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HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 43(3)
Jonathan Prangnell Kate Quirk
Children in Paradise: Growing Up on the Australian Goldfields ABSTRACT Paradise, a gold mining town in Queensland, Australia, was occupied only briefly towards the end of the 19th century, a single fleeting moment in the boom-and-bust cycle of the Australian gold rush. At its zenith, Paradise was home to more than 600 people, and contrary to popular expectations about the nature of the goldfields, a substantial proportion of the inhabitants were children. While the presence of children in the archaeological record is frequently overlooked, evidence from Paradise not only confirms the existence of children at the site but also illuminates community attitudes toward children and the nature of childhood in colonial Australia. The evidence from Paradise strongly suggests a deep-rooted tension between middle-class Victorian ideals of childrearing and the realities of life in a frontier mining town.
Introduction Children are an important, integral component of human societies, yet they have often been marginalized and neglected in archaeological reconstructions of the past. This neglect has a number of causes, ranging from the difficulty of arriving at a sufficiently robust and versatile definition of the notion of “childhood” to the perceived “invisibility” of children in the archaeological record. Some attempt to redress this situation is made through investigating the lives of children who lived in the late-19th-century mining town of Paradise in Queensland, Australia (Figure 1). Archaeological and historical evidence reveal a vibrant and closely interconnected community that struggled to meld the middle-class ideals of a Victorian childhood with the realities of life on the colonial frontier. Paradise children were at the heart of the private nuclear family that cherished the ideals of the Victorian middle classes, and yet they were used to broker social and economic connections with other households. Children were encouraged to play amongst themselves and to savor their sacred childhood years, but they were also
Historical Archaeology, 2009, 43(3):38–49. Permission to reprint required.
expected to perform for the world at large in the name of suitably worthy causes. They were encouraged to learn but were needed for work. Even though the often-dangerous occupations of these colonial industries harbored risks of early death, each passing of a working child was mourned as wasted promise. These paradoxes represent the underlying tensions between the affective and the economic, the sentimental and the pragmatic, that typify the colonial family and lay the foundation for the 19th-century Australian experience of childhood (Grimshaw and Willet 1981). Towards an Archaeology of Childhood Despite the demonstrable presence of women and children at relatively recent sites like Paradise along with their undoubted presence at a vast majority of habitation sites of the recent and more distant past, the archeological study of each has been somewhat limited. Over the past 20 years, considerable inroads have been made by researchers into redressing the bias against women (Conkey and Spector 1984; Walde and Willows 1991; Balme and Beck 1995; Casey et al. 1998; Lawrence 2000), but children continue to be marginalized in reconstructions of the archaeological past, ostensibly for many of the same reasons that were once used to justify the exclusion of women.
FIGURE 1. Paradise. (Map by Deborah Brian, 2005.)
JONATHAN PRANGNELL AND KATE QUIRK—Children in Paradise
Firstly, children are frequently regarded as irrelevant to those aspects of the past considered central to the discipline. Like women, children are commonly seen to be sequestered in the private sphere, separate from the political, economic, and techno-environmental concerns that are the principal preoccupations of traditional and, some would argue, androcentric approaches to the past (Conkey and Spector 1984; Gero 1988; Sofaer Derevenski 1997; Lawrence 1998; Kamp 2001). This tendency is exacerbated by the assumption that children are inherently incapable of participating in the wider world. By virtue of their unformed nature, children are seen as passive receptors of culture, unable to influence or contribute to their communities (Sofaer Derevenski 1997:193; Kamp 2001:1–2). There is also a widespread expectation that, like women, children of the past cannot be studied because they are essentially invisible in the archaeological record (Conkey and Gero 1991:11; Kohl 1993:15; Sofaer Derevenski 1997:193). Just as it has been held that the archaeological record “is all too frequently silent on this important problem of determining gender difference” (Kohl 1993:15), so too there is the sense that the “material traces children leave are minor and hard to interpret or are too difficult to untangle from those of adults” (Kamp 2001:2). Among other things, this has meant that research that does focus on children tends to be dominated by studies of skeletal remains, which are seen to provide the only definite evidence of children’s existences. Not surprisingly, these studies frequently emphasize children’s deaths rather than their lives, variously concentrating on health and disease (Goodman and Armelagos 1989; Grauer and McNamara 1995; Mays et al. 2002), sex determination (Saunders 1992:4–6; Cunha et al. 2000), body size (Saunders 1992:13–16; Visser 1998), mortuary practice (McKillop 1995; Finlay 2000; Haslam et al. 2003), and the symbolic aspects of death and burial (Lucy 1994; Meskell 1994). In recent years, these preconceptions about the potential for an archaeology of childhood have begun to be challenged. Building on the work of Grete Lillehammer (1989), archaeologists such as Kathryn Kamp (2001) and Joanna Sofaer Derevenski (1997) point to the significant and varied roles that children play within their communities. Contrary to common assumption, children are not
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mere bit players in the historical drama of family life; they frequently fulfill vital social and economic functions within the family (Grimshaw and Willet 1981:135; Lawrence 2000:95–96; Kamp 2001:14–18). At times they have been of central importance in bringing about even the most wide-reaching social change. This was perhaps never more apparent than in the 19th century when politicians and philanthropists struggled to develop social and legal policies that would protect children—who were newly conceived of as vulnerable innocents—from the wider world (Steedman 1990:62–81; Findlay 2004). Likewise, children can impact the material culture of a society—objects are made specifically for their use, and they use objects in ways that adults do not (Finlay 1997:206; Kamp 2001)—and thus they play a potentially identifiable role in site-formation processes (Sofaer Derevenski 1997:193). As Andrew Chamberlain (1997:249) makes clear, “children contribute to the archaeological record whether or not we are competent to recognize them [emphasis in original].” An archaeology of childhood must therefore aim, as Kamp (2001:1) suggests, not only to recognize the presence of children but also to address community attitudes toward children and the nature of the experience of childhood. Only in giving attention to each of these three key elements of the archaeology of childhood can archaeologists hope to generate more complete accounts of the past and adequately address the subtleties of past social change. An operational difficulty arises, however, in defining the meaning of “child” and of “childhood,” given that, like gender, it is a concept determined by historical and geographical context (Sofaer Derevenski 1997:198; Kamp 2001:25). Even in the context of the relatively recent past of the Victorian period, it is a challenge to develop a single working definition of childhood. The Victorian middle classes, for example, saw childhood as a period in which the child, a helpless, formless “blank slate,” needed to be protected from the world, educated, and molded into the appearance of a responsible, respectable adult (Fitts 1999:45–46; Young 2003:77). At the same time, economic necessity meant that Australian children of both the working and middle classes bore heavy financial and social responsibilities long before they reached adulthood (Grimshaw and Willet 1981:146)—census data
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show that children as young as six were working in Queensland during the 1890s (Queensland Registrar-General 1891a:633). Participation in the workforce ran counter to the middle-class ideal of childhood, but for many Australian families the capacity to contribute to the family economically was an intrinsic element of what it meant to be a good child (Grimshaw and Willet 1981:146). In the culture of the Australian colonial family, an inherent contradiction can be seen between the desire to maintain the purely affective ties of the middle-class ideal and to preserve the economic functionality of the family (Grimshaw and Willet 1981:151–153). Given these complexities, it seems impossible to define a single, genuinely emic understanding of childhood that would function for the entirety of Paradise. Like most other towns in the growing colony, Paradise contained different classes, ethnicities, religions, nationalities, and social backgrounds. Each of these divisions w o u l d i m p a c t t h e i n d i v i d u a l ’s a n d t h e community’s understandings of what it meant to be a child. The only practical recourse for the archaeologist seems to be to arbitrarily adopt the contemporary legal definition that childhood ended at 21, the age of majority in Australia during the Victorian era. Such an approach has the advantage of being consistent with 19th-century sources pertaining to childhood, such as census data, legislation, and newspaper reports. This somewhat unsatisfactory convention masks considerable variation in the social and economic circumstances of colonial families and the shifting community expectations to which children were held accountable as they matured. Certainly, inhabitants of Paradise were performing the very adult tasks of working, marrying, and starting families long before their 21st birthdays (Methodist Church of Australasia 1898; Frazer 1987). The taxonomy of the period reflected multitudinous ways to understand the category “child.” The state of infancy is deemed to pertain from birth to 7 years of age, childhood from 7 to 14, and youth from 14 to 21 (Karskens 1997:126). Children were expected to take on additional tasks and responsibilities as they passed from one stage to the next, but ultimately they were still regarded as undeveloped and in need of the protection and guidance of their families (Karskens 1997:126).
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Children in Paradise Historical and Archaeological Context Paradise, located on the banks of the Burnett River in southeast Queensland, was founded in the last years of the 1880s upon the discovery of gold-bearing reefs in the region. At the time, it was heralded as “the coming field,” potentially comparable to the nearby gold town of Gympie (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1889, 1890e). Accordingly, the population rose from less than 40 in 1890 (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1890b) to more than 600 in 1891 (Queensland Registrar-General 1891b:13). Once established, the town boasted a police station and a courthouse, a Methodist Home Mission, seven hotels, a lemonade factory, and numerous retail stores, trade workshops, and residential dwellings. The Paradise boom was to be short-lived. As early as 1892 it was realized that the mines would never produce payable gold. As the hard-rock mining enterprises ground to a halt, one by one, the inhabitants of the town gradually left, driven out by poverty and hopelessness (The Queensland Christian Witness and Methodist Journal 1896). By 1900, the town had all but disappeared. Hoping for better luck, most residents packed up their belongings, dismantled their houses, and hauled their families and all their worldly possessions to the next gold town. Paradise was once more turned over to pastoralism, and the cattle returned to graze the riverbank among the scattered stumps and scant remains of a once-thriving village. In 2002, the Queensland government granted approval to commence construction of the planned Burnett River Dam, a proposed artificial catchment, to supply the irrigation needs of nearby orchards and farms. The remnants of the Township of Paradise fell within the area scheduled for excavation and eventual inundation. In late 2002 and early 2003, the authors, together with staff of the University of Queensland Archaeological Services Unit, conducted a series of surface surveys and limited subsurface excavations to record and sample the material remains of a range of localities within the area of the town. Thirteen sites were selected for intensive surface collection or excavation, including the town dump, the lemonade factory, the Methodist Home Mission, Plastow’s cobblers, Ware’s sawmill, Walker’s
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JONATHAN PRANGNELL AND KATE QUIRK—Children in Paradise
store, the residential area of the McGhie Machinery Area, and the homes of the Buzza, Shuttleworth, Martin, Bartlett, McGonnell, and Turk families. Family and Community Archaeological, historical, and populist conceptions paint the Australian goldfields as rough, masculine places, devoid of community connections and family life (Lawrence 1998:127, 2000:15). In reality, this was seldom the case. Rather, the population of the Australian goldfields, like those of North America, can be conceived of as a “community without a locus”—a collection of families and individuals who move together from one strike to the next, bonded by social and kin ties and by shared history (Douglass 1998:100; Lawrence 2000). At Paradise, women and children quickly came to make up the greater part of this community. During Christmas 1889, for example, the township was described as having “plenty of Adams but no Eve” (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1890a), but as Table 1 demonstrates, by 1891 women and children accounted for almost one-half of the town’s inhabitants and would constitute a peak of more than 90% of the population in 1895. Part of the reason for this preponderance of women and children seems to have been the large size of many families. A typical example is the Frazer family that had been making a meager living moving among various other gold mining
towns in the district before relocating to Paradise in the early 1890s. William Frazer, then aged 21, and Annie Gillece, 16, had married in Tamworth, New South Wales, in 1874. In September 1875, Annie, still little more than a child herself, gave birth to William Jr., the first of their 17 children. By the time the family moved to Paradise, it included William, Annie, and their children William Jr. (then aged 15), Eliza (14), Mary Ellen (12), Kate (7), Jack (5), Annie (3), and Emily Jane (1). Two other children, James and Anne, were already dead. While at Paradise, Annie gave birth to Donald George (1892), Duncan Charles (1894), Ruby (1896), Maud (1897), and Alice (1899); three other children, Hugh, Arthur, and Violet, were born after the family moved from the town (Frazer 1987). Raising such large families ran contrary to the ideals and population trends of the time. During the 19th century in Australia, as in Britain and the United States, there was a general push to restrict the number of children born (Fitts 1999:46). The middle-class ideal structured family around home and children (Fitts 1999:39). It was the parents’ duty to care for, love, and educate their children; while the children were, in turn, to love and respect their parents and to develop into responsible adults (Young 2003:77). As a result, parents began to restrict the number of children they had so that each might be given due attention (Young 2003:80). The size of the families in Paradise and the number of children in the town at large,
TABLE 1 PARADISE POPULATION 1891–1900 Paradise
Men
Women and Children
Total
% Women and Children
1891 1892 1893 1894a 1895a 1896a 1897a 1898a 1899a 1900a
320 218 172 160 140 91 77 64 59 66
300 290 340 300 372 286 185 160 196 160
620 508 512 460 412 377 262 224 255 227
48 57 66 65 90 76 71 71 77 70
a includes surrounding district Source: Statistics of the Colony of Queensland, Queensland Registrar-General’s Office, Brisbane, Australia.
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however, seemed to have done little to inhibit the development of the affective bonds and sentimental attachment to children enshrined in the ideal of the middle-class home. For instance, one of the earliest newspaper reports from Paradise unexpectedly diverges from businesslike accounts of the number of stampers in use, tonnage dug, and reefs exposed, to joyously recount the news that “Two little ones were added to our population last week;” both were reported to be “doing well” (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1890c). A later article indicates that erstwhile lone miners were spending their Christmas holidays going home to fetch their families back to Paradise, evidently not wishing to remain in the town without their wives and children (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1891a). The people of Paradise were clearly focused on their children and family life, but in contrast to the British middle-class ideal, this was not at the expense of maintaining wider community bonds. For the middle classes, the nuclear family was all, an “oasis” against the world outside, with broader connections often limited to the extended family (Grimshaw and Willett 1981:136; Fitts 1999:39). In Paradise and throughout colonial Australia, however, these extended family ties had often been fractured by immigration, and support networks shifted away from blood relations to other members of society, tying the residents of this transient town to their “community without a locus” (Grimshaw and Willett 1981:136; Saunders 1984:70; Douglass 1998:100; Lawrence 2000:39). Records from Paradise show that children often played an important part in forging these bonds between families and the broader community. In 1894, a son was born to the Kirke family, the lay preachers who operated the Methodist Home Mission from 1892 until 1896. The boy was the Kirkes’ first child to be born at Paradise, and they chose to name him Gilbert Shuttleworth Kirke, after one of the town’s most prominent families (Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages 1894). No other historical or archaeological connection can be found to substantiate a relationship between the Kirke family and Digby and Sarah Shuttleworth who themselves had six, mostly adult, children at the time (Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages 1903). It seems plausible, however, that a kind of patron-client
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relationship may have existed between the comparatively wealthy Shuttleworths and the missionary Kirkes, and that the naming of little Gilbert Kirke honored and cemented a close connection between the two families. This type of connection provided families of all classes with the support they needed to survive in a country geographically and socially distant from all that they had previously known. Play and Performance Highly organized forms of play, often accompanied by appropriately elaborate suites of material culture, might be considered emblematic of a Victorian childhood. Through play, young children were taught roles that would be important in later life. Through a growing emphasis on sport, they developed strong and healthy bodies. The latter was particularly important for boys, who were expected to exorcise their rougher instincts through play, so that they were able to behave respectably in company and particularly in the company of women (Young 2003:18,81). Role-related play, on the other hand, was especially important for girls, who were given dolls in an effort to encourage maternal instincts and toy tea sets to promote learning the complex rules of ritual tea taking (Fitts 1999:50,54). Historical and archaeological evidence from Paradise suggests that townsfolk actively encouraged both of these types of play. Pieces of ceramic dolls and tea sets were recovered from eight sites: the town dump, Walker’s store, the McGhie Machine Area, the Methodist Mission, and the houses of the Martin, McGonnell, Turk, and Buzza families. With the exception of the McGonnell house, each of these sites is known historically to have been a home to young families. These toys are most likely of German origin and reasonably inexpensive, as would be consistent with an impoverished community like Paradise. While it is not always possible to attribute ownership of such toys to individual children, they seem suggestive of the kind of heavily gendered roleplay encouraged among young girls. Generally, boys are thought to have preferred “action” or special interest dolls rather than the baby or lady doll styles recovered from Paradise (Coleman et al. 1986:241).
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JONATHAN PRANGNELL AND KATE QUIRK—Children in Paradise
The only material culture specifically indicative of boys’ play comes in the form of the ceramic marble stoppers from Codd’s patent aerated water bottles, which were popular toys for children in the 19th and early-20th centuries (Karskens 1999). Codd’s marbles often appear among the deposits associated with homes from Paradise, and, interestingly, they always occur independently of the bottles themselves. This suggests that the marbles had been removed from the broken bottle and purposefully curated, perhaps to be collected, traded, and used in games. The absence of any other identifiably masculine toys is no doubt due in part to boys being encouraged to play active games that did not necessarily require specific items of material culture (Young 2003:18). This evidence of children’s play, of the games and amusements in which they participated and the toys their parents purchased despite extreme poverty, highlights yet another aspect of children’s lives in Paradise, in which they were not workers or scholars but simply children, playing with friends and siblings. The lengths to which their parents went to provide these opportunities speak to the importance of this side of childhood to the community. Newspapers report that sports days were also arranged for the boys, with small prizes being offered to the winners of races (Maryborough Chronicle 1891a), while the mission arranged picnics with swings, games, and cake for all children (The Queensland Christian Witness and Methodist Journal 1891). Special entertainments were even brought into the town on occasion: Dr. March brought up a sciopticon lantern, and on Thursday night Mr. Doyle went to one end of the town, assembled the children as he came along, and marched them to Mr. Huggin’s store, and when they were seated in rows on the back verandah, an exhibition of the views was given gratuitously to their infinite amusement (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1891b).
As important as these opportunities for pleasurable or educational play may have been to the people of Paradise, they also harnessed the children’s natural love of games and sport for more pragmatic purposes. A civic-minded lot, Paradise inhabitants held frequent balls, concerts, and suppers to raise money for various good causes, including building the school and the Assembly Hall as well as support for mis-
sion and temperance activities (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1890e, 1891b, 1892a). Although these amusements were held largely by and for adults, children were also expected to participate. The following account of such an event clearly illustrates the role that children played in entertaining their elders and displaying their cultural accomplishments: A concert was given on Saturday night by the school children in aid of funds for building a state school and was well attended. The children sang well indeed, and reflect great credit on their master, Mr. Hicks. Several of them gave recitations. One little dot of five years, Miss Maude Tomlin, gave the “Ship Boy’s Letter” remarkably well for so young a child and she had to respond to an encore and was also the recipient of a bunch of flowers. Miss Nellie Martin’s “The Two Crossing Sweepers” was very well rendered. A song by Miss Lizzie Pope was well sung and an encore demanded; also a duet by Mrs. Hamilton and Miss Lewis, which was loudly applauded. The concert concluded with a dialogue of local hits by two schoolgirls, which was highly appreciated. It was pronounced the best concert yet held in Paradise (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1892b).
Such performances were, in some ways, antithetical to contemporary ideals of childhood, in that they took children from the home and exposed them to the wider world (Findlay 2004). On the other hand, the performing of “good acts,” which such recitals could be construed to be, were seen to be character-building for adults and children alike (Swain 2002:67; Young 2003:25). In either case, the important practical purpose these events served would likely have overridden ideological considerations. Like the establishment of inter-family networks, these occasions served to provide much-needed local bonds, vital to the survival of both individual families and the community as a whole. Education and Work Writing slates and slate pencils were found at several of the archaeological sites, including the Methodist Home Mission, Walker’s store, and five of the residences. As Susan Lawrence argues (2000:135), slates and slate pencils cannot be definitively associated with children; adults also used slates. In each case at Paradise, however, these artifacts were found in sites known to have housed school-aged children. Further, pieces of slate scored with widely
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spaced lines, suggestive of children learning to write, were found at the homes of families with very young children: the Turk, Martin, and McGhie family residences and the Methodist Home Mission. These artifacts demonstrate the community’s interest in children’s lives and the local attitude to education. Like play, education was seen to be a pivotal process in the creation of respectable adults. Children were believed to be born without morals or character; these were formed by the positive influence of mother, church, and school (Fitts 1999:47; Young 2003:77). If these influences were not present, or were imperfect, only an imperfect adult could be formed (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2001:646). Concern that the children of Paradise were missing some of these positive influences can be seen as early as mid-1890 when townsfolk began agitating for a school because children were reportedly “running wild” (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1890d). A subscription list was immediately circulated around Paradise to determine the level of support for the school, and various money-raising activities were held to gather the necessary funds (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1890d, 1890e). In the meantime, a provisional school was set up in one of the rooms at Berrie’s Hotel (The Queenslander 1891), while the school committee finished building the Miners Institute, a 14 by 10 ft. “humpy” [an Australian term for a small or primitive hut] that would be used to hold classes until the school building was complete (Maryborough Chronicle 1891b; Department of Public Instruction 1892). When Paradise township was officially surveyed in April 1891, a site of 4 acres and 33 perches [ca. 4.2 acres; 160 perches=1 acre] was reserved at the northern end of River View Terrace for erecting a state school (Surveyor-General’s Office 1891). By 1892, the number of children attending the provisional school had grown so large that local residents were demanding that the state school be established (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1892a) (Figure 2), and they once again set about raising the requisite funds. The school opened in January 1894 to all who could pay the one shilling per week charge (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1894). By 1896, however, the number of families that could afford to meet the payments had declined (Figure 2). The goldfields were showing little
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 43(3)
profit, and the township was poverty stricken, forcing many to leave in search of employment. According to the school inspector’s reports, those children who did remain were sometimes difficult to discipline, and the teachers felt that they had little option but to refuse attendance to these children (Department of Public Instruction 1895). These actions, as well as the more extreme forms of corporal punishment, met with disapproval in the wider community. According to the correspondent for the Wide Bay and Burnett News (1895), “modest mothers, within the precincts of the school, discharged all their lady-like vituperation against the head teacher for that he did without cause inflict punishment on their always innocent ones.” The writer goes on to opine that corporal punishment should only be used when “richly deserved” and only in a “way as not to leave shoulder marks” (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1895). Clearly, the good citizens of Paradise wanted their children to be
FIGURE 2. Children Attending Paradise School 1892–1904. (Graph by Deborah Brian, 2005; data from Queensland State Archives, Department of Public Instruction, Statistical Returns Furnished by Head Teachers of Provisional and State Schools 1892–1904, Item 1307, Series 1, File PRV7930, Runcorn, Queensland, Australia.)
JONATHAN PRANGNELL AND KATE QUIRK—Children in Paradise
educated and disciplined, but they did not want them beaten into submission. The school finally closed on 29 February 1904, when attendance had been reduced to just 11 children. While it is clear that Paradise parents strongly desired that their children be educated and have the opportunity to play children’s games for as long as they might, there was also a strong economic imperative for children to enter the workforce. Families in mining towns, country areas, and even urban centers throughout the colony led precarious and often impoverished existences. The only way to ensure survival was for every member to contribute to the family income, according to his or her capacities (Grimshaw and Willet 1981:146). Paradise was no exception to this harsh reality. The eldest boy of the Frazer clan, William Jr., was employed by the age of 16 in the carrying business his father established upon their arrival at Paradise. William Sr. carted the gold from Paradise to the rail stations at Biggenden and Degilbo and brought supplies back to the township, with William Jr. working as the brake boy on the wagon (Frazer 1987). The Allens, another Paradise family, were accomplished prospectors and miners. They had in fact founded the township of Paradise, as well as nearby Allenstown. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the 16-yearold Arthur Allen was employed in the Berrie Patterson mine, one of the many claims being worked in the district (Maryborough Chronicle 1895a, 1955). Entries in Pugh’s Almanac (Pugh 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899) demonstrate that paid employment was not only expected of boys but also of girls. In 1891, Catherine Bartlett moved to Paradise with her miner father, James; her mother, Mary; a domestic servant; and her brother James Jr. who also worked in the mines (Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages 1873). The Bartletts were another semi-itinerant mining family, moving around many of the claims in the district before settling in Paradise when Catherine was 16. Shortly thereafter, Catherine listed herself as a dressmaker and continued to do so until the family moved in 1899 (Pugh 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899). While a number of children performed paid employment outside the home, more still undoubtedly helped in family businesses or performed tasks in the home—tending to gardens,
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caring for younger siblings, and performing household tasks (Grimshaw and Willet 1981). The conflict between the need for work and for education is one of the most notable concerns in relation to 19th-century childhood. Even after compulsory education was introduced in 1875, special laws were needed to ensure that children were attending school rather than going to work (Grimshaw and Willet 1981:148–149). In this light, the dedication of Paradise parents to schooling is even more extraordinary. While some children in the township were clearly working, many others were attending school or attempting to gain both an education and an income. Sending children to school represented a significant sacrifice for the families involved, in terms of both school fees and lost potential income from the child’s labor. It is this conflict, perhaps more than any other, that best represents the tension between the ideals and the realities of childhood in colonial Australia. Death and Mourning The exploitation of child labor was a contentious issue, not just because it diverted children from education or from the important business of developing into respectable adults but also because in Victorian times the work children carried out was often physically dangerous. This was never more so than in mining towns, which suffered some of the highest mortality rates of any community. Although such communities grew somewhat inured to the death of their men-folk, the death of a child in the work place retained the capacity to shock (Rule 1998:159). In July 1892, young William Frazer, now 16, was returning from one of the regular round trips he made with his father, carting gold and goods back and forth from Paradise. The wagon had just reached nearby Degilbo when the horses unexpectedly took fright and bolted. William Jr. was thrown from the wagon and crushed against a tree (Frazer 1987:10). The response to Frazer’s death among the local community demonstrates that although Paradise families depended on their children’s income, the middle-class veneration of childhood was still in operation. William Jr.’s headstone, which still stands in the Paradise cemetery, reads as a celebration of the affective ideal of childhood:
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HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 43(3) In \ Loving Remembrance \ of \ WILLIAM FRAZER \ Accidentally killed at \ Biggenden July 22 1892 \ Aged 16 years and 11 months \ We miss thee from our home dear, \ We miss thee from thy place \ A shadow o’er our life is cast, \ We miss the sunshine of thy face, \ Thy fond and earnest care, \ Our home is dark without thee, \ We miss thee everywhere.
This epitaph reflects the grief of a family mourning the death of a beloved child (not a laborer) whose time among them had been too short. The wider community shared in the Frazers’ loss, most likely raising money to pay for the elaborate headstone, which must have been far beyond the means of the impoverished family, and bringing the town to a standstill when more than 300 people (60% of the population) attended the funeral (Wide Bay and Burnett News 1892a). Similar sorrow doubtless marked the passing of 16-year-old Arthur Allen, who fell to his death down the BerriePatterson mineshaft in 1895 (Maryborough Chronicle 1895a, 1955), as well as the deaths of the younger children buried in the cemetery: Edith Ann Elliott who died at the age of 14 months after being scalded with boiling water (Maryborough Chronicle 1890), William John Bowden who died aged 6 years and 10 months (Maryborough Chronicle 1895b), and Matilda Ellen Bromham who died aged 5 years and 9 months (Maryborough Chronicle 1895c), both of unreported causes. The public grief of the Paradise community at the death of a child signals the close ties among families and the high value placed on childhood. It demonstrates that although Paradise parents realized the necessity of children’s labor, they refused to stoically accept the mortal risks associated with that labor. The death of any child, whether infant or youth, worker or dependant, was a death that came too soon, pointlessly wasting the potential of the life that was to come. Conclusion Children may be a mere footnote in many archaeological reconstructions of the past, but the impact they had on the communities in which they lived is undeniable. The investigation of childhood in the mining town of Paradise demonstrates not only that children can be identified in the past but also that adult’s attitudes toward children can be uncovered, as well as the
experiences of the children themselves. In doing so, broader social and cultural phenomena can be accessed. In this case, the Paradise case study highlights a tension that existed in 19th-century Australia between the ideals of an essentially middle-class Victorian culture and the reality of colonial experience. Children were at once innocents to be protected, educated, and amused as well as resources to be used for economic and social gain. Through all, however, the close affective ties between parent and child survived, demonstrated never so clearly than by a community’s grief at the death of one of its children. The tension played itself out in families throughout the country on the goldfields of the frontier, in urban centers, and in rural towns— and from it arose the colonial childhood. Acknowledgments The authors thank Burnett Water Pty Ltd., for funding the project and for providing ongoing support. Gratitude is due also to Elsie Campbell and members of the Biggenden Historical Society who have had a long-standing interest in Paradise and generously allowed access to their historical archives. We also thank Deborah Brian for drawing the figures, editing, and for comments on drafts of the paper as well as Barbara Heath for comments on an early draft. Lastly, we thank all those who contributed to the research, survey, and excavation stages of the project, in particular Lynda Cheshire, Tam Smith, Jim Smith, Kevin Rains, Jill Reid, and Adrian Murphy. References BALME, JANE, AND WENDY BECK (EDITORS) 1995 Gendered Archaeology: The Second Australian Women in Archaeology Conference. ANH Publications, Canberra, Australia.
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JONATHAN PRANGNELL SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND 4072, AUSTRALIA KATE QUIRK SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND 4072, AUSTRALIA
