rights of the Child 220–21 Cook, J. Hume 29 Cooke, Albert Charles 19n68 Cooper, Garney 153 Cooper and Bailey’s Menagerie and Circus 177 Cornish, Henry 131 Corrigan, Paul 143 courtship 122–27, 124f Cresswell, Tim 6 crime and criminals; see also police assaults 146–47, 158n127 committed by women 159n130, 159n132 and courtship activities 126 at Eastern Market 116–17 larrikins 152f newspaper reporting on 137–38 number of, committed by larrikins 132–34 rape 164–67 and shop assistants’ protests 121–22 theft 94, 148 vandalism 61–63, 68–71, 145–46, 226–34t Cromack, John 32–33 Crotty, Martin 161, 202 Cummins, Fanny 158 curfews 85–86, 186, 215 ‘currency lads’ 33n40, 135 Davies, Andrew 124, 161–62 Davin, Anna 11 Davis, Allen F. 90n15 Davis, George 107 Davis, Susan 173

Index Davitt, Michael 156–57 Deakin, Alfred 111 Defence Acts 208 demographics of 19th- and 20th-century Melbourne 3 of 19th-century Australia 31–32 of Chinese population 72 of street workers 96–97 Denisoff, Dennis 87n3 Dennis, C.J. 163, 168–69 Dickens, Charles 41 Douglas, Adelaide 71 drains 26, 27f, 29–30, 30f Dreamland amusement park 118 Duffy, Charles Gavan 38 Duggan, Daniel 85 Dunstan, David 15–16n58 Dyson, Edward 162–63 Eastern Market 53n25, 67,115–20, 116f, 119f, 147n77, 148 Eddy, F.C. 202 Edmonds, Penelope 4n13 education see school Education Act (1872) 41–42, 51, 68 Elder, John 70 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 38 Empire Day 173–74 entertainment and leisure; see also consumerism; courtship; wages Bourke Street 112–14, 115–20 and class 120 at Eastern Market 115–20 and gender divide 120 of larrikins 142–43 and larrikins 147–49 shop assistants’ desire for 120–22 wage earning as entrance to 127–28 Esson, Louis 168–69 etiquette and manners 54, 75–78, 85n163, 161 Evans, Daniel 70 Ewins, James 139 Excelsior Class 84 Farrell, Peter 153 Federation festivities 190–99 Finnane, Mark 138 Fitchett, W.H. 201n104 FitzGibbon, Edmund 15n57

269

Fitzroy Gardens 67, 70, 71, 76, 79, 80, 84, 94, 125 flower sellers 97, 99, 100n60, 101 Foley, Larry 162 footbridges 143 Forster, William 107, 110, 115, 134, 184, 206 Foucault, Michel 7 Fowler, Jean 85 Frances, Rae 98 Fredricksen, Charlie 112n115, 116 Freeman, John 109 fundraising events 184, 186 funerals 107–8 Gane, Douglas 26 gangs 146, 151, 161–62, 168 gardeners 97 Gaunson, David 110 gender; see also larrikin girls; women and construction of childhood 42–43 and courtship 123 and demographic analysis of street work 96–97 effect of, on children’s free time 216 effect on wage earning 99n58 and larrikinism 137, 157–62 and nationalism 211 and public entertainments 120 role of, in parades and processions 188n63, 193, 198 street work divided by 97–98, 101, 110–11 and urban range 71–72, 74n109, 75–82 and urban spatial analysis 8 generation gap 3, 33–35, 54 Gill, Tim 219 Gladstone, William 23n1 Glassberg, David 173 Goddard, Victoria 87n1 Godfrey, Frederick 157 Good Templars 187 Gordon Institute 45, 56, 114, 171, 210f Gould, Nat 150 Graff, Harvey 44 graffiti 53n25 Grainger, Percy 52, 59, 120 Griffiths, Albert 162 Grimwade, F.S. 47 Guerin, Bella 25n9

270

Book Title

Guild of Play 49n4 Guilfoyle, John 47, 63–64, 68–69 Guillaume, George 46–47, 51–52, 63 Hall, G. Stanley 40, 43, 198 Hamer, David 6 Hansen, James 153 Harding, William 107 Harris, John 107 Harvey, David 220 Hicks, Mary Jane 165 historical material see primary sources Hoben, Allan 5 Hobsbawm, Eric 173 Hoddle, Robert 11 Hogan, James Francis 23n2 Homeless (Kennington) 213–14, 213f Hopkins, Jacobina 120 Humphreys, Arthur 107 Hyslop, Anthea 205 identity clothing as central to 151, 153–54, 156–57, 162–63 place/space and construction of 7–8 and in-between spaces 170 Independent Order of Rechabites 184 Indigenous peoples see Aborigines infrastructure as conducive to larrikinism 140–42 drains 26, 27f as mirror of young inhabitants 131 roads 26 tram tracks 28f utilities 26 Internet, as playground for youth 1, 222, 224 Irving, T.H. 149 Jacobs, Jane 217 Jacobs, P.A. 201n102 Jaggs, Donella 84, 158 Joynt, William 61, 178–79 Jubbs, E.J. 58 jubilees see Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Juvenile Offenders Act (1887) 84 Juvenile Traders’ Association 88

Kannuluik, Emily Mitchel 53, 177–78 Keating, Letitia 71–72 Kelly, Ned 110 Kelly, Veronica 147 Kennington, Thomas 214 Kinglake, Edward 146, 161 Kingston, Beverley 89 Kociumbas, Jan 183n40, 211 Kulin people 4, 48 Lack, John 162n143 Land, Suey 72 language 156–57, 159 larrikin girls 137, 157–61, 160f larrikins; see also crime and criminals ages of, for current study 44 anti-social behavior of 143 and city spaces 13–14 and class 149 clothing and style of 149–51, 152f, 153–54, 154f, 155f, 156–57, 159, 162–63 complaints about 137–40, 148 definition of 4, 131–32 development of, as concept 134–35 gangs of 142, 148–49 language of 156–57 literary redemption of 167–70 loitering by 144–45, 144f, 145f, 146f and masculinity 161–63 motives of 144–45 newspaper accounts of 133–34, 137–38 number of 133n12 number of crimes committed by 132–34 origins of term 132 and police 132, 138–39 as positive actors 136–37 public vs. police perceptions of 139–40 and Salvation Army 146–47 sexuality of 150–51 spatial appropriation by, of city 140–42 stage created by 142–43 studies on 135–37 and theatres 147–48 and Young Australia 169 Larson, Ann 42–43, 51, 52n20, 96–97, 100n60 Lawler, Thomas 70 Lawson, Henry 33, 168 League of the Cross 184n46

Index Lee, Elizabeth 81 Lefebvre, Henri 6–7, 217–18, 220–21 legislation 85 affecting newsboys 108–11 Australian Colonies Government Act 36 curfews 85–86, 215 Defence Acts 208 Education Act (1872) 41–42, 51, 68 Juvenile Offenders Act (1887) 84 Neglected Children’s Act (1887) 84 Police Offences Act (1890) 5, 142 restricting street work 108–11 Street Trading Act (1925) 110–11 Summary Jurisdiction Act (1879) 42 Unlawful Assemblies and Processions Act (1890) 174n15 ‘link boys’ 10 Loch, Joice 59 loitering adult anxieties about 54–55 by larrikins 144–45, 144f, 145f, 146f ‘Mosquito’ device to deter 222n40 Young People Idling on the Steps at Flinders Street Railway Station (Carter) 223f Loy, Ron Wong 72 Lydon, Jane 16–17 Lyons, Enid xv McCalman, Janet 65 McConville, Chris 136 McCrae, Georgiana 4 Macdonald, Donald 179 Macdonald, Elaine 45, 78, 79f, 118n139, 123, 127–28, 214 McEacharn, Malcolm 110n110 Mackie, George 184 McLachlan, Noel 133n12, 135, 149 McLellan, William 92, 110 Madden, John 55n32 Maitland, Edward 103 Maloney, William 85 maps 18–19, 20–21f, 22f marine stores 92–94, 97, 108 Marks, Mark 154 marriage 42n73, 163 Marvellous Melbourne 102–3 masculinity 151, 161–63 Massey, Doreen 11

271

Matthias, Frank 29, 57–58, 179, 197 Maunders, David 97n45 May, Andrew see Brown-May, Andrew Maynard, Margaret 151 Mazzini, Giuseppe 38 Meeham, Eliza 71 Melba, Nellie 96 Melbourne author’s experience of 18 modern ‘youthscape’ of 222–24, 223f population growth in 25–26 rapid growth of 6 in Royal Atlas & Gazetteer of Australasia 18–19, 20–21f as suburbanized xvi as young city 4, 23–28, 24f, 45–48 Melbourne Grammar School 181 Melbourne Punch 34–36 Melbourne University 189 Melburnians, anxiety of, about ‘unfinished’ city 25 messengers 97 Mickle, Alan 50, 177–78 Miller, E. Morris 52, 68, 118n139, 197 Minton, F.W. 203–4 Mitchell, Don 220, 224 Mitchell, Eliza 77, 176 Mitchell, Janet 44 Monash, John 129–30 monkey parades see courtship Moore, Dorothy 76 Moore, Pierce 107 moral panic 134 Moran, Alfred 151–52 Moran, Thomas 133 Moy, Russell 72 Murdoch, Jack 96 Murdoch, Keith 128 Murray, Alfred 82 Murray, James 136 Nankervis, William 118 Nasaw, David 11, 127 nationalism 167, 169, 198–99, 205–6, 210–11 nativism 33–35, 188 Neglected Children’s Act (1887) 84 Neglected Children’s Aid Society 46 Nesbitt, James 151 Nettleton, Charles 23–24

272

Book Title

Newell, Andrew 64 newsboys adult work for 109nn103–4 agency of 105–6, 108 annual picnic 202–3, 203f city as resource for 214 City Newsboys’ Society 91, 115 demographic analysis of 97 fictional representations of 101–5, 103f funerals of 107–8 legislation affecting 108–11 and myth of ‘little merchant’ 109–10 Onians’ on 91 parades and processions of 202–3 as part-time workers 100n60 performances by, at fundraising galas 186 strikes by 106–7 symbolic value of 104–5 wages earned by 98–101, 100n63 newsgirls 97, 171 newspapers 137–38 Nugent, Maria 8–9 O’Brien, Eliza 158–59 Old Colonists’ Association 34 O’Neill, Richard 85 Onians, Edith and age boundaries 44 and economic thrift 128–29 on entertainment for children 115 on motives for rescue work 91 on newsboys 104 and regulation of street trading 110 on street workers’ knowledge of urban geography 95 on vulnerability of children 114 Opie, Iona and Peter 54 Order of the Sons of Temperance 181, 183 orderly boys see street sweepers O’Rell, Max 41 Palmer, Sue 219 parades and processions 181; see also picnics benefits to young people of attending 178 and Boer War 179 Brown-May on 174–75 of cadets 186, 195–97, 208, 209f children in Federation events 197–99 children’s agency in 180f, 181f, 182f

children’s tableaux 191–92, 191–92f Chinese 177n26 Cooper and Bailey’s Menagerie and Circus 177 and gender 188n63, 193, 198 and increase in youth groups 181 of larrikins 147 May Day socialist demonstrations 201 of Melbourne University students 189 of newsboys 202–3, 203f orderliness of sanctioned 201 organized by adults 211, 216 and photographs 175–76 political nature of 172, 183, 201–2 Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee 178, 187–200 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee 177, 186–87 Ragged School Children’s Picnic, The 203, 204f, 205 schools’ role in organizing 201–2 and temperance groups 183–84, 187 theoretical frameworks for 172–74 women in 173n9 young people as spectators at 176–79, 177f parks and gardens children’s destructive effects on 47, 61–65 minimum age of unsupervised children in 82, 83n150 and precursor to Children’s Court 63 Parr, A.E. 67–68, 218n15 Partlin, M. 186 Pascoe, Carla 75n114 Paterson, ‘Banjo’ 33 Peacock, Alexander 188 Pearson, Geoffrey 135 Peers, Juliet 166 penny dreadfuls 118n139 photographs and camera technology 175–76 message of 145 as source material 16–17, 175–76 picnics newsboys’ annual 202–3, 203f Ragged School Children’s Picnic, The 203, 204f, 205 pigeon mart 117n132 place; see also space

Index definition of 6–7 and identity construction 7–8 and larrikins 13–14 public, defined by Police Offences Act (1890) 5, 142 play as essential for children 54 instances of 4, 29, 30, 44, 53, 55–61, 63–66, 72, 75–76, 82, 95, 110, 114, 118, 129n190, 139, 141, 180–81, 203, 205, 217, 219–20, 224 police intervention in 55–56 and trains 60–61 and trams 59–60 playgrounds built by children 64, 214 cities as 53 drains as 29–30 Internet as 222, 224 movement for 49n4 as restrictive 216–17 streets as 55–58, 56f, 57f vacant lots as 30 police; see also crime and criminals beat sizes of 140–41 efforts of, to reduce vandalism 62–63 intervention of, in children’s play 55–56, 58–59 and larrikins 132, 138–39 reports on courtship activities 126 Police Offences Act (1890) 5, 142 Pomfret, David 172n5, 211 Pooley, Colin G. and Siân 81 population growth 25–26 Prahran Gospel Tent 114–15 Pratt, J.M. 100 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 52, 61 Priestly, Susan 132n4 primary sources 14–18 Princes Court 118 property damage see crime and criminals; vandalism prostitution 101, 136, 148, 156, 158, 167 pushes see gangs Quartly, Marian 33 Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee 178, 187–200 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee 177, 186–87

273

Ragged School Children’s Picnic, The 203, 204f, 205 railways see trains rape 164–67 Rasmussen, Kim 4–5, 61 rat catching 93 Reekie, Gail 89 reformers; see also Forster, William; Gordon Institute; Onians, Edith; parades and processions; Try Societies anxieties of 82–83, 112–14 and economic thrift 128–29 establishment of rescue organizations by 114 legislation enacted by 84–85 nationalism of 205–6, 210, 211 restrictions enacted by, on young people 215–16 shift from relief to prevention 205 and temperance groups 181, 183–84 Renfrew, Alexander 70 respectability 153, 165, 168 Richards, Lou 59 Richardson, Henry Handel 66–67 Ricketts, Dudley 61, 116 ‘right to the city’ movement 220–21 Robinson, Catherine 7 Rogers, ‘Soldier’ 107–8 Russell, Charles 123–24 Russell, John 35 Russell, Robert 26 Ryan, Mary 8, 173 St Patrick’s Cathedral 1–3, 24f, 222 Sala, George Augustus 23n5 Salvation Army 146–47, 184n46 Samuel, Raphael 17, 36 Scandrett, Elizabeth 153 scavenging 92, 94–95 school, attendance patterns 51–52 Schwarz, Bill 137–38 Scott, Dorothy 206 Seal, Graham 156 Sennett, Richard 224 Serle, Geoffrey 129 Service, James 106, 111n112 sewer system see drains sexuality 150–51, 158–59, 167

274

Book Title

Sharp, Charles 70 Sherratt, Tim 133n14 Shields, Rob 125n173 shooting galleries 117n134, 119f shop assistants 120–21, 159 Sibley, David 11–12 Sing, William Ah 72 skateboarders 1–3, 222 Smart, Judith 216n6 Smith, Kylie 136–37 Smith, Richard 153 Smith, William 70 smoking 85 socialists 201 Soja, Edward 7n26 space; see also place ephemerality of children’s, in urban landscape 53 and identity construction 170 Lefebvre on 217 youth as 217–18 spatial analysis 10–11 spatial appropriation 61, 140–42 Spence, W.G. 205 Stedman Jones, Gareth 98, 109n103 Stewart, May 78–81, 125–26, 214 Stirling, Amie Livingstone 77 Stone, Louis 163 Stott, John 65–66 Stratton, Jon 12n51 street sweepers 93f, 97 Street Trading Act (1925) 110–11 street work; see also shop assistants class and legislation for 110–11 competition in 95, 98 demographic analysis of 96–97 gender divide of 97–98, 101, 110–11 heyday of 88 marine stores 92–94 types of 92–93, 96–97 wages earned from 98–101 streets grids 23n2, 140–41 as playgrounds 55–58, 56f, 57f poor surfaces of 26 Stretton, Leonard 50, 59, 145–46 strikes 106–7 Sullivan, Alfred 206, 207f Summary Jurisdiction Act (1879) 42

Sutherland, Selina 46, 84–85 Swain, Shurlee 206 Tagg, John 16n60 tattoos 151n100 technology 97n48 teenagers see larrikins; young people Tekin, Lena 158 temperance groups 181, 183–84, 185f, 187 theatres on Bourke Street 112 influence of, on larrikin style 156 larrikins’ attendance at 147–48 theft see crime and criminals Tomlinson, W.M. 161 town clerks; see also Clayton, John; FitzGibbon, Edmund complaint letters to 16, 58, 65, 148 offices of, as source of historical material 15–16 trains 60–61, 68, 80, 125 trams 28,59–60, 68, 78, 80–82, 105, 123, 125–26 Trexler, Richard 172n5 Trollope, Anthony 23, 167 truancy 51–52, 65 Try Societies 84, 114, 128, 172, 184, 186, 206 Tuan, Yi-Fu 6, 10 Turner, Ethel xv, 48, 167–68 Turner, George 108 Turner, Graeme 12n51 Turner, Henry Gyles 23 Twopeny, Richard 25, 137 Unlawful Assemblies and Processions Act (1890) 174n15 urban geography, street workers’ knowledge of 95 urban range of 19th-century children 67–71, 226–34t of 20th-century children 74–75 and class 69, 75–76 crossing boundaries of, for courtship 125n173 and gender 71–72, 74n109, 75–82 restrictions on 74–75 vacant lots elimination of, in 20th century 215

Index and larrikins 140–42 as playground 30 vandalism by larrikins 145–46 in parks and gardens 61–63, 68–71, 226–34t von Mueller, Ferdinand 97 voting rights 42n73 wages dangers of earning, in reformers’ eyes 90–91, 100–101 effect of gender on 99n58 and independence 127 of street workers 98–101 Walker, Frank 52, 176 Wallis, George 58 Walsh, Michael 153 Ward, Colin 11, 54, 67 Waterhouse, Richard 89 Watson, Alexander 122 Watson, Harold 109 Watson, Richard 146n69 Webb, John 50, 52 Weber, Max 218 Whisnant, David 109 Whitburn, Will 156 White, Benjamin 87n1 White, William 69–70 Whitehead, Georgina 71 Whiting, J.B. 63 Whitsun tradition 188n63 Whoren, Henry 92n22 Wicks, James 59 Wilson, Elizabeth 8, 151 Wilson, Floren 186 women and larrikinism 157–61 in parades and processions 173n9 Women’s Christian Temperance Union 183 World War I 208 Wren, John 110 Wrixon, Henry John 138n36, 143 Young Australia in children’s tableaux 193 and larrikins 169

275

literary debates on 32–33 in Melbourne Punch 34–36 and similar movements in other countries 38 trope of 36–39 young people; see also children; larrikins; teenagers cities as dangerous for xv, 45–46, 82–84, 90, 213–14 climate’s effect on 41 construction of, as vulnerable 91n17 containment of 219–20 criticism of, in late 19th century 3 definition of, for current study 44 demographics of, in 19th and early 20th centuries 3, 31–32 effect of, on urban surroundings 47, 215 effect on, of urban surroundings 45–48, 46f, 213–15 ‘islanding’ of 2 as measure of national vitality 34, 38–39 as mirror of Melbourne’s infrastructure 131 as national ideal 199 outdoor experiences of, in memories 50–51 as photographic subjects 17 restrictions on freedom of 74–75, 84–86, 215–17 rights of 220 ‘safe’ environments for 114–20 scholarly attention to spatial behaviour of 10–12 skateboarders at St Patrick’s Cathedral 1–3, 222 as societal problem 39, 40f as spectators at parades and processions 176–79, 177f subjectivity of 217–18 and temperance groups 184, 185f unique insights of 10 and Young Australia trope 38–39 Young Traders’ School Society 181 youth culture 4, 12, 89–90 Zelizer, Viviana 217 Zox, Ephraim 97, 111n113