Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 by Simon Sleight (review)

Seeking to fill a historiographical void—a failure to effectively “spatialize” the history of childhood—Simon Sleight makes a case for the particular significance of youth in the young and burgeoning city of Melbourne and in Australia as a whole. In 1871, he notes, over 42 percent of the white population in the colony of Victoria was aged fourteen and under (compared to 18.6 percent of the state’s population in 2011). Sleight takes public space as his focus, defined broadly as “the outdoor city.” The young people in this book are captured in image or in text on Melbourne’s sidewalks and streets, in its public parks and outdoor markets, on vacant lots, tramways, or rail tracks. Sleight also embraces a loose definition of “young people,” noting that his subjects were comprised of those old enough to access public space independently and anyone defined in his sources as young—usually those of school age through the late teenaged years. Drawing theoretical inspiration from the work of Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Tim Creswell on space and place, Sleight considers the role of young people in the making of Melbourne, what public spaces and pursuits meant to young Melburnians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how their public presence figured as cause for both optimism and despair about “Young Australia.” Sleight’s primary source research is extensive, encompassing diaries and autobiographies, city records, photographs, newspaper and journal articles, parliamentary debates, and legislation.

Sleight explores the twin phenomena of a city in the making and a population in the making. Melbourne, founded in the 1830s, expanded to a population of half a million by 1900. Sleight reveals the existence of a “metropolitan youth-scape,” arguing that young people shaped Melbourne’s urban environment as they “ranged across the metropolis in search of adventure and play” (49). He critiques historians’ tendency to focus on the indoor spaces of childhood— home, school, and other institutions. He also downplays the significance of institutions in children’s lives in this period, even as School Acts made attendance mandatory and lengthened the number of years children were required to attend, noting that as many as 50 percent of enrolled children were absent on any given school day. Instead, Sleight demonstrates that the outdoor urban environment functioned as a primary site of sociability and entertainment for Melburnian youth, though categories of race, class, and gender meant that not all young people had the same access to public space.

Over the course of the period under study, “the urban environment was conceived as a place of potential and increasing peril to young people of all ages,” and Australian child savers and urban reformers, like their international counterparts, sought to restrict young people’s movements and activities through legislation and social services (45). Sleight offers an insightful analysis of the decline in children’s street work, which coincided with growing opportunities for young people as consumers. “Legitimacy in public space hence began to be associated with spending rather than getting,” Sleight writes, and he contends that this fundamentally altered children’s position in the urban environment and their interactions with adults in public (130).

Sleight devotes a chapter to youthful bad behavior, encapsulated by the popularization of the term “larrikin” in Melbourne around 1870. Used to describe a range of young people’s activities, from the mischievous to the criminal, Sleight observes that comparable terms emerged nearly simultaneously in other parts of the English-speaking world, including “hoodlum” (San Francisco), “scuttler” (Manchester), and “hooligan” (London). He suggests that larrikinism “is best understood as a series of ‘performances’ in space,” distinguished by particular clothing, speech and behavior (131). Sleight concludes that “occupying gaps and crossing points within Melbourne’s urban frame, . . . Larrikin activities, and the reactions they elicited in the wider community, helped drive a permanent wedge between the life phases of child and adult. Henceforth the teenage...