Historical Childhoods and Histories of Emotion

Earlier this week, Mary (Tomsic) and I attended the Australasian Society for the History of Children and Youth Conference, called ‘(Re)Examining Historical Childhoods’ at the Australian Catholic University. The opportunity to engage with scholars working in the field of childhood and children’s history—from literary, legal, and arts-based perspectives—provided interesting perspectives from which to consider our own histories of child refugees. In particular, Professor David Pomfret’s keynote ‘Difficult Histories, Dangerous Pasts: Childhood, Disease and Emotion in Colonial Asia’ made me question my own approach to emotion in history. That is, how do we study the emotional in its historical context? The idea of childhood and children can bring up highly emotional and morally-charged topics. Pomfrey was interested in how the emotional could be scaled-up from the level of families to the level of the (colonial) state. In these contexts—in which the sick child performed an emotional function in highlighting the dangers of imperial transmission and transgression between Britain, France and their colonies in Asia—the child is often silenced and contained.

What cannot be silenced from history, however, is the emotion such children incite—or indeed the lack of emotion they incite, in the case of children deemed not worthy of protection due to class or racial prejudices. The latter point was taken up by many papers presented at the conference, including those that addressed the abuse of children in institutional care in Australia in the 20^th century. Care Leavers, including Frank Golding and Jacqueline Wilson, were present to testify to, and to historicise, the low level of regard afforded to children in care—and the overwhelming contempt and disdain that colours every emotional inscription on their official records. Understanding the institutional contexts that propped up and perpetuated this abuse is important to understanding the emotionology of Australian childhoods, and the ‘hidden’ stories that the public have only recently begun to hear.

Overall, the conference also helped me to crystallise my own research interests: perhaps what I’m most interested in is the efforts of former child refugees to construct their own family histories, an emotional process for those seeking to understand the violence and displacement their refugee parents faced during and after WWII. As I continue with my research, I hope that I remain conscious of how the emotional can shape both the institutional and intimate (family) contexts of their experiences.