Periodicals for Schools in Nineteenth-Century Australia: Catherine Helen Spence and the Children's Hour

In the decade leading up to the Federation of Australia, exiled Australian poet and journalist Arthur Patchett Martin (1851–1902) published an edited collection of illustrated short stories for children, Over the Sea: Stories of Two Worlds (1891), with the London/Sydney publisher Griffith Farran. Stories by Australian and British authors comingle in the volume in a bid to create a cultural dialogue between the British colonial centre ("home" in the first few pages of the volume) and the emerging unification of Australia's colonies. Martin's opening ballad to the collection clearly claims that the book's mission is "to bind these lands in this bountiful reign," or, as Peter Pierce more recently put it, to "reaffirm and strengthen the bonds" between Australia and Britain.¹ Martin's choice to utilise children's literature for the political purpose of nation-building resonates with the core of my argument in this essay.

Children's literature in nineteenth-century Australia was a site for the configuration of an imagined federated nation, as critics such as Clare Bradford, Marcie Muir, Brenda Niall, and Maurice Saxby have recognized. In particular, these critics have noted how such literature embodies both the anxieties and the desires of the British colonial enterprise in Australia. Indeed, Martin's edited collection arguably brings together these two competing narrative subtexts. The utopian overture to bind together the old and new worlds of Europe and Australasia through their future citizens is quickly complicated by the coded national anxieties of the stories collected in Over the Sea. These stories frequently overspill with violence and cruelty towards children, as well as the dangers faced by young colonial settlers in isolated bush landscapes. Many of these thematic strands are now recognised as complex tropes represented more broadly in Australian literature and culture across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the figure of the lost child.²

Within this context, however, less attention has been paid to a particular type of children's literature that arguably, and very explicitly, engages with the relationship between the imagined Australian nation and the role of the child: the moral or didactic tale. In this essay, I attempt to rethink the significance of this mode of writing through the work of leading Scottish-born Australian educationist, writer, and political reformer Catherine Helen Spence (1825–1910). Spence firmly believed that at the heart of a good education was the "enjoyment of a good story."³ Literature and education were, for Spence, inextricably intertwined and mutually reinforcing, and the fate of the nation or colony depended on its young citizens receiving a decent education. Writing to the editor of the Adelaide Observer in 1857, Spence argued that without a good education, the "political privileges which we have so recently won for our children will be worse than useless."⁴ This essay will argue that by reading Spence's children's literature within its original periodical contexts, particularly Australian school papers and magazines, we can gain a better appreciation of its literary and political significance.

Recent scholarship by Jane McGennisken, Phillip Cormack, Bill Green, and Michelle Smith has already begun to help us understand how Australian school papers were influential in shaping the national identities of both students and teachers. Cormack further points out that the "humble school reading text is an overlooked site for examining processes of the constitution of national identity and the citizen subject."⁵ This essay builds on this research and uses it as a departure point for exploring Spence's contribution to Australian children's literature and education. It gives special attention to her didactic short story "The Obstinate Children," published in 1890 as part of a short-lived children's column, "Aunt Kate's Cupboard," in a South Australian school paper, the Children's Hour: For Reading and Recreation (1889–1963). It further considers the framing of this story within the history of school readers in Australia and their engagement with the imagined nation, as well as Spence's other journalism on education, especially education for girls. "There is no greater mistake for girls...