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The National Library holds a vast array of items relating to Australian childhood. Within the general collection there is the literature itself, ranging from the first children’s book published in Australia (Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, 1841) through sundry omnibuses, to the latest work by Ursula Dubosarksy or Andy Griffiths – not to mention the glories of the John Ryan Comic Book Collection. This material is supplemented by biographies and autobiographies, and by a wide range of non-fiction publications documenting childhood in Australia. The Newspaper and Microform Collection is also a major resource in this area.
This vast amount of material is hugely amplified by holdings in the Library’s special collections. Among Oral History recordings are a great number of interviewees from all walks of life, who have given accounts of their childhood experiences. These range from Mary Gilmore’s recollections of the 1870s, through to the experiences of street kids in the 1990s. Likewise, the Library’s Folklore Collection incorporates children’s play songs and nursery rhymes. And the Oral History Collection includes Professor Fiona Stanley’s recent National Library Kenneth Myer Lecture on the subject of children’s rights and welfare.
The Library’s Pictures Collection portrays children over a 200-ycar period. This material ranges from early paintings, to items of realia, such as the 1845 patchwork quilt made by Aboriginal children supervised by eleven-year-old Elizabeth Irwin, and Miles Franklin’s needlework sampler from about 1890. The massive photographic record ranges through early coloured ambrotypes from the 1850s, to Harold Cazneaux’s portraits of his own children in the early 1900s, to Peta Hill’s contemporary photographs of the children of outback stockworkers.
The Library’s Manuscript Collection is a similarly fruitful resource. It includes, for instance, childhood material from the papers of Sir John Monash, a poem on a school AFL match penned by a ten-year-old Robert Menzies, along with records from numerous Australian writers, such as Maie Casey’s delightful hand-drawn and coloured booklets produced as a ten- or twelve-year-old. and Alan Moorehead’s schoolboy diary. At another level. there are the papers of various child welfare institutions and agencies. and of professionals working in the areas of childcare, education and health.
The Library’s Ephemera Collection holds an array of items, such as catalogues for Cyclops toys, children’s shoes and clothes, and Paton’s childhood clothing patterns, while the Music Collection holds sheet music for children’s songs ranging from the stirring propagandist World War I ballad ‘Daddy’s in the Dardanelles’, through to more recent compositions.
The National Library has sampled its resources relating to childhood in a diverse range of publications. In 2000 I compiled The Endless Playground: Celebrating Australian Childhood, which surveyed material about growing up in Australia over the last two centuries. More recently, the Lillie Book of Childhood (2003) anthologised childhood evocations in poetry, matched with items from the Library’s Pictures Collection. Childhood themes also underpinned Robert Holden’s Twinkle, Twinkle, Southern Cross: The Forgotten Folklore of Australian Nursery Rhymes ( 1992), while the same author was responsible for Bunyips: Australia’s Folklore of Fear (2001), with an associated touring exhibition and website.
In their annual celebration event, the Friends of the National Library has honoured, among many others, the children’s authors Ruth Park (1996) and Mem Fox (2002), producing associated celebratory publications. Ann Turner’s In Their Image: Contemporary Australian Cartoonists (2000) excerpted oral history interviews conducted with twenty-one leading political cartoonists, each speaking at some length about their formative early years. Most recently, Daisy in Exile: The Diary of an Australian Schoolgirl in France 1887-1889 (edited by Marc Serge Rivière) transcribes a spirited teenager’s diary held in the Library’s Manuscript Collection.
Finally, one particularly significant aspect of the Library’s holdings of childhood material is the ‘Bringing Them Home’ Oral History Project, under which the Library, with funding from the federal government, recorded hundreds of narratives relating to the removal of indigenous children from their families. The resulting publication, Many Voices: Reflections on Experiences of Indigenous Child Separation (2002), edited by Doreen Mellor and Anna Haebich, also included a CD of excerpts from some of the interviews.
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