Making Public Histories: Histories of Australian Childhood

World Children’s Day, celebrated on November 20 each year, offers an opportunity to both look back on the history of childhood and of children’s rights and forward to the ways in which childhood is changing and child rights are contested.

How do historians investigate and recover the lives, experiences and perspectives of children in the past? How have understandings and experiences of Australian childhood changed over time? And how and why have understandings of the rights, roles and responsibilities of children changed?

In this Making Public Histories seminar, three historians working at the cutting edge of research in this field will discuss histories of children and childhood in Australia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Dr Isobelle Barrett Meyering is a historian of feminism, the family and childhood. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, which she joined in 2018 after completing her PhD at UNSW. Isobelle is the author of Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution 1969-1979 (Melbourne University Press, 2022), and her work has featured in a wide range of Australian history and gender studies journals. She was the David Mitchell Memorial Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales in 2019 and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre in 2022. Isobelle is currently working on a history of children’s rights in modern Australia and, in December 2024, she will commence a new project, ‘Child Citizens: Young People and Australian Democracy since 1945’, supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

Catherine Gay is a historian and curator. She completed her PhD in October 2024 and was a Hansen Trust PhD Scholar in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research examined the experiences of Aboriginal and settler girls in nineteenth-century Australia using girl-produced material culture. Her research has won several awards, including the Australian Historical Association’s 2022 Jill Roe Prize and the 2024 SHAPS Fellow’s Essay Prize.

Dr Emily Gallagher is a historian and research editor at the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University. Her PhD thesis was a history of the childhood imagination in Australia and won the Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award in 2024. Emily is currently working on a book for La Trobe University Press.

The seminar is part of an ongoing series, Making Public Histories, that is offered jointly by the Monash University History Program, the History Council of Victoria and the Old Treasury Building. Each seminar aims to explore issues and approaches in making public histories. The seminars are open, free of charge, to anyone interested in the creation and impact of history in contemporary society.

We thank the series sponsors, Monash University Publishing, the Monash University History Program and the Old Treasury Building.