Collecting children’s folklore in Australia[1]
June Factor
Summary
Until the 1950s, the history of collecting the folklore of Australian children – the games, rhymes, riddles, jokes, insults, secret languages, etc –was the work of dedicated individuals, urban and rural, for whom it was a minor but fascinating cultural byway. The arrival of an experienced ethnographer from the US in the mid-1950s not only greatly enlarged the corpus of collected material, but also shifted playlore into the scholarly realm of historical context, analysis, international comparison and the like. From this time, scholars have played an increasingly important role in the study of Australian children’s folklore, and in the advocacy of its significance to the understanding of human development and the growth of cultural forms, as well as its clear-eyed reflection on Australian history. The current national Australian Research Council-funded project, ‘Childhood, Tradition and Change’, builds on the earlier work undertaken by individuals inside and outside academia.
In 2009 we celebrated the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and the emphasis, understandably, was on science. But Darwin’s influence went well beyond the natural sciences, and it’s appropriate that those of us interested in folklore recall the dangerously attractive thesis we know as social Darwinism. It gained currency in Britain, parts of Europe and the USA in the final decades of the 19th century, and was for some a useful tool in asserting the superiority of whites over blacks, rich over poor. It also encouraged the development of both anthropology and folklore studies.
Social Darwinism – a thesis resolutely rejected by Darwin himself – was often constructed by analogy with Darwin’s concept of evolution in nature by natural selection. Ian Turner described the process well in the essay he wrote for the first edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella:
[It was] the idea of a unilinear evolution of the most advanced (in 19th century terms) society from earlier societies, stretching right back to tribal times; the idea that this evolution was progress; the idea that, if one wanted to understand contemporary society, one had to know its origins… one must study those examples of earlier forms of society… which still existed, and those reliques of earlier society which had survived in the 19th century world.’[2]
I have sometimes wondered if it was an adventurous spirit, as well as the wealth to make distant travel possible, that distinguished those early anthropologists, seekers after the primitive ‘beginnings’ of humanity, from the stay-at-home folklorists who sought the survival of old traditions in the songs and sayings of the ‘common people’ – and sometimes also the children, who were, after all, primitives themselves.
This notion of the child as a young savage is exactly the view of one of the earliest writers to record an interest in the folklore of local children in an Australian publication – in his case, girls playing outside his cottage in ‘a quiet suburban street’ in Sydney in 1898.
In an article for The Bulletin, Victor Daley, the Irish-born poet and journalist who came to Australia as a 20-year-old in 1878, writes confidently that ‘Children of civilized or so-called civilized parents are simply small savages writhing in the bonds of petticoats or knickerbockers.’ Their singing games, he asserts, have qualities ‘found in the primitive poetry of all races’, a consequence of the fact that ‘the human race – in spite of homo-culture and scientific training, and no end of other nauseous specifics for turning men into machines – is continually beginning at the beginning and passing through several years of healthy, happy, irresponsible barbarism before it takes up the yoke of Civilization.’[3] Civilization is spelt, with ironic intent, with a capital C.
Victor Daley was an urbane, witty and perceptive writer, and his tone is one of mock exaggeration. Despite the fashionable rumination on social evolution, he displays a genuine interest in the game-songs he hears – children’s own ‘traditional literature’ he calls it, and shows it the respect of a literary critic, albeit light-hearted. He provides the words and actions of ‘See the robbers passing by’, ‘In and out the window’, ‘Poor Alice is a-weeping’ and his favourite, ‘Here come two dukes a-riding’. And he observes, correctly, that these are all ‘old nursery favorites with their Northern color and Northern ideality’ – in other words, they don’t originate locally. Which brings him to the interesting question: ‘Shall we ever have an Australian child-literature that will supersede the old nursery favourites…?’ And his answer: ‘Not for five hundred years.’[4]
Daley provided convincing evidence of the maintenance of tradition in children’s playlore. Readers of his article offered proof that local adaptation did not require the passage of centuries. Within a fortnight, The Bulletin published a response from a Sydneysider who wrote:
Wrong! My little girl (attending a Sydney State-school) and her schoolmates trill out this as a game accompaniment:
Johnny and Jane and Jack and Lou,
Butler’s Stairs through Woolloomooloo;
Woolloomooloo, and ‘cross the Domain,
Round the Block, and home again!
Heigh, ho! Tipsy toe,
Give us a kiss and away we go.
How’s that?[5]
A few weeks later, another correspondent sent a counting-out rhyme which he called a ‘Woolloomooloo (Sydney) classic’:
Bake a puddin’
Bake a pie,
Take ‘em up to Bondi;
Bondi wasn’t in,
Take ‘em up to black gin;
Black gin took ‘em in –
Out goes she![6]
What characterises Daley, and many other commentators before and after him, is his position as knowledgeable observer. The knowledge is founded not only on observation but on personal experience, for as everyone was once a child, everyone has some memory of the games, rhymes and other play traditions of childhood – what Lieutenant-Colonel Godfrey Charles Mundy called in 1846 ‘a green recollection of… schoolboy days’. Mundy was the Deputy Adjutant-General of British military forces in Australia at the time, and in his journal he describes children in the Sydney streets playing with hoops, peg-tops and marbles. Of marbles he writes:
The earnest little gamblers - for the winner, as you may recollect, pockets a handful of marbles as well as his opponent’s ‘taw’ - knuckle down in the middle of the street or pavement, and if you disturb the state of the game - look out, that’s all![7]
There is another continuing strand of commentary on children’s folklore in Australia, both urban and rural - the memoir: the recollection of the writer’s own childhood. One of the most impressive in its detail is the still unpublished memoir written by Sir Joseph Verco, a leading figure in medical and scientific circles in Adelaide from the 1880s until his death in 1933. With an exceptional memory for the minutiae of his schoolyard life in the Adelaide of the 1860s, he describes a quantity of games and the verbal lore that accompanied them - all forms of centuries-old playlore that have mostly survived into our own time.
Marbles was a particular favourite – according to Verco ‘the boys were addicted to “playing marbles”… In those days they were stocked in the shop windows, and were a considerable article of commerce, and could be heard to rattle in the trousers pockets of the lads…’[8] One elaborate game, with a special board through which the marbles had to be fired, takes Verco paragraphs to describe. There are ball games, whipping tops, cockfighting (a small boy on a bigger boy’s back grappling with another pair of about the same height), and many counting-out rhymes. One, ‘a rigmarole of incomprehensible words’, involved a circle of boys; one boy would walk around the circle, ‘and as he touched each one would repeat: Onery - oorey - ickery am - fillisee - follisee - nickolis jam – queebee - quorbee - irish man - tickelum - tackelum – buck. And to whom so ever the [word] “buck” came, he was the fated lad.’[9]
Of his schooldays Verco wrote (speaking of himself in the third person):
He entered Mr Haire’s school in July 1860, when he would be nearly nine years of age, and he left Mr John L. Young’s school in December 1867… In neither of these institutions were the sports of the scholars in any way directed, superintended or interfered with by any of the masters. They were free to do as they wished and play whatever games they pleased. They had to find their own amusements.’[10]
Such freedom, alas, is no longer available to many children at school.
Of course, children’s play traditions are not restricted to the school playground (and have always existed, and continue to exist, without formal institutional frameworks). At around the same time as the young Joseph Verco was ordering his spinning top from a wood-turner in Pulteney, Adelaide,[11] Eliza Chomley, aged about 8 or 9, was having fun with her 5 brothers and sisters in Melbourne. At home they played games of ‘make-believe’, including an elaborate recreation of life on the imaginary ‘Island of Bodan’:
The boys drew and painted a long and excellent panorama of its principal river, and its capital city, “Buik”. The boats they cleverly built, rigged, and painted, were its navy. We drilled with wooden swords and daggers in its Army, and the weekly paper which the boys edited at home was the “Bodanic Gazette”. Minnie, always very clever with her pen, wrote leaders, the most epoch making being one in which she pleaded for (and obtained) a Saturday holiday for us “little girls” to be on the same footing as the boys. I wrote for the Poet’s Corner “Laments for my lost youth” and other effusions.’[12]
Playfulness was not restricted to the domestic realm. Chomley and her siblings have fun in inner-city Melbourne: ‘We would wander through Collingwood… taking it by turns to inquire at homes for imaginary people with grotesque names.’ They also gate-crash a Wesleyan tea meeting, and persuade a real-estate agent to give them the key to a house to let, passing themselves off as possible tenants, then returning the key hours later, ‘regretting that the place was uninhabitable’.[13]
It is not until the 20th century that the study of children’s folklore in Australia moves, modestly, into the scholarly arena. Amongst the earliest endeavours that achieves publication is that of Percival R. Cole, then Vice-Principal of the Sydney Teachers’ College.
In 1910 the Sydney Mail published two lengthy articles by Dr Cole. They were printed, according to the paper, in order to give readers ‘some idea of the way in which an expert patiently and systematically studies the child-mind’.[14] In what was certainly a pioneering study in the Australian context, the author distributed a questionnaire to 177 boys and 165 girls between the ages of nine and thirteen. The boys ‘attended school in a rather poor but not squalid section of Sydney; certainly not an environment particularly favourable to making schoolboy collections’, wrote Cole.[15] The girls’ location is not mentioned.[16]
Cole believed that the results of his questionnaire confirmed the existence ‘of a single definite instinct, or phase of an instinct, in school children - that of collecting.’[17] According to Cole, this ‘instinct’ is demonstrated in the act of collecting, rather than in any particular materials collected, but its character alters somewhat with age and is influenced by the inherent differences of the sexes: girls, for example, collect for more aesthetic reasons than boys, because, according to Cole, ‘[girls’] treasures are chiefly an attempt to realise their spontaneously developing love of the beautiful.’[18] This last statement seems more an assertion of belief than a study of the evidence, for the top four collectables on the girls’ list - postcards, shells, stamps and cigarette cards - varied little from that of the boys: cigarette cards, postcards, marbles and stamps.
Both the language and the assumptions underlying this study seem out-of-date today, but there is nothing old-fashioned about the information Cole assembled.[19] It is the first attempt I know by an Australian academic to collect and then analyse a facet of children’s informal play lives, in which comparing and swapping treasures with other children plays a key role. The study was repeated in suburban Melbourne in 1987, and then again in 1992; while a number of the items collected by both boys and girls differed from the 1920s, the passion for collecting did not.[20]
The passion for collecting folklore grew in the 20th century, and the games and verbal lore of children, while always a minor interest, find some small space. It is here that a paradox of Australian cultural life emerges. We have been, since our European origins in the late 18th century, an exceptionally urbanised society, yet well into the second half of the 20th century many of our folklore collectors, performers and publishers shared the view, widespread in the community, that the minority who lived outside the cities were the ‘true’ Australians. It was to the people who lived or had lived in the bush or in small outback hamlets that most folklore collectors of that period turned, first with their notebooks and later with tape recorders.[21]
The emphasis was to catch the past – the songs, ballads and stories – before they disappeared, overtaken by mass media, mass education and pop culture. A number of the collectors were also from the Left politically, and they saw their work in part as preserving and honouring the voices of everyday men and women. Some also included children – the most voiceless of all when it comes to power and politics.
Yet the scholar whose study of Australian children’s lore and language marked a radical and significant shift from both affectionate memory and occasional observation was a foreigner. Just four years after the middle of the 20th century, Dr Dorothy Howard arrived in Australia. She came well-credentialed as an educator, a middle-aged, middle-class post-doctoral Fulbright scholar from the University of Maryland, and she looked the part: neat and respectable. She was given an office in the Education faculty at the University of Melbourne, treated kindly – but very few of her colleagues appreciated the significance of what she set out to do.
For the first time, a scholarly net was woven to catch as much Australian children’s folklore as was possible in 10 months. In 1954-55 Howard travelled to every State and to the Australian Capital Territory.[22] She spent time in capital cities and in small country towns. From school playgrounds, parks, beaches, hotel lobbies – wherever she found children – and from the memories of adults, Howard collected many hundreds of games, rhymes, riddles, sayings, insults, secret languages: the richest panoply of children’s lore and language ever compiled in this country. Her own fieldwork was supplemented by correspondence from people of all ages from across the nation who gladly shared their repertoire of playlore.
An innovative pedagogue and pioneering folklorist, Howard was also an assiduous and painstaking ethnographer. Every item collected was recorded on slips of paper and carefully filed and cross-indexed under appropriate headings. Often there are brief comments which reveal her interest in connecting her current findings to the broader understanding of children’s sociable behaviour. At the beginning of her section on play terms she writes:
Play language is the lingo of a particular peer group in a specific community. A child, to fit in, be one of the group successfully, must speak the language.[23]
Her long list of terms includes ‘crows’ (‘Roman Catholic boys’ term for the Brothers who teach their schools’) and the Aboriginal word ‘mundoeyes’ (‘bare feet… from Bowen to Cairns, Queensland in the 1950s’).[24] Always careful to observe the environment in which children’s folklore occurs, Howard goes on to note that boys in State schools in northern Queensland went barefoot in the 1950s.[25]
An example of her documentation can be seen in a few of the entries on the Toodlembuck, the gambling implement devised by children for use on Melbourne Cup Day, the first Tuesday of November. Once widespread, especially in Victoria, the game was already fading in the 1950s. While adults were placing their bets at the racecourse or – illegally – at small gambling enterprises in back lanes,[26] children in school playgrounds used cherry pips (aka cherry bobs or stones) as their Toodlembuck betting currency. A longer entry is recorded on two or more of the thin white slips of paper:
Howard was the first person to systematically collect, collate, transcribe, annotate and publish a comprehensive sampling of Australian children’s folklore.[28] We are fortunate that the ‘foreigner’ who undertook such a culturally significant task was a woman of broad scholarship and abiding curiosity. Her reading and research had equipped her with a sophisticated understanding of the history of cultures and the way in which, to survive, they must adapt and alter:
Organisms adapt or die; change is basic to all life; a traditional custom, song or game changes or dies… ‘[W]hen unsupervised, children transmit words and ways from one generation to another, they adapt them as the environment requires and according to their immediate needs determined by whim and their chance place in history.[29]
She insisted on the educative character of children’s own subcultures of verbal and kinetic play, and she politely but firmly refuted the then widely-held belief in Australia that our children’s traditions were mere imitations of British models:
The most important question answered by the present collection and study is the first question put to me upon my arrival, ‘Do Australian children have any folklore?’ The answer is that they do; and that there is an important phase of child life, which Australian adults, who are interested in children's growth and development, can profitably study and understand … . [30] In Australia I found children's play influenced by history; climate; economy; topography; flora; fauna; by association with their Aboriginal inhabitants; and, most of all, by children's inventiveness – the constant factor in the folklore process the world over.’[31]
In a talk she gave to the Australian Council for Educational Research in 1955, Howard linked the local focus to the wider political as well as cultural implications of folklore:
Australians do not need to be overconcerned about an indigenous folklore. For it is a grave error of fact to talk of folklore as the unique property of any national group. Comparative studies which have been made reveal convincing and overwhelming evidence of the universality and great antiquity of basic motifs, types and ideas. Research in children’s play is now furnishing material to establish the fact of similarities in children's playways, historically and geographically. Spoken tradition does not exist or migrate according to geographic boundaries. Scientific scholars find no place for nationalism, provincialism or commercialism in the study of folklore which is a part of the history of the human race.[32]
Howard’s ability to maintain a global perspective while always viewing the playlore of the young in the context of their physical, social and cultural environment – the particular circumstances of the small world in which they lived – was one of her great strengths as both ethnographer and scholar. In this she progressed beyond the documentation and search for historical origins which characterised the admirable but more antiquarian work of Iona and Peter Opie in Britain.[33] Dorothy Howard was a pioneer in more ways than one.[34]
Two scholars whose work – separately and together – marks the next significant milestone in children’s folklore research and publication in Australia both met Dorothy Howard during her time in this country. In his Introduction to the first edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella, the historian Ian Turner refers admiringly to Howard’s research in Australia in a footnote to a comment about ‘the absence of folklore studies in Australian academic institutions’, and regrets that ‘the whole of Dr Howard’s study has not been published in book form.’[35] Wendy Lowenstein, folklorist and oral historian, remembered Dorothy Howard in positive terms when we were working together on the second, enlarged edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella[36] - and she generally expressed a certain acerbic scepticism about overseas ‘experts’. But Howard’s research was still too little known at the time to greatly influence either scholar.
Turner, who had an enduring interest in folklore, was intrigued in the 1960s by the playlore his own children brought home; he began to collect from other children, and to encourage friends to collect on his behalf.[37] Cognisant of the ways in which oral cultures shift and change, he pretended neither to comprehensiveness nor definitiveness. While his was then certainly the largest and most wide-ranging compilation of local children's verbal playlore ever published in this country[38] (approximately 835 rhymes and variations), he made it clear that ‘there is no definitive version of any children's rhyme, and it impossible for anyone to make a complete collection.’[39] The rhymes are organised mainly according to function – skipping, hand-clapping, war cries – with one of the largest categories given the general-purpose title ‘For Amusement Only’. Each item is numbered, and most have additional information regarding source and variants recorded in other countries.
Turner, a diligent historian, was familiar with the work of all the major nineteenth century English-language collectors as well as ‘the foremost contemporary scholars in this field, Iona and Peter Opie’, to whom he expressed his ‘warm admiration and gratitude’.[40]Fortunately for the study of children’s verbal lore in Australia, Turner chose to include material that the Opies, responding largely to the social mores of their time, referred to as ‘strange, salacious prescriptions’.[41] Turner’s approach to vulgar lore was both straight-forward and politely uncompromising. In his Introduction he wrote:
Some readers may feel disturbed by the inclusion of a number of ‘vulgar’ rhymes. I have several reasons for this. First, it may be of some value for adults generally to be confronted with this segment of the reality of the children’s world, and to know how all-pervasive it is. Secondly, the styles of vulgarity prevalent among children may be of some interest to scholars. And thirdly, I have a general objection to censorship - and if we cannot publish the literary creation of preadolescent children, what can we publish?[42]
Turner’s refusal to bowdlerise his collection resulted in one of Australia’s comic efforts at censorship. At the time, books - other than those which were held to be blasphemous, seditious or obscene - received a preferential postage rate on the signature (usually automatic) of the manager of the post office at which the books were posted. When Cinderella Dressed in Yella was presented to the Melbourne General Post Office in 1969, the manager refused to sign the requisite document. Apparently he regarded the book as obscene. (A view shared by a number of publishers to whom the manuscript had been offered before being sent to Heinemann Educational.) According to Nick Hudson, the book’s editor at Heinemann, the public mockery this aroused led to advice that another post office manager might be more obliging. This indeed proved to be the case when Cinderella was submitted to the Canberra GPO.[43] For some time after this incident, jokes circulated about those moral guardians in the Post Office who were outraged and offended by the verbal lore of pre-pubescent children.
Turner’s enduring contribution to the study of children’s folklore includes his long essay at the end of Cinderella Dressed in Yella. In a discussion both scholarly and accessible, he outlines the evolution of folkloric studies and acknowledges the significant findings of his predecessors - the major 19th and 20th century English and American collectors and researchers.[44] He points out that ‘the most important discovery made by modern investigators of children’s lore was that this was no dying tradition, as the 19th-century collectors had feared, but one that was continuing and even renewing itself.’[45] He discusses the influence of urbanisation, compulsory education, large-scale immigration and mass communication, all of which changed children's experiences and encouraged the development of new traditions. In his analysis of the trajectory of different categories and modes of children’s lore, he considers the reasons for the young’s ‘preoccupation… with the forbidden and the “rude”’,[46] and ponders the folkloric process of ‘adaptation-creation, transmission, selection, and (sometimes) survival.’[47] On a subject that divided earlier writers, he argues convincingly that in their playlore ‘children do not only imitate, but also create.’[48]
It is more than forty years since this essay was written, and in the intervening years the world-wide study of children’s folklore has grown in complexity and diversity. Yet, with one exception, there is little a contemporary scholar would find significantly awry in Turner’s writing. That is a measure of his contribution.
His conviction that Australian children's verbal lore was largely free of racism, however, was not valid then, any more than it is today. When Turner wrote in 1969 (and repeated unchanged in the 1978 edition), that ‘the evidence of children’s rhymes confirms the liberal belief that children, left to themselves (although they may reject individuals who suffer from physical defects), do not feel prejudice against minorities - that this is something they learn as they grow into the adult world,’[49] he had some justification for this assertion. Cinderella Dressed in Yella contains very few overtly racist rhymes. And the fact that this humane and progressive intellectual would have shared with many other adults a sense of relief, if not pride, in children’s apparent lack of prejudice, doesn’t in itself invalidate the claim.
Where Turner’s assertion fails is in the limited scope of his sources. Had he surveyed children's riddles, jokes and stories, he would have discovered ample evidence to the contrary,[50] such as
Step on a crack
You’ll marry a black.
and
What’s the shortest book in the world?
The book of Italian war heroes.
Turner was neglecting the important truth that, in a cultural and ideological sense, children are never ‘left to themselves’. From their earliest years they hear and observe the adults close to them, and those other powerful adults in the media, all too often structuring the world around basic dichotomies: good and bad, for us and against us, reliable and untrustworthy, friendly and foreign, beautiful and ugly. Small wonder that children’s lore mimics, at least in some of its forms, the prejudices and antagonisms of adult culture. That so many of the play rhymes are free of direct ideological patterning may be evidence of a human tendency towards cooperation and amity, as well as that powerful childhood curiosity which sometimes overcomes initial prejudice, and a capacity for strong feelings of compassion which may shame the prejudiced one into silence, or even reconsideration. But the group ethos does not readily allow for the expression of doubts, and folklore is oriented predominantly by and to the group.
This was well understood by Wendy Lowenstein, who co-founded the Folk Lore Society of Victoria with Ian Turner in 1955, and edited the Society’s newsletter cum journal, Australian Tradition, for 15 years. In her 1974 publication Shocking, Shocking, Shockingshe observes that ‘the very real religious and racial prejudices which are to be found in a large number of children’s jokes are not often found in rhymes.’[51] But her focus in this small book was elsewhere: the ‘improper play rhymes sung, chanted or recited by Australian children for their own amusement.’[52] ‘I do not collect improper rhymes in preference to any others,’ she wrote, ‘and in fact, until I started collecting in 1967 at Ian Turner’s suggestion, I was almost unaware of their existence.’[53] That early venture into children’s lore resulted in a significant contribution to the first edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella and an enduring interest in the folkloric traditions of the young.
When I worked with Wendy Lowenstein on the second edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella (published in 1978) I recognised her commitment – deeply held and sturdily unromantic – to the study and presentation of Australian folklore. Knowledgeable, and with a historian’s interest in origins and social context, she was as engaged in the oral lore of children she collected in Melbourne and in Western Australia as in the ballads and yarns she helped rescue from obscurity in Australian Tradition.
In her Introduction to Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, Lowenstein comments on the way in which the subject of children’s humour varies with age – from underpants and lavatories among the 6-8 year olds to matters sexual among the mid-teens.[54] I think she is the first Australian scholar to note that the widely-held assumption that vulgar lore is most common among working-class children, especially boys, is often false.[55] Unlike some later collectors, she found few distinctive class, gender, regional or ethnic differences in the rhymes she collected.[56] She notes the complex interaction of traditional child lore with current adult concerns, and includes in her collection (and in Cinderella Dressed in Yella) an enduring relic of World War II, still popular into the 1970s:
Hitler had only one brass ball,
Goering had two but his were small,
Himmler was somewhat sim’lar,
And poor old Goeballs [sic] had no balls at all.
Lowenstein’s final comment in her Introduction to Shocking, Shocking, Shocking remains relevant to this day:
There is an immense need [in Australia] 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.[57]
Both Turner and Lowenstein influenced the development of the Australian Children's Folklore Collection, but neither was responsible for its creation. Officially launched in 1979 at the Institute of Early Childhood Development in Melbourne with an exhibition of Dorothy Howard’s Australian research, the Australian Children's Folklore Collection was initially an unplanned by-product of a different pedagogic enterprise.
As an academic teaching literature at the Institute, I was struck by the number of my students reacting with shock and disbelief to the gritty realities of childhood reflected in the work of writers such as Hal Porter and Richard Hughes.[58] The students’ images of the young were more closely aligned with the fresh-faced, amusing and largely conventional children who inhabited the fantasy world of American television than with the noisy, inventive and multifaceted youngsters whom they would eventually be teaching. But my efforts to get them to remember their own childhood activities – games, rhymes, trickery – initially failed. As young adults, they were busily putting away childish things.
Then I introduced Turner’s Cinderella Dressed in Yella – and the thin membrane of amnesia was broken. Soon the students were in primary schools collecting games, rhymes, riddles, jokes, taunts, insults, secret languages – the rich panoply of children’s playlore. It was this material, in growing piles around my small office, that transformed what had been a means to an end into a new passion. Here was an abundant unofficial culture, familiar and yet full of variation and invention. Here, caught in verbal aspic, were history, celebrity, prejudice and literary forms. When Turner asked me to co-edit the second edition of Cinderella and to include all the new material my students had collected, I began – although I did not realise it at the time – to enter a new arena of scholarship and discovery.
It was my good fortune that a colleague and friend, Gwenda Davey, shared the passion, and brought to our mutual project her long interest in folklore and experience as child psychologist and multicultural researcher. An early and signal contribution to the Australian Children's Folklore Collection was her pioneering gathering, analysis and presentation in the mid-1970s of what came to be called the Multicultural Cassette Series.[59] For the first time in Australia, she compiled a large audio collection of folklore for children – lullabies, finger games, play songs – in eight major community languages, including English. As well as enriching our folklore archive, these audio tapes became an indispensable resource for kindergartens and infant grades in schools.[60]
The second edition of Cinderella Dressed in Yella was published in 1978. Social changes in Australia since 1969 ensured no repetition of attempted censorship, but the publishers appear to have retained a residual nervousness; without consulting any of the three editors, the book’s dust-jacket contained the warning: ‘Not recommended for children’. That children’s verbal lore is unsuitable for children’s eyes is a long-enduring fallacy.
Unknown to the Melbourne-based scholars, in 1975 two academics in Queensland began a large-scale observation and evaluation of children’s free play in Brisbane schools that is still the most extensive city-based study undertaken in this country. They were not folklorists – they were physical education specialists interested in comparing a new program being introduced to the Queensland Education Department’s primary school physical education curriculum with the ‘structure and elements of children’s games as they spontaneously erupt in the playground’.[61]
In two years they documented the school play of almost 5000 children, providing detailed description of 257 games, some with a number of variants. Not surprisingly, many of the games played in Brisbane were familiar to children in other parts of Australia and the world. Lindsay and Palmer were unaware (as were most Australians) of Dorothy Howard’s monographs on Australian children's playlore – hence their note, capitalised for emphasis: ‘NO… STUDY OF AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN’S GAMES EXISTS.’[62]
As well as providing an invaluable account of the games, the study comments on a number of the characteristics observed in play. The authors detail the different play preferences of girls and boys, consider the environments which may lead to such differentiation, and recommend that ‘playgrounds should not be divided into play areas on the basis of sex.’[63] They also discuss the special play space needs of younger children.
Among Lindsay and Palmer’s most significant findings is the way in which children’s own games are essentially cooperative (unlike many of the games devised by adults for children). They write:
games comprise mainly a social function … Children learn to play with other children rather than against them, if the game is to serve its purpose. Skill learning is an incidental outcome. It is this emphasis on process that ensures that co-operation holds sway over competition in children’s games.[64]
In this they are entirely in accord with the judgment of Howard, Turner and Lowenstein. These predecessors would also agree with Lindsay and Palmer when they urge teachers to ‘show genuine interest in the games’: ‘A teacher can learn much about children and the way they think by observing them at play in a child’s world.’[65]
Back in Melbourne, the Australian Children's Folklore Collection grew rapidly. As well as the Multicultural Cassette Series, and the plethora of playlore collected in schools by students at the Institute of Early Childhood Development (a fieldwork program that continued until the early 1990s), there was a new and significant source. I had made contact with Dorothy Howard in her retirement in what she called her ‘fake adobe’ house in Roswell, New Mexico. Retired from paid work, certainly, but this indomitable scholar was still collecting – from Amish families in Pennsylvania, and from a small Mexican boy and his family in the pottery village of Tonala.[66]
Howard was delighted to learn that her 10-month research project in Australia in the mid-1950s was not forgotten - indeed that it was (belatedly) recognised as of great cultural and scholarly value. Her interest in Australian children's lore undimmed by time, she provided me with an extra suitcase to carry home a tranche of her meticulously documented Australian research material, including play artefacts, at the end of my first visit to Roswell (to be followed by a number of such donations in subsequent years). This material formed the basis of the Australian Children's Folklore Collection first exhibition in 1979, and the official launch of the only public archive of children’s folklore in this country.[67]
More than 30 years later, housed in Museum Victoria since 1999, the Australian Children's Folklore Collection has grown in size and complexity. As well as many thousands of files documenting the range of children’s verbal and kinetic self-directed play, the archive contains photographs, audio and video tapes, film, and play artefacts. It has been enriched by a series of research projects, including an oral history-based study of Aboriginal children’s playlore in Victoria, a number of local and regional explorations of children lore and language, and contributions from folkloric interactive exhibitions. The work of a variety of scholars in the field, as well as individual donors and correspondents, has enhanced the archive’s scholarly reach.[68] While Australia-focused, the Collection includes considerable material from other countries. Since 1981, its two founders have edited a biannual publication, Play and Folklore, now published on Museum Victoria’s website and attracting readers and contributors from around the world.[69]
In 2004, the Australian Children's Folklore Collection was selected by UNESCO to be listed on their Australian Memory of the World Register. This Register is ‘a selective list of Australia's significant documentary heritage’.[70] According to UNESCO, ‘The Australian Children's Folklore Collection has immense historic and research significance as the pre-eminent collection of children's folklore in Australia, and possibly the biggest in the world.’[71]
Museum Victoria has supported a program of organisation and development of the archive, guided by a small Reference Committee which includes the two founders of the Collection. While lacking funds to employ an ongoing curator or to initiate major research projects, much has been achieved, including the provision of appropriate archival storage and cataloguing, the gradual digitisation of parts of the Collection, exhibition of a sampling of play memorabilia, and the publication of a book, Child's Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children, which for the first time provides Australian readers with all Dorothy Howard’s writing about her research in this country in the mid-1950s.[72]
In parallel with the development of the Australian Children's Folklore Collection, both Gwenda Davey and I have published widely.[73] The popularity of a number of our books points to a paradox: while there is considerable interest in the lore and language of children in the broader community, folkloric studies are rarely found in Australian universities, or taught in Australian schools.
In this, as in much else, we have followed the British rather than the European or American higher education focus. It is therefore a hopeful sign, in an academic culture largely uninterested in Australian folklore (other than of Australian Aborigines), that in 2006 the Australian Research Council – the government’s national research funding body - allocated public funds for a four-year project collecting and analysing local children’s folklore.
The project, titled ‘Childhood, Tradition and Change: A National Study of Australian Children's Playlore’, involves scholars from three universities, the National Library of Australia and Museum Victoria.[74] Experienced fieldworkers are visiting a variety of primary schools across the country, creating a written, visual and audio record of Australian children’s playlore today. This new material will be examined alongside records from the past, to assess continuity and change in children’s playground activities over a sixty year period, to document the ways in which significant social and cultural changes in Australian society since the 1950s have impacted upon children’s play, and to appraise the significance of such voluntary play for the children themselves. When the research and analysis phases are completed, the material will be permanently deposited in existing children’s folklore collections at the National Library of Australia and Museum Victoria.
In 1891, Victor Daley thought it would take 500 years before Australian children adapted the old play traditions of the British Isles to suit and reflect local circumstances.[75] He was shown to be wrong almost immediately, but what is striking, reading his affectionate musings so many years later, is the shift in attitude towards children engaged in their own playlore. Daley, like Joseph Verco in the 1860s, regarded children’s play as nobody’s business but their own – unless serious damage resulted. That freedom that Verco describes – children ‘free to do as they wished and play whatever games they pleased’[76] at school – is disappearing rapidly.
Australia is not the only country in which a kind of moral panic increasingly oppresses children in the name of safety and/or academic achievement. The United States leads the way, with whole school districts across the nation restricting or eliminating free play, and requiring teachers to instruct children in ‘cognitively useful’ play activities.[77] In Australia the trend to shorten recess is well underway, and the play itself is progressively restricted. There are schools where children are forbidden to throw balls, dig holes, do cartwheels, even to play marbles – because marbles games may give rise to arguments.[78]
The folklore of children was once regarded as unsuitable for children to read. Now the practice of this folklore is under attack. And the plethora of restrictions and forbiddings also encompasses those who wish to observe and document children's playlore.
Where once a researcher could approach a school to ask permission to visit and chronicle the traditions of the playground, now it is often necessary to proceed first via State or Territory education bureaucracies. University ethics committees, fearful that a child may somehow be harmed (and the legal consequences), exhibit excessive caution and control. This may include checking the wording of letters, and requiring researchers to gain the committee’s permission to visit a school not on the original list. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that it took the Childhood, Tradition and Play project more than a year of bureaucratic to-ing and fro-ing before any field work could begin. Under these circumstances, the Australian Children's Folklore Collection could never have been developed.
Children’s folklore itself, however, does not disappear. It is the sturdiest of cultural forces, surviving even in terrifying times. Amidst the hunger, fear and brutality of the ghettos and concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Europe, children snatched at the brief happiness provided by a patch of grass, a box of sand, empty cigarette boxes. A survivor of the Lodz ghetto remembers:
[Children] collect empty cigarette boxes. They remove the colorful tops and stack them in a pile, until they have a whole deck of cards. Playing cards. And they play. They count the cards and deal them out. They arrange them by color and name. Green, orange, yellow, brown, even black. They play games that they invent for themselves, they devise systems, they let their imaginations take over.[79]
The American scholar, George Eisen, in his notable book, Children and Play in the Holocaust, provides one explanation of why children persisted in playing: ‘the play activities made life’s continuation possible for a little while longer by making the camps, ghettoes, and the cramped hideouts somewhat more bearable.’[80] He cites the words of a small girl from the Warsaw ghetto: ‘When I am in play, I forget my hunger. I forget that outside are such evil Germans even existing.’[81] A child who survived Auschwitz told a puzzled interviewer: ‘But I played! I played there with nothing! With the snow! With the balls of snow!’[82]
Play does not protect children from pain, fear and death, but it offers escape, refuge, solace, friendship and hope in a malleable universe controlled by the young. It warrants adult respect and study.
[1] Elements of this discussion first appeared in June Factor’s social history of children’s folklore, Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children's Folklore in Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 1988.
[2] Ian Turner, Cinderella Dressed in Yella, Heinemann Educational, Melbourne, 1969 , p.127. Early British collectors of children’s folklore such as Lady Alice Gomme were influenced by the work of the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832-1917), who believed that residual cultural forms, such as songs, games and customs, survived in civilised societies as relics from earlier stages of human evolution. Thus Gomme wrote, in her discussion of children’s line games: ‘In considering this group of games it is obvious, I think, that we have elements of custom and usage which would not primarily originate in a game, but in a condition of local or tribal life which has long since passed away.’ (Alice Bertha Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Vol. II, Thames and Hudson, London 1984, p.489 [originally published in 1898].
[3] Victor Daley, ‘Song-Games in Sydney in the 1890’s’, The Bulletin, 26 February 1898, republished in Ian Turner, Cinderella Dressed in Yella, op cit, p.121.
[4] Ibid pp. 121-123
[5] J.A.P. The Bulletin, 12 March 1898 n.p.
[6] John Peat, The Bulletin, 9 April 1898 n.p.
[7] Godfrey Charles Mundy, Sydney Town 1846-1851, Review Publications, Dubbo, NSW, 1971 [1852], p.13.
[8] Sir Joseph Verco, ‘Early Recollections 1850 -1870s’, unpublished manuscript, Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia, p.37.
[9] Ian Turner, in Cinderella Dressed in Yella, dates a variant of this rhyme to c.1865 and sources it from Central Victoria (p.5 of 1978 edition). When I was putting together my third collection of Australian children’s rhymes, Unreal Banana Peel!, in the mid-1980s, I came across a variant of this counting-out rhyme still current: Eeri, oarie, ickory am/ Queerbie, quorbie, raspberry jam/ Filsy, folsy, Irishman/ Tickle ‘em, tackle ‘em, bock.
[10] Verco, op cit p.36.
[11] Ibid pp.46-7.
[12] Eliza Chomley, ‘My memoirs’, unpublished MS, LaTrobe Library, State Library of Victoria, MS9034, pp.9-10.
[13] Ibid pp.15-16.
[14] Percival R. Cole, ‘The Collections of Sydney Schoolboys’, Sydney Mail, July 20, 1910, pp.28-9; ‘The Collections of Sydney School Girls’, Sydney Mail, October 19, 1910, pp.34-5. The details of what was collected, according to the questionnaires, can be found in the Appendix of June Factor Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children's Folklore in Australia, Penguin 1988.
[15] Ibid p.28.
[16] I believe he collected from both girls and boys at the same school, but this is not explicitly stated in the articles.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid p.34.
[19] Cole was fortunate to work at a time when a major newspaper undertook to publish his findings in two lengthy articles – unthinkable today.
[20] For the 1987 study, see a summary in the Appendix of Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children's Folklore in Australia, by June Factor, Penguin 1988; the full study is held in the Australian Children's Folklore Collection, Museum Victoria. For a description of the 1992 study see Merryn McDonald, ‘The collecting Habits of Children’, Play and Folklore, nos.30-31, November 1996, pp.16-21.
[21] One of the earliest collectors was A.B. (Banjo) Paterson, whose Old Bush Songs (composed and sung in the bushranging, digging and overlanding days) (1905), could be said to have set a pattern of focusing on rural Australia followed by many later collectors. See entries under ‘Collectors and collections of folklore’ in Gwenda Davey and Graham Seal (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore, OUP, Melbourne, 1993, for information about the most notable of the later collectors. Some information about the children’s lore collected by Norm O’Connor (1950s and 60s), Wendy Lowenstein (1960s), John Meredith (1980s) , and Alan Scott (1980s) can be found on the National Library of Australia website [http://www.nla.gov.au/fishtrout/].
[22] Her schedule didn’t allow for a visit to the Northern Territory, something she regretted at the time and subsequently.
[23] Dorothy Howard Collection in the Australian Children's Folklore Collection, Museum Victoria.
[24] The word ‘mundowie’ (also ‘mundeye’) is included in Australian Words and their Origins (ed. Joan Hughes, OUP, Melbourne, 1989, as well as in a much earlier compilation, Justine Kenyon, The Aboriginal Word Book, Lothian Publishing, Melbourne, 1930.
[25] Ibid.
[26] The legalisation of off-course betting in the various States and Territories from the 1960s saw an end to most of the illegal gambling establishments. By coincidence, or perhaps as an unintentional consequence, the Toodlembuck also disappears.
[27] Dorothy Howard Collection in the Australian Children's Folklore Collection, Museum Victoria
[28] Howard’s articles on her Australian research, originally published in American journals, are now available in Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children, (eds Kate Darian-Smith and June Factor), Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2005.
[29] Dorothy Howard, Folklore of Australian Children’, Keystone Folklore Quarterly, vol.10, no.3 ,Fall 1965, reprinted in Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children, (eds Kate Darian-Smith and June Factor), Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2005.
[30] Dorothy Howard, ‘Folklore of Australian Children’, Journal of Education, vol.2, no.1, March 1955, pp.31-32, reprinted in Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children, (eds Kate Darian-Smith and June Factor), Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2005.
[31] Dorothy Howard, Folklore of Australian Children’, Keystone Folklore Quarterly, vol.10, no.3 ,Fall 1965, reprinted in Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children, (eds Kate Darian-Smith and June Factor), Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2005.
[32] Dorothy Howard, ‘Folklore of Australian Children’, Journal of Education, vol.2, no.1, March 1955, pp.30-35, reprinted in Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children, (eds Kate Darian-Smith and June Factor), Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2005.
[33] Iona & Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Paladin, St Albans, 1977 [1959]; Children’s Games in Street and Playground, OUP, 1979 [1969], and other titles.
[34] Howard was also a pioneer in this field in the US. In his speech presenting Howard the first Recognition Award in 1981 from The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, Professor Brian Sutton-Smith referred to her as ‘without doubt the pioneer woman scholar of children’s games in the United States, standing to my best knowledge first in line in the world behind the British scholar Lady A. B. Gomme.’ TAASP Newsletter, vol.7, no.3, Spring,1981, p.2.
[35] Ian Turner, Cinderella Dressed in Yella, Heinemann Educational, Melbourne, 1969, p.2. Turner had seen offprints of 3 of Dorothy Howard’s articles: ‘The Game of “Knucklebones” in Australia’ (Western Folklore, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, 1958); ‘Australian “Hoppy” (Hopscotch)’ (ibid, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1958), and ‘Ball Bouncing Customs and Rhymes in Australia’ (Midwest Folklore, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1957).
[36] Ian Turner, June Factor & Wendy Lowenstein, Cinderella Dressed in Yella, Heinemann Educational, Melbourne, 1978. Lowenstein also made a significant contribution to the first edition, published in 1969.
[37] The National Library of Australia holds a number of tape recordings of folkloric material, including children’s skipping and clapping rhymes, made by Ian Turner between 1960–1965.
[38] It seems likely that the first attempt at a published collection was by the artist and critic Robert Rooney, who produced 24 copies of Skipping Rhymes – a collection illustrated by his own linocuts and published by Moonflower Press, Melbourne, in 1956.
[39] Ian Turner, op cit, p.2.
[40] Ibid p.3
[41] Iona & Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Oxxford University Press, Oxford, 1967 [1959], p.95. In her book The People in the Playground (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), and in conversation in recent years, Iona Opie has acknowledged the valid existence of vulgar lore among the young.
[42] Ian Turner, op cit, p.2.
[43] Information provided by Nick Hudson in conversation with June Factor.
[44] For many Australian readers it would have been their first introduction to the work of the great nineteenth century English and American collectors: Joseph Strutt, J. O. Halliwell, Robert Chambers, W.W. Newell, H.C. Bolton and Lady Alice Bertha Gomme.
[45] Ian Turner op cit, p.131.
[46] Ibid p.137.
[47] Ibid p.141.
[48] Ibid p.142.
[49] Turner, op cit pp.138-9.
[50] The Australian Children's Folklore Collection‘s riddles category contains 14% of derogatory references to race and nationality’ the jokes and tall stories contain 30%. For a more extensive discussion of this subject, see June Factor, ‘”Drop dead, pizza head!”: Racism in Children's Culture’, Meanjin, vol.43, no.3, 1984, pp.393-401.
[51] Wendy Lowenstein, Shocking, Shocking, Shocking, The Rams Skull Press, Kuranda, Queensland, 1974, p.15.
[52] Ibid, p.7.
[53] ibid, p.12.
[54] Ibid p.7.
[55] Ibid pp. 9, 11 & 14.
[56] Ibid p.14.
[57] Ibid p.16.
[58] Hal Porter, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, Faber & Faber, London, 1963; Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica, Chatto & Windus, London, 1929.
[59] This series is now part of the Australian Children's Folklore Collection in Museum Victoria.
[60] Gwenda Davey had the technical assistance of Norman O’Connor in this federally funded project, undertaken in 1976-77.
[61] P.L. Lindsay & D. Palmer, Playground Game Characteristics of Brisbane Primary School Children, ERDC Report No. 28, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1981, p.1.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Ibid p.14.
[64] Ibid p.12.
[65] Ibid p.14.
[66] Dorothy Howard, Pedro of Tonala, Hall-Poorbaugh Press, Roswell, New Mexico, USA, 1989. Howard’s Amish material has never been published.
[67] For more information about the Australian Children's Folklore Collection, see [http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/infosheets/australian-childrens-folklore-collection/]
[68] Special mention should be made of the participant research project in a working-class and immigrant inner-city school in Melbourne in 1984, organised through the Australian Children's Folklore Collection and undertaken by Heather Russell. It is one of the rare studies in Australia of play practices and their social significance in a multicultural community. See Heather Russell, Play and Friendships in a Multi-Cultural Playground, Australian Children's Folklore Publications, Melbourne 1986.
[69] Until 1997, the publication was called the Australian Children's Folklore Newsletter. All issues of this publication can be found at [http://museumvictoria.com.au/about/books-and-journals/journals/play-and-folklore/].
[70] http://www.amw.org.au/register
[71] http://www.amw.org.au/citation/9
[72] Kate Darian-Smith & June Factor (eds) Child's Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children, Museum Victoria, Melbourne, 2005.
[73] Titles by Gwenda Davey include Snug as a Bug, Brolly Books, 2005 [first published 1990] ; Duck Under the Table, Brolly Books, 2005 [1991]; The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (co-edited with Graham Seal), OUP, Melbourne 1993; and A Guide to Australian Folklore(with Graham Seal), Kangaroo Press, NSW 2003. Titles by June Factor include Far Out Brussel Sprout! (and 5 subsequent collections of children’s rhymes), Brolly Books, Melbourne, 2009 [first published 1983]; Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children's Folklore in Australia, Penguin, Melbourne 1988; Australian Childhood: An Anthology (co-edited with Gwyn Dow), McPhee Gribble, Melbourne 1991; and Kidspeak: A Dictionary of Australian Children's Words, Expressions and Games, MUP, Melbourne 2000.
[74] See [http://www.australian.unimelb.edu.au/CTC/].
[75] Daley op cit
[76] Verco op cit
[77] A recent analysis of the experience in one American State can be found in Michael M. Patte, ‘The State of Recess in Pennsylvania Elementary Schools: A Continuing Tradition or Distant Memory?’, Transactions at Play, (ed. Cindy Dell Clark), Play and Culture Studies Volume 9, University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland, 2009, pp.129-146.
[78] This trend is discussed in June Factor, ‘Tree Stumps, manhole covers and rubbish tins: the invisible play-lines of a primary school playground’, Childhood, vol. 11, no. 2, May 2004, pp.142-154; June Factor, ‘Three myths about children's folklore’, Play Today in the Primary School Playground, (eds Julia C. Bishop & Mavis Curtis), Open University Press, Buckingham, 2001, pp.24-36; and June Factor, ‘”It’s only play if you get to choose”: children's perceptions of play, and adult interventions’, Transactions at Play, (ed. Cindy Dell Clark), Play and Culture Studies Volume 9, University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland, 2009, pp. 129-146.
[79] Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed), The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984, p. 361.
[80] George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988, p.75.
[81] Ibid p.101.
[82] Ibid p.72.
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