It’s not often that one gets to read a history that speaks to one’s most private memories, one’s sense of self. This week I have read two: Emily Gallagher’s Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood, and Alistair Thomson and his colleagues’ Fathering: An Australian History.
In the case of Playtime this might be true only for older readers — Gallagher begins her study in 1890 and ends in 1939. But as she makes clear, children’s play is always conservative as well as changing, and I think most Australian readers will share my delighted recognition. Thomson — Fathering is jointly authored, but Alistair Thomson was its anchor and driver — gives us the history of Australian fathering from 1919 to now. The historical changes and continuities it describes are deliberately grounded in individual life stories, and again readers will find resonances with their own memories and experience.
Gallagher writes with an elegant assurance. Children, she says, have not been treated as historical subjects; rather “they have appeared as accessories to a larger story; a colourful thread of a neatly spun tapestry of adult lives. This book complicates that tapestry.” It does this by taking “children seriously as the authors of their own lives.”
People told Gallagher that the sources for the story she wanted to write — children’s own documentary records — did not exist, but she nevertheless set out to find them. She discovered more than a hundred collections, in state libraries and local collections, encompassing everything from farm sheds to school museums “and even private doll collections, my research keenly appraised by hundreds of unblinking eyes.” There were treasures in the bush, but her richest source was more conventional, what she calls “youth journalism”: letters, poems and stories published in school papers, official and unofficial, and in the children’s pages of city newspapers. These contributions, naive and sophisticated, candid and shy, power her analysis throughout.
Her account is organised into what she calls “common imaginative worlds.” In roughly chronological order, these worlds involve bird-watching, playing at war, dolls and home-making, dreaming about the future, and monsters and fairies. In all these worlds, even playing at war, Gallagher finds children joyfully reimagining themselves as heroes, independent of adults and shaping adult worlds to their own purposes.
Gallagher recognises some the social constraints on these imaginings. Gender is a constant. Boys play as soldiers and girls as nurses, and girls banish boys from their cubbyhouses because the boys destroy their dolls — perhaps, writes Gallagher, foreshadowing “the violence that some girls would experience in their own homes as married women.”
She is also alert to her subjects’ constraints as the children of colonialism. Their imaginings of “birdland” — a land inhabited by anthropomorphic birds — follow adult imaginings in celebrating their own connection to country, and at the same time erase Indigenous people from the landscape. The settler myth framing the children’s stories is unquestionned, though some stories protest the murder of birds by egg collectors and farmers.
Few sources document the imaginings of Indigenous children, but we glimpse them in a collection of drawings by children on the Hermannsburg mission in Western Arrarnta country. Rather than the bush landscapes, “largely unmarked by modernity,” painted by Arrarnta man Albert Namatjira and his followers, the children’s landscape is populated with gums and kangaroos together with cars and aeroplanes:
Black emus sprinting along the red earth; camels lounging among pine trees and porcupine grass; ghostly gums standing solemnly alongside modest buildings; and aeroplanes gliding through the sky like great birds.
In these drawings aeroplanes are not depicted “as a vehicle to another world.” Gallagher explains — perhaps over-explains — that while both settler and Indigenous children placed the aeroplane in their futures, the Western Arrarnta, unlike the utopian worlds imagined by settler children, “anchored it to the ‘everywhen’ of Country.”
There is another constraint which to my mind Gallagher could have explored more — the frame of middle-class culture. In discussing the sources available for a history of childhood she insists that the records of working-class children, while elusive, can be recovered, but she does not do this here. Nor does she acknowledge how far the records she draws on are class-bound. The youth-journalists whose stories are the backbone of Playtime display levels of self-confidence and schooling readily found only in a family with middle-class aspirations. Gallagher’s aim in writing this history, to take “children seriously as the authors of their own lives,” may itself be essentially middle-class.
But I doubt this is a constraint that will bother many readers. Like this reviewer they will delight in the stories of fairies triumphant and monsters overcome, of brave and adventurous children taking hold of power for themselves.
Fathering begins with a story about working-class childhoods in the 1930s and the 1960s. In an oral history interview Patrick Doran was asked what his father Tom, an unskilled labourer working for the Board of Works, was like as a parent. In words that reproduce all the idiosyncracies of his speech, he remembered:
There was a cheap library up in Elsternwick and we use to all walk up there to get these cheap books where they rent it out a penny a week, I think, to get the books out, and walk all the way back. Like my father use to take us and bring us home and sort out the books we wanted and get everything paid for… I did the same with our kids.
The authors of Fathering don’t wonder what books these working-class kids chose; that is not their remit. Their aim is “to explore the forces that have shaped family life and fathering since the early twentieth century, and how men have responded to those forces and managed the roles and responsibilities of fatherhood.”
They tell the story of Tom and Patrick and the library visits as a “muted expression” of a father caring about his children, muted both in its telling in the interview that is its source, and in its historical happening. “Expressive intimacy or even play… were not significant aspects” of Tom’s and Patrick’s relations with their children, they write.
Difficulties with what is not said are a recurring theme in Fathering. This is partly because the research draws on pre-existing oral history interviews in which fathering was not a central concern. More crucially, when interviewees — especially older men — were asked directly about the role of fathering they had little to say. Patrick Doran’s response was typical of working men of his generation: “It’s just being around, and be taken for granted. I can’t see a big deal in a role for a father, but just be there.”
Fathering draws on some 1250 oral history interviews from four different collections, plus memoirs by Indigenous Australians, submissions to the mid-1970s Royal Commission on Human Relationships, and letters to and from servicemen during the second world war. These life-histories represent a wide swathe of Australian society: respectable and unrespectable poor, skilled workers, aspiring and well-established middle-class families, newly arrived migrants and their children, and Indigenous families both destroyed and surviving. They are set in the context of reflective chapters organised in five chronological sections: Fathering Between the Wars, Fathering in WWII and Post-War Reconstruction, Fathering in Prosperous Times, Fathering in Turbulent Times, and Fathering into the Twenty-first Century.
The voices of its subjects speak directly from every page of Fathering; they are its greatest strength. They are heard most clearly in the Portrait chapters scattered through the book; fifteen in all, chosen for their relevance to the themes pursued in the different sections and featuring all kinds of Australian fathers, including the good, the violent and the absent. Let me bring you just two examples.
As a baby born during the second world war, I was drawn to the chapter Dear Dad: The Johnson and MacFarlane Families at War. John Johnson was a farmer’s son trained as a carpenter. Ken MacFarlane, educated at Scotch College, was an optometrist and the son of an optometrist. The Portrait is based on letters exchanged by these parents and their children during the war. Johnson wrote from Tobruk: “How is my Sylvia Rose and my Josie Jacqueline. Not forgetting all my men. I’m expecting a letter from John any time and hope he is well and happy.” Muted affection is overcome here by necessity.
Both dads used their correspondence to maintain affectionate bonds with their children, the more literate MacFarlane more readily. It was painful to learn at the end of this chapter that John Johnson was killed by a sniper’s bullet in 1941, before his last letter reached home.
The story of Jack Brooks is subtitled Becoming an Aboriginal Dad. Based on an interview in 2012, it tells how he grew up in a country town with a strong, supportive Aboriginal community. After his family life was shattered by violence Brooks tried various jobs in country New South Wales and then Sydney. In Sydney he fathered five children in three different relationships that all failed; he saw the children only sporadically. His sixth child was different. His wife was the main wage-earner, and Brooks chose to stay at home with his son.
When asked what times in his life he had most enjoyed, Brooks replied: “bringing up [my son]… actually spending every day with [him] has been really amazing.” He was taking care of his son’s Aboriginal identity, “to make sure that he’s around community as well, and knowing who his uncles and aunties are, and cousins and brothers and sisters. And he’s always asking questions and talking about the Dreamtime… [E]verything that I’ve learned over the years, I’m trying to pass on to him… I really enjoy life now. I enjoy life a lot.”
Brooks’s joy is not typical of the men whose experience shapes Fathering. The book is dominated by the difficulties of being the kind of father who takes equal responsibility for, and gives equal time to, the rearing of his children. This is the model of fathering valourised by the authors of this book, the model they believe will give fathers the greatest satisfaction and children the greatest benefit. They show how versions of this “New Fatherhood” have come to be accepted as an ideal over the last four decades, despite ideological challenges.
Fathers from across Australian society have embraced that ideal, yet all but a very few struggle to achieve it. The problem is identified as being entrenched in the workplace, in the reality that most husbands continue to earn more than most wives, and in the stubborn belief that men are the natural breadwinners. Fathering concludes that until this changes, fathers “will continue to be the secondary parent.”
Different readers will find different rewards in Playtime and Fathering. Some will be happily reminded of daydreams in which they mapped heroic futures for themselves. Others will find historic context for current uncertainties about their future as parents or grandparents. All will find histories that are deeply personal. •
Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood
By Emily Gallagher | La Trobe University Press | $36.99 | 320 pages
Fathering: An Australian History
Alistair Thomson, John Murphy, Kate Murphy and Johnny Bell, with Jill Barnard | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 432 pages
