Books worth (re)reading
Shocking, Shocking, Shocking: Improper Play Rhymes of Australian Children, compiled by Wendy Lowenstein, Prahran (1974)

Shocking, Shocking, Shocking: Improper Play Rhymes of Australian Children, compiled by Wendy Lowenstein, Prahran, Melbourne, Fish and Chip Press, 1974, reprinted by Rams Skull Press, Kuranda, Queensland, 1986, 1988 and 1989, 71 pp.

Shocking, shocking, shocking,

A mouse ran up my stocking.

He got to my knee

And what did he see?

Shocking, shocking, shocking.

This rhyme, collected from a group of schoolgirls in Melbourne in 1967, provided the folklorist and social historian Wendy Lowenstein with the title of her lively – and for some, provocative – collection of Australian children's verbal lore. The title is also mock serious, suggesting an exclamation of moral outrage: what are these children chanting! It is precisely such prudishness that Lowenstein challenges with her presentation of children's clear-eyed and unembarrassed exploration and celebration of the human body.

Long before the publication of Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, Lowenstein had been a leading figure as a folklore collector and populariser in Australia. Together with the historian Ian Turner, she established the Folk Lore Society of Victoria in 1955, and she edited the major Australian folklore publication, Tradition, from its inception in 1964 till its demise in 1975. She travelled to many parts of the country collecting folklore, but showed no special interest in the lore and language of children until nudged in that direction by Turner, who was beginning the research which would result in Cinderella dressed in yella, the first book of uncensored children's play rhymes and autograph album entries published in the English-speaking world.¹

Lowenstein contributed some of her early findings to Cinderella. Always practical and down-to-earth, and with young children of her own, she saw nothing either romantic or repulsive in children's ‘improper’ verbal play. Indeed the traditional meaning of the word ‘improper’ is declared an adult perception in the very first paragraph of Shocking:

By ‘improper’, I mean those rhymes, created or circulated by children, which are calculated to shock or disgust the listener, to challenge adult refinement and to show … that the child concerned … has penetrated the adult veil of secrecy about sexual matters.²

Far from sharing the Opies’ early offhand dismissal of a few ‘ogre’ and ‘delinquent’ children who transmit ‘strange salacious prescriptions’ to their playmates (Opie & Opie, 1959/1977, pp. 115–116), Lowenstein acknowledged that this verbal lore is part of ‘the common cultural heritage of the English speaking countries’.³ Children everywhere inherit, adapt and create vulgar lore just as they do the other verbal and kinetic playlore that is part of the common culture of childhood. And just as not all children know or participate in particular games or rhymes, so there are children who are deaf to the ‘rude’ rhymes and jokes that circulate in the school playground. Lowenstein found that there was often an ‘in-group culture’ with one or two ‘acknowledged experts’ in this field, while some other children remained largely uninvolved.⁴ Furthermore, a rhyme can have more than one meaning. She offers the example of a common variant of the Cinderella dressed in yella skipping rhyme:

Cinderella dressed in yella

Went upstairs to kiss her fella,

By mistake, she kissed a snake;

How many doctors did it take?

One, two, three, four … 

While Lowenstein recognised the sexual innuendo, none of the children she consulted saw anything improper here. Her son told her: ‘If children want to be rude, they aren't subtle, they make it obvious.’⁵ This is largely true of the humour of young children, but much less so of adolescents. Lowenstein herself makes this clear:

A child's idea of what is rude and what is amusing varies with age as well as personality. The Fat and Skinny rhymes appeal greatly to the six to eight year olds, who tend to consider bottoms, panties and lavatorial matters both daring and amusing, but as they grow older they become more and more blasé until, in their mid-teens, it is difficult to divide their rude rhymes and jokes from the adult tradition.⁶

Daring and amusing – these are qualities that appeal to children in their verbal play. To share verbal lore that combines humour with a certain edge, a whiff of defiance of adult mores, is a small but definite – and sometimes defiant – step towards greater independence from adult direction and control. Lowenstein does not explore this idea. Instead she points to a process often overlooked: the transmission of rhymes from adults to children, sometimes including risqué versions. She writes of her own experience:

Many, if not most, of my own store of children's rhymes came from my mother who learned them in Bendigo around the turn of the century and I passed quite a number of these on to my own daughter. Since my mother had learnt them from her father, who was born on the Bendigo goldfields about 1855, children in our street have recently been singing children's rhymes which are at least one hundred years old, but yet have passed through the hands of only four people.⁷

Lowenstein's collection of children's verbal lore took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in her home city, Melbourne, and in parts of Western Australia, and her informants were mostly girls, with a fair sprinkling of boys to enable her to compare repertoires. To her surprise, she discovered that the ‘popular belief … that improper or “rude” rhymes are more commonly circulated among boys’ was wrong: the girls were equally proficient.⁸ She also overturns a widespread misconception that working-class children are the major tradition-bearers of this material – a misconception she acknowledges she initially shared. She writes: ‘So far, I have not found any evidence that this is so. In fact I am inclined to think that the trend may be in the opposite direction.’⁹ My own collecting over four decades suggests she was correct in her prediction, as she was when she noted that the corpus of ‘improper’ rhymes is largely common to children across regions. Immigrant youngsters, too, quickly learn the local repertoire – it is a significant part of their integration into the community of children where they live and go to school.

At a time when scholarly folklore collecting from children was in its infancy, Lowenstein encountered a problem endemic to such work to this day. She wrote:

There are many difficulties in the road of the would-be collector of a full range of children's rhymes, which do not confront the collector of adult folk-lore. While conventional parents may regard improper rhymes with disapproval, the school authorities often regard them as totally unacceptable, even little short of criminal …  [In 1962] the parents of a young teen-age girl of my acquaintance were bluffed into removing her from the school (thus terminating her schooling) because the child had been caught circulating an obscene opus under the desk!¹⁰

Decades after Lowenstein's observation, children's verbal lore of all kinds still caused adult anxiety and sometimes censorship. In 1993, the publishing division of the Australian Library and Information Association, together with the publishing company D. W. Thorpe, produced a book about censorship in school libraries in Australia. The book's academic authors’ findings were disturbing: ‘censorship in Australian school libraries is widespread’ (Williams & Dillon, 1993, p. v). Among the most censored books – either removed from primary school library shelves or on restricted access – were the four compilations of Australian children's playground rhymes I had published.¹¹ These were collections specifically for children, from which I had deliberately and overtly excluded the most vulgar content, recognising that ‘protective’ adults were the gatekeepers of the literary culture for the young. Yet despite this careful winnowing, the books caused some adult conniptions, and I suspect they still may do.

More seriously, in the same year as the publication of the book on censorship in school libraries, an experienced Perth primary school teacher was arrested and ultimately lost his job because of his interest in children's playlore. An anonymous complainant suggested to the police that the teacher had ‘pornographic’ material in his possession. The ‘pornography’ turned out to be photos of some of the girls in his school playground performing one of their favourite action rhymes, ‘Firecracker, firecracker, one, two, three’. The children had chosen this well-known rhyme for him to record and photograph. Their version of the rhyme (evolved from a popular television programme) went as follows:

Flintsones, Flintsones (sway hips)

Yabba dabba do (circle hands)

Yabba dabba do (repeat action)

Wilmur does the curtsy (curtsy)

Fred does the bow (bow)

Pebble shows her knickers (lift skirts)

We all go ‘Wow!’ (clap hands on last 3 words)

(Finish with a handstand)

The teacher was collecting and photographing games and rhymes as part of his Masters of Education postgraduate degree. After six months and immense publicity the case against him was dismissed by the court, but he was a broken man. As far as I know, he has never taught in a school again.¹²

Lowenstein understood that children's verbal playlore could sometimes bring trouble to its young performers, and to those who take a scholarly interest in the play cultures of childhood, but she was not deterred. In her final paragraph, she wrote:

There is an immense need for field work of all kinds, for local, regional or specialised studies, but there is no room at all in folk lore studies for any worker who does not have a warm loving regard for the people who pass on their lore, and a real appreciation of the material itself.¹³

Notes on contributor

Dr June Factor, an editor of the International Journal of Play, is a writer, folklorist and social historian.

Notes

1. For a discussion of Cinderella Dressed in Yella, see the International Journal of Play, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2013, pp. 147–149.

2. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 7.

3. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 7.

4. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 9.

5. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 10.

6. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 7.

7. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 11.

8. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 14.

9. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 14.

10. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 14.

11. Far Out Brussel Sprout! OUP, Melbourne, 1983; All Right Vegemite! OUP, Melbourne, 1985; Unreal Banana Peel! OUP, Melbourne, 1986; Real Keen Baked Bean! Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney, 1989.

12. For an account of these events from the teacher's perspective, see Burrows (1995).

13. Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, p. 16.