The Disenchantment of Childhood: Exploring the Cultural and Spatial Boundaries of Childhood in Three Australian Feature Films, 1920s–1970s

Abstract

In this paper the authors’ primary concern is to outline the cultural and spatial boundaries delineated in the representation of children and childhood in a selection of Australian feature films. To this end they explore in some depth the depiction of children’s worlds in three films: The Kid Stakes (1927), Smiley (1956), and Storm Boy (1976). The analysis canvasses class, gender, race and ethnic, as well as geographic, boundaries. These films demonstrate the historicity of the concept of childhood in Australian cinema. They show how over time the boundaries between children and adults became blurred and, while free movement through the landscape was maintained, children’s worlds became more restricted and emotionally laden. In Weberian terms, childhood became increasingly disenchanted. These findings are supported by childhood research based on other approaches and sources. At the same time the authors contextualize the films under discussion and begin the larger task of constructing a map of the two genres of Australian feature films concerning childhood: children’s films and films about children. To this end, the paper traces the brief prominence of the child as central character in The Kid Stakes, through the 1950s when there was something of a ‘golden age’ of films about children, to the re‐emergence of child‐centred films in the 1970s.

Notes

¹ Dekker, Jeroen. “The Century of the Child revisited.” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 8 (2000): 133–50.

² Artigas, Mariano. “The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and Religion.” In Faith, Scholarship, and Culture in the 21st Century, edited by Alice Ramos and Marie I. George. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002: 113–25 Available from www.unav.es/cryf/themindofuniversenotredame.html; INTERNET.

³ Jenkins, Richard. “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re‐enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Max Weber Studies 1, no.1 (2000): 11–32. See also the original speech published 1919 in which Weber outlined his idea of ‘disenchantment’ in Weber, Max. “Science as Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated, edited and introduced by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

⁴ Dekker, “The Century of the Child revisited”, 143.

⁵ Pennell, Beverley. “Ozzie Kids Flee the Garden of Delight: Reconfigurations of Childhood in Australian Children’s Fictions.” Papers 13, no. 2 (2003): 5–14, 6.

⁶ Dekker, “The Century of the Child revisited,” 143.

⁷ See Storr, E., and M. C. J. Rudolf. “Once upon a time.” Archives of Disease in Childhood 88, no. 6 (2003): 545–49.

⁸ Researchers now agree that prevailing ideas about childhood and children are culturally and historically constructed. Seminal works in this field include Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. London: Cape, 1962; Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 1982; Cunningham, Hugh. Childhood and Children in Western Society since 1500. London: Longman, 1995. See also Goddard, Chris. “The Construction of Childhood at the End of the Millennium: A Clash of Symbols.” Children Australia 25, no. 1 (2000): 37–40.

⁹ Dekker, “The Century of the Child revisited.”

¹⁰ Palmer, Dave, and Garry Gillard. “Indigenous Youth and Ambivalence in some Australian Films.” Journal of Australian Studies 82 (2004): 75–84, also Notes 186–87, 75. Palmer and Gillard are referring to youth in this way, but the same can be said of childhood, indeed of any age grouping.

¹¹ Pennell, “Ozzie Kids Flee the Garden of Delight”, 8.

¹² Stratton, David. The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry. Melbourne: Pan Macmillan, 1990: 340, 348.

¹³ There is another film mentioned by Lindsay Foyle in his online history of Ginger Meggs, “The Most Important Boy in Australia: 75 Years of Ginger Meggs.” Available from www.hinet.net.au [accessed 30 March 2005]. The film is called Those Terrible Twins, starring ‘Ginger Meggs’, and apparently playing to ‘packed houses in 1925.’

¹⁴ Reade, Eric. Australian Silent Films: A Pictorial History 1890–1929. Melbourne: Landsdowne, 1970.

¹⁵ Pike, Andrew, and Ross Cooper. Australian Film 1900–1971: A Guide to Feature Film Production. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980: 178; McFarlane, Brian, and others. The Oxford Companion to Australian Film. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999: 250.

¹⁶ Routt, Bill. “More Australian than Aristotelian: The Australian Bushranger Film, 1904–1914.” Senses of Cinema no. 18 (2002).

¹⁷ Shirley, Graham, and Brian Adams. Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Currency Press, 1983: 86.

¹⁸ Routt, William D. “‘Shall We Jazz?’: Modernism in Australian Films of the ’20s.” Senses of Cinema no. 9 (2000).

¹⁹ McFarlane, The Oxford Companion, 250.

²⁰ Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, 86. The 1930s was mainly given over to adult themes including comedies, romances, bushrangers and pioneers. According to Pike and Cooper, Seven Little Australians was a ‘crudely made and rambling film’. Australian Film 1900–1971, 244.

²¹ From 1944 until 1950, the Rank Organization ran a Children’s Entertainment Film (CEF) division. The Children’s Film Foundation was launched on 7 June 1951 following the Wheare Committee on Children and the Cinema. Agajanian, Rowana. “Just for kids? Saturday Morning Cinema and Britain’s Children’s Film Foundation in the 1960s.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18, no. 3 (1998): 395–410. Available from http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/72_BWTY/CFF.html; INTERNET.

²² Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1971, 289.

²³ McFarlane, The Oxford Companion, 457.

²⁴ White, Peter, and Simon Burke. “The Grammar of Cinema: Typolography in Australian Films in the 1950s.” Metro Magazine 129/130 (2001): 240–46, 246.

²⁵ Hanson, Stuart. “Children in Film.” In Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood, edited by Jean Mills and Richard Mills. London: Routledge, 2000: 147. Hanson has listed five themes that are prevalent in the social construction of childhood: child as nature is the first. The other four are: child as ‘incomplete adult’; child as vulnerable and in need of protection; gender identity and transgression; and child’s condition as comment on social condition.

²⁶ Ward, Russell. The Australian Legend. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1958: ch. 1.

²⁷ McFarlane, The Oxford Companion, 457.

²⁸ A colloquial term for a small freshwater lobster‐like creature, also known as a ‘yabby’.

²⁹ Smiley was followed by Smiley Gets a Gun (producer‐director, Anthony Kimmins, 1958). It was neither as successful nor did it possess the original’s ‘complexity and charm’. The projected third film, Smiley Wins the Ashes, was abandoned. Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1971, 296. Graham and Adams claimed that it substituted ‘the harsh social background [of the original film] with a string of clichés typified by a pet kangaroo and a hidden cache of gold’. Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, 205.

³⁰ White and Burke, “The Grammar of Cinema,” 241.

³¹ May, Jo. “Imagining the Secondary School: The ‘Pictorial Turn’ and Representations of Secondary Schools in two Australian Feature Films of the 1970s.” History of Education Review 35, no. 1 (2006): 13–22, 15.

³² Lawson, Sylvia. “The Film Industry.” In Australians from 1939, edited by Ann Curthoys, A. W. Martin and Tim Rouse. Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987: 246.

³³ Storm Boy was highly successful and much praised. It was for example the first Australian film to attract a major distributor in Japan. It was sold to and distributed in over one hundred countries. Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1971, 387.

³⁴ Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1971, 386.

³⁵ McFarlane, The Oxford Companion, 471.

³⁶ Hugh Cunningham, cited in Pennell, “Ozzie Kids Flee the Garden of Delight,” 13.

³⁷ Pennell, “Ozzie Kids Flee the Garden of Delight.”

³⁸ Ibid., 6.

³⁹ Lawson, “The Film Industry,” 247.

⁴⁰ Palmer, Dave, and Garry Gillard. “Aborigines, Ambivalence and Australian Film.” Metro Magazine no. 134 (2002): 128–34, 130.

⁴¹ Ibid., 130.

⁴² Lawson, “The Film Industry,” 247.

⁴³ Stephens, John. “Editor’s introduction: Always Facing the Issues: Preoccupations in Australian Children’s Literature.” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 2 (2003).

⁴⁴ Cited in Hanson, “Children in Film,” 146.