The Victorian Deaf And Dumb Institution For Children

Behind the glittering image of 'Marvellous Melbourne' there existed in the popular imagination another, very different, picture of the colonial metropolis. This was the city of 'low life', of crowded slums, poverty, disease and vice. The nine essays in The Outcasts of Melbourne attempt to reveal the social realities behind this picture. They include new accounts of the forces which created the city's physical environment. They show how perceptions of a city can be shaped by campaigning journalists, artists and writers. They present collective portraits of the poor and the 'criminal classes' - and of those who set out to save them. They describe how the city's guardians - the police, public health authorities and charity workers - responded to the challenge of the slums. By imaginative use of the rich deposits in the public records, these explorations in social history present new ways of documenting the lives of people whose daily activities were seldom reported in the popular press. In doing so, they also map the chains of causation which link the actions of individuals - appearing before a committee of a benevolent society, getting arrested, evangelising at a Salvation Army rally - to the social forces which have shaped the cities in which we live.

Drawing on examples from British world expressions of Christianity, this collection further greater understanding of religion as a critical element of modern children’s and young people’s history. It builds on emerging scholarship that challenges the view that religion had a solely negative impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century children, or that ‘secularization’ is the only lens to apply to childhood and religion. Putting forth the argument that religion was an abiding influence among British world children throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, this volume places ‘religion’ at the center of analysis and discussion. At the same time, it positions the religious factor within a broader social and cultural framework. The essays focus on the historical contexts in which religion was formative for children in various ‘British’ settings denoted as ‘Anglo’ or ‘colonial’ during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. These contexts include mission fields, churches, families, Sunday schools, camps, schools and youth movements. Together they are treated as ‘sites’ in which religion contributed to identity formation, albeit in different ways relating to such factors as gender, race, disability and denomination. The contributors develop this subject for childhoods that were experienced largely, but not exclusively, outside the ‘metropole’, in a diversity of geographical settings. By extending the geographic range, even within the British world, it provides a more rounded perspective on children’s global engagement with religion.

This lavishly illustrated book takes a broad sweep through the history of Australian childhood, from the early nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on material from the Library's Pictorial, Manuscript, Ephemera and Newspaper Collections, and using excerpts from the Oral History Collection, in addition to specially commissioned feature articles from Robert Holden, and children's writers Steven Herrick, Ursula Dubosarsky and Jack Bedson, the book surveys and celebrates two centuries of growing up in Australia.

This 1996 book is a comprehensive history of single motherhood in Australia. Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe tell the powerful, if painful and often moving, story of these women and their children and the lives they constructed. Starting in the 1850s when abandonment and infanticide were not uncommon, the book's main focus ends in 1975 when the legal status of illegitimacy was abolished. The book covers issues of baby farming, infanticide, abortion, sex education, birth control, adoption and marriage, in effect becoming a history of sexual practice in Australia. While tracing profound changes from a time when single mothers were locked in gaol for discarding their babies to the establishment of state benefits, the authors find a good deal of continuity over the period. This book makes an important contribution to social, welfare and women's history in Australia.