Abstract
In the early 1940s, Felicity Clemons, the wife of a Tasmanian doctor, embarked on the task of ‘improving’ a small dolls’ house her daughter had received as a gift. This endeavour spanned four decades, and revealed Clemons’ interest in colonial history. The daughter of Sir Geoffrey Syme, managing director of the Age newspaper, Clemons had grown up in Melbourne and had exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria.1 She directed her artistic skills to her Georgian dolls’ house, Pendle Hall, which gradually acquired 21 rooms over four storeys. Its elaborate interiors were arranged with finely wrought period furniture, and hundreds of tiny, handmade objects: foodstuffs, ornaments, books and other household items. By the 1970s, Clemons was operating a private museum in a restored colonial building in Westbury, widely known as Tasmania’s ‘most English’ town. On display were her collection of children’s toys and other memorabilia, with Pendle Hall as the centrepiece. A local tourist attraction for many years, and well known to doll’s house enthusiasts around the world, Pendle Hall was recently donated to Museum Victoria, and its rooms and their contents can now be viewed by the public online.2
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Notes
Geoffrey Serle, ‘Syme, Sir Geoffrey (1873–1942)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Available online: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/syme-sir-geoffrey-8732 (accessed 12 February 2015).
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 69.
It is now on display at Windsor Castle in Britain. See: http://www.46.236.36.161/queenmarysdollshouse/house.html (accessed 20 February 2015). See also Lucinda Lambton, The Queen’s Doll’s House: A Doll House Made for Queen Mary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.
See for instance Ian Turner, Cinderella Dressed in Yella: Australian Children’s Play Rhymes (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1969);
June Factor, Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s Folklore in Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 1988).
Neil Postman, ‘The Disappearing Child’, in Heidi Morrison (ed.), The Global History of Childhood Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), 464–75.
Kate Darian-Smith, ‘Images of Empire: Gender and Nationhood in Australia at the Time of Federation’, in Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre (eds), Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 153–55.
Richard White, Inventing Australia 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 110–24;
Robert Crawford, ‘A Slow Coming of Age: Advertising and the Little Boy from Manly in the Twentieth Century’, Journal ofAustralian Studies, vol. 25, no. 67 (2001), 126–43.
Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
Fiona Paisley ‘Childhood and Race: Growing Up in the Empire’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 240–59.
Jan Kociumbas, ‘Children in Chains: Juvenile Convicts’, in Heidi Morrison (ed.), The Global History of Childhood Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), 149–60.
John Tosh, ‘Children on “Free” Emigrant Ships: From England to the Cape of Good Hope, 1819–20’, History Australia, vol. 9, no. 2 (2012), 5.
Jan Kociumbas, Australian Childhood: A History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997), 77.
Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, 1840–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15–32, 69–87.
See, for instance: John MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986);
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropolis and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992);
Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds (eds), Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance, and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (London: Routledge, 2015).
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).
See Colley, Captives and Trevor Bentley, Captured by Maori: White Female Captives, Sex and Racism on the Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Frontier (Auckland: Penguin, 2004).
Julie Carr, The Captive White Woman of Gippsland: In Pursuit of the Legend (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).
Kim Torney, Babes in the Bush: The Making of an Australian Image (Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2005) 98; see also Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, 287–91.
Torney, Babes in the Bush, 199–227; Kate Darian-Smith, ‘Children, Colonialism and Commemoration’, in Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe (eds), Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge, 2013), 162–63.
Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
For instance see numerous references to Australian children in R.E.N. Twopeny, Town Life in Australia (London: Elliott Stock, 1883).
Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013);
Melissa Bellanta, Larrikins: A History (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012).
James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 357–67.
Nelson Brock and Tammy Proctor, Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scouting Movement’s First Century (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).
Susan Fisher, Boys and Girls in No-Man’s Land: English Canadian Children and the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 10.
Rosalie Triolo, ‘Our Schools and the War’ (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012), 69f.
In a Canadian context see Carol Payne, ‘A Land of Youth: Nationhood and the Image of the Child in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division’, in Loren Lerner (ed.), Depicting Canada’s Children (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 85–108.
Alison Clarke, ‘Coming of Age in Suburbia: Gifting the Consumer Child’, in Edith Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (eds), History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 253.
Jack Santino, ‘Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialisation of Death’, in Jack Santino (ed.), Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialisation of Death (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5–15.
Laurjane Smith, ‘Taking the Children: Children, Childhood and Heritage Making’, in Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe (eds), Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge, 2013), 107–25.
An identical monument has been erected in Busan, Korea to commemorate the Canadians buried at United Nations Memorial Cemetery. Susan Hart, ‘A Child’s Place in Ottawa’s Commemorative Landscape’, in Loren Lerner (ed.), Depicting Canada’s Children, (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 219–32.
Sharon Roberts, ‘Minor Concerns: Representations of Children and Childhood in British Museums’, Museum and Society, vol. 4, no. 3 (2006), 153.
Sharon Brookshaw, ‘The Material Culture of Children and Childhood: Understanding Childhood Objects in the Museum Context’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 14, no. 3 (2009), 365–83.
Carla Pascoe, ‘Putting Away the Things of Childhood: Museum Representations of Children’s Cultural Heritage’, in Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe (eds), Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge, 2013), 215.
Alena M. Buis, ‘The Raw Materials of Empire Building: Depicting Canada’s Home Children’, in Loren Lerner (ed.), Depicting Canada’s Children (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 137.
See Barry Coldrey, Good British Stock: Child and Youth Migration to Australia (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1999);
Alan Gill, Orphans of the Empire: The Shocking Story of Child Migration to Australia (Sydney: Random House, 1998);
David Hill, The Forgotten Children: Fairbridge Farm School and Its Betrayal of Australian Child Migrants (Sydney: Random House, 2007).
Barry Coldrey, Child Migration from Malta to Australia, 1930s–1960s (Box Hill, Victoria: Tamanarisk Publishing, 1992).
See, for instance Hill, The Forgotten Children; Gill, Orphans of Empire; and R.A. Parker, Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2008).
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Families (Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia, 1997).
See Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).
Ingrid Lohmann and Christine Mayer, ‘Lessons from the History of Education for a “Century of the Child at Risk”’, in Heidi Morrison (ed.), The Global History of Childhood Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), 394–407.
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Darian-Smith, K. (2016). Memorializing Colonial Childhoods: From the Frontier to the Museum. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_16
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