Spaces Imagined, Places Remembered: Childhood in 1950s Australia
Author: Carla Pascoe
Date Of Publication: Sep 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3176-5
Isbn: 1-4438-3176-X
With the end of World War II, Australians turned to rebuilding their nation, placing the perceived educational and social needs of children at the forefront of their efforts. Urban planners aimed to protect children from the potential degradation of urban environments through refashioning slums and laying out spacious streets in suburbia. Concomitant with a renewed public emphasis on the domestic life of the family, architects and home magazines promoted the benefits of modernism, which encouraged a stark functionalism and new social relationships within the home. School authorities and architects sought to create educational environments that would foster learning and instil discipline in pupils.

Whilst these were the spatial discourses most dominant in 1950s Australia, closer examination of two Melbourne localities reveals that such ideals were often compromised in practice. Australia was suffering a housing crisis, with building hampered by material and labour shortages that persisted until the mid-1950s. A fertility boom and the influx of migration caused a demographic leap that left urban planners scrambling to provide infrastructure for the rapidly expanding city. Thousands of new homes and scores of new schools were urgently needed. Given these circumstances, many of the neighbourhoods, houses and schools of the 1950s failed to live up to the aspirational ideals of planning and architectural discourses.

The childhood memories of people who grew up in Melbourne during the 1950s reveal a markedly different perspective to the expert spatial notions of this era. In their recollections of the landscapes and buildings of childhood, interviewees recalled emotional resonances, sensory experiences and social interactions associated with particular places. Urban planners and architects viewed physical environments as abstract spaces. But for post-war children, these environments were places imbued with complex personal meanings.

Dr Carla Pascoe is a professional historian, an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne and an Honorary Associate at Museum Victoria. She has published in leading Australian journals including Australian Historical Studies and History Australia. She is currently writing a social history of Melbourne’s tram workers and co-editing a collection on children’s cultural heritage.

“In my opinion it is an excellent book and makes clear and important contributions to the history of childhood, architecture, cultural geography, and urban studies. Through the lenses of neighbourhood, home and school, Pascoe argues that the intentions of design experts (architects, planners, psychologists, education bureaucrats) differed substantially from the ways real children understood and remember places of childhood. Whereas experts saw the neighbourhood, home and school as tools for the rationalization and modernization of family life, providing for example adult-controlled parks, multi-purpose family rooms and classrooms emphasizing the hierarchy of the teacher, they showed little concern for or knowledge of children’s real interests in wild, untouched places; spots removed from adult supervision; and spaces of intense student-teacher interaction. Although the focus of the book is on Melbourne, Australia, the lessons drawn by Pascoe in terms of method and conclusion are applicable to these fields in many other countries, including the UK, USA, Canada, and presumably New Zealand. As Pascoe recognizes, the postwar experience, baby boom, immigration, and the primacy of the suburb are universal issues in the 1950s Anglophone world. In conclusion, Spaces Imagined, Places Remembered: Childhood in 1950s Australia is beautifully and clearly written.”

– Annmarie Adams

“Dr Pascoe’s book on memories of Australian childhoods draws on path-breaking research into oral history and children’s play. Engaging with the disciplines of social and cultural history, architecture and urban planning, Dr Pascoe’s research will not only contribute to how we understand the past, but to debates about children’s play and urban design in the present.”

– Kate Darian-Smith

“I know of no other Australian work that has explored the complex relationships between children and their spatial environments with such forensic care and sensitivity. Using the full panoply of historical sources, including oral history, the writer brings new perspectives to an ‘old’ story. At a time when there is growing interest in – not to say concern about – urbanisation on the one hand, and children’s restricted opportunities for play and experiment on the other, this book provides a solid foundation for understanding how we reached this point. It is not a romance about the past – it is full of ‘hard’ evidence, but it doesn’t neglect the role of the emotions in human affairs as seemingly mundane as housing. Such a nuanced approach is a rare pleasure.”

– June Factor

Price Uk Gbp: 44.99
Price Us Usd: 67.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)