ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

NLA Publishing produces beautiful ‘coffee table’ illustrated books on all sorts of subjects, but Spinning Tops and Gumdrops is one that is likely to find a home in school libraries.  It is as the subtitle says, a portrait of colonial childhood, 192 lavishly illustrated pages covering everything from toys and games to the vulnerability of 19th century children to an early death.  Because the book is large (approximately 25cm square) a teacher could easily show a class the full page and double spread images to bring all kinds of topics vividly to life, from colonial clothing to transport to housing.  Senior school students could use it for research too, because there is as much to be learned from the drawings, paintings and photos as there is from the text.

The quality of the photos is quite remarkable, considering that photography was in its infancy and that portraits involved people having to pose without moving for minutes at a time.  The photos of the De Salis children, probably taken about 1890 when the family was struggling after the depression, are enchanting, and I think that more than one of these images would make a brilliant stimulus to creative writing.   There’s a splendid photo of one of these children brandishing a pistol at the others who are all dressed in rather odd garb.  The author’s note explains that they’re play acting with dress-ups but the swords and the pistol may well be real.  Imaginative present-day children could write wonderful stories about this image! I also like a photo of a family in an open carriage, most of them looking very sour indeed: where are they going?  Why are they so gloomy?  (They’re not dressed for a funeral, so that’s not the reason!)  There’s also a very sad collection of the Sobraon boys, one of them as young as three, posed with brief biographies which explain the pathetic backgrounds that led to them being ordered into detention on a ship called the Sobraon until they turned 18 or were apprenticed out.  (You can read a little about this ship refitted as a reformatory for wayward boys and destitute children at the Museum of Sydney website, but it’s the images in this book that brings the story to life.  Imagine that poor little tot being confined to a ship for 15 years!)

The blurb also suggests that family historians can get a sense of their ancestors’ childhoods through these poignant photographs and memories from the past.  The author, Edwin Barnard, based the book on the reminiscences of men and women whose earliest memories were of the rip-roaring cities, sleepy outback towns and lonely selections of colonial Australia, and his sources include well-known writers like A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson but also relative unknowns such as Henry Button:

‘Very soon I became conscious of a peculiar pleasure when she was near, and this steadily increased until her image was rarely absent from my mental vision.  By a mysterious process of affinity more readily experienced than explained, each was drawn to the other, until the love light beamed in the eyes of both, and the heart’s secret was declared in silent eloquence.  Well do I now remember, though more than fifty years have fled, how my whole nature thrilled when the little lady came in sight, and she graciously bestowed upon me a furtive smile.’ (Henry Button, aged 19, describing his sweetheart, 14-year old Emma Glover whom he later married, Tasmania, 1866).

(BTW I think Henry’s age is a typo: he can’t have been 19 when he was describing how ‘fifty years had fled’ but he can’t have been 91 either.)

Whatever about that, it’s amazing to read that the marriageable age in Australia in the 19th century was the same as the age of consent: 14 for boys and 12 for girls (though they still had to have the permission of their parents if they were under 21).

So yes, the book shows, amongst other things, how the very definition of childhood has changed.  A chapter titled, ‘We all had to do something’ details the work that children were expected to do from a very young age, from long, laborious hours helping out on the family farm to labour-intensive (and sometimes risky) household chores, and then transitioning to employment from the age of fourteen onward.  The jobs, like almost everything else, were gendered, with most girls going into domestic service or unskilled factory work and boys apprenticed to a more diverse range of occupations including trades or labouring.  These gendered occupations were following a pattern established in whatever schooling they’d had, where boys learned skills such as carpentry while girls learned needlework.

Schooling was a hit-and-miss affair until the 1870s when Victoria passed the Education Act in 1872 and became the first colony to introduce education that was compulsory, secular and free, with the other colonies (and the rest of the world) following suit in due course.  There are engaging photos of small country schools with a mixed bag of kids grinning at the camera, some of them including indigenous children – which made me wonder about the circumstances of their enrolment and whether they were children stolen from their families…

I was a bit disappointed to see that while the first chapter acknowledges that perhaps 3000 generations of Aboriginal children, members of hundreds of distinct nations, had grown up in the country we now call Australia, there is no information about their education, games or traditions, and the reason given is this:

Memories of those times survive in a rich heritage of oral traditions. How, when and where those oral traditions are communicated to the wider world is a matter for Indigenous writers and story-tellers, which is why they have no place in this book.  Also missing, for the same reason, is the sad history of Indigenous dispossession at the hands of nineteenth-century colonisers, and particularly accounts of children tragically stolen from their parents. (p.8)

Well, fair enough that Indigenous stories are best told by Indigenous authors – but why couldn’t an Indigenous writer or story-teller have contributed to or co-authored the book?  It’s about Australian children, and Indigenous children have been here all along. Because the effect of leaving out any reference to Indigenous childhoods other than this one-page gesture, is to leave a huge and deceptive gap in the book.  It perpetuates the invisibility of Indigenous people in our national story.

The story of education, for example, begins with the uncomfortable truth that although at the time of First Settlement no one among the colonists had given any thought at all to the education of the children of the First Fleet, Indigenous people had in place a long-standing, effective and hugely enjoyable system of education that taught their children what they needed to know to be become successful functioning adults.  Eventually the children of privileged classes had tutors and dame schools and so forth, but for many of the ordinary children of the colony there was no formal education at all for almost a hundred years.  While I wouldn’t expect a book of this type to tell the whole sordid story of Aboriginal dispossession, why couldn’t it be acknowledged that Indigenous children learned through stories, dance and song?

And when it comes to toys and games, I happen to know a bit about Indigenous play because some years ago I reviewed Claudia Haagen’s book called Bush Toys: Aboriginal Children at Play on my professional LisaHillSchoolStuff blog.  Bush Toys is not written by an Indigenous author, (because there wasn’t the same attention to these issues of authorship back in 1994 when it was published) but it documents the artefacts in the National Museum and explains how Indigenous children played with them.  So there’s no reason why the NLA could not have invited an Indigenous researcher to contribute something on similar lines to what’s in Claudia Haagen’s book.  I say this because I know that teachers want to include content about Indigenous lifestyles and history in their curriculum but they find it difficult to access useful teaching materials.  Indeed, in 2014 the National Museum set up a hands-on school holiday program featuring bush toys so they are well aware that teaching about Indigenous childhood is a way of respecting Indigenous history in a practical and meaningful way.  I really liked Spinning Tops and Gumdrops – but I would like it to be even better than it is.  A book of this style and type – although it doesn’t purport to be a comprehensive history – could so easily have been a perfect resource!

Even so, it’s a marvellous book as it is, and I can’t wait to show it to the kids next door!

Author: Edwin Barnard
Title: Spinning Tops and Gumdrops, A portrait of colonial childhood
Publisher: NAL (National Library of Australia) Publishing, 2018
ISBN: 9780642279187
Review copy courtesy of NLA Publishing, with thanks to Scott Eathorne of Quikmark Media

Available from Fishpond: Spinning Tops & Gumdrops: A Portrait of Colonial Childhood and from the NLA Bookshop.