‘Very decidedly decadent’

Abstract

The elite conveners of the 1903–04 Royal Commission into the declining birth rate in New South Wales pressed a policy of rural settlement as the solution to the anti-natal conditions of urban life. A new reading of the Royal Commission, which emphasises this preoccupation with rural-urban differentials in the birth rate, bears important fruit with regard to understandings of the early post-Federation climate. The present article argues that the enquiry was richly suggestive of the particular concerns of an elite group of male ‘social guardians’ about the uncertainties of urban modernity, expressed through fear of upheaval in gender relations.