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

YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE SHAPING OF PUBLIC SPACE IN MELBOURNE, 18701914

Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present

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 childrens bodies; views of young people as consumers and/or originators of culture; the child and religious discourse; childrens and adolescents self-representations; and adults recollections of childhood.

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SIMON SLEIGHT
Kings College London, UK, and Monash University, Australia

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Copyright 2013 Simon Sleight

Simon Sleight has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sleight, Simon.

Young people and the shaping of public space in Melbourne, 18701914. (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
307.76083099451-dc23

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Sleight, Simon.

Young people and the shaping of public space in Melbourne, 18701914 / 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)

1. Cities and towns--AustraliaMelbourne (Vic.)History. 2. Public spacesAustralia Melbourne (Vic.)History. 3. YouthAustraliaMelbourne (Vic.)History. I. Title.

HT169.A82M459 2013
305.235099451dc23

2012046555

ISBN: 9781409432449 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315546056 (ebk)

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 Public Record Series (for files held at PROV): VPRS

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.

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.

Unless stated otherwise, all web pages referenced in this book last accessed 20 February 2013.

In Australia a model child is an unknown quantity, wrote the celebrated childrens 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. Australias 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 nations children meant saving them from the city.

The fear of the child-devouring Australian city is one of the myths dissected in Simon Sleights 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 citys 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