The History of Children in Australia: An Interdisciplinary Historiography Carla Pascoe* University of Melbourne Abstract Children have long been shadowy or forgotten figures within historical narratives. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that a critical historiography of children and childhood emerged. In the Australian context, histories of young people were not published until the 1980s. Whilst the historiography of the child is now a burgeoning field, it has been haunted by two major challenges: a lack of sources authored by children themselves; and a tendency amongst adult scholars to romanticise children. This article situates the Australian historiography of children within an international context. Given the difficulties of reconstructing the lives of children in the past, it argues for an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon the insights of folklore, material culture, geography and oral history. Introduction In England, and America, and Africa, and Asia, the little folks may be paragons of virtue, I know little about them. But in Australia a model child is – I say it not without thankfulness – an unknown quantity. It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliancy, of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and the people are young-hearted together, and the children’s spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years’ sorrowful history. There is a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and mischief in nature here, and there in children. Often the light grows dull and the bright colouring fades to neutral tints in the dust and heat of the day. But when it survives play-days and school-days, circumstances alone determine whether the electric sparkle shall go to play will-o’-the-wisp with the larrikin type, or warm the breasts of the spirited, single-hearted, loyal ones who alone can ‘advance Australia’. 1 Ethel Turner’s famous book Seven Little Australians (1894) represents a distinctively Aus- tralian response to the Victorian romanticisation of childhood. Yet she reveals here a cer- tain sentimentalisation nonetheless, albeit a peculiarly colonial version. Like Turner, there has always been a tendency amongst Australian adults to sentimentalise children. Apart from those who experience desperately unhappy childhoods, adults generally look back wistfully to their early years as a precious period of innocence, simplicity and joy. Histo- rians are no exception. A thick haze of nostalgia often clouds historical accounts (and contemporary debates) concerning growing up. Because we were all children once, the challenge for historians is to move beyond the assumption that we intuitively know what it felt like to grow up in past eras and to actively, self-reflexively historicise changing experiences of childhood. An equally challenging task for historians of childhood is to discern how we can tell children’s stories when there are so few extant sources authored by children themselves. Unearthing the lives of previous generations of children is a difficult task which has only been taken up relatively recently by historians in Australia and overseas. This article History Compass 8/10 (2010): 1142–1164, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00710.x ª 2010 The Author History Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd