Europeans living in the northern half of the Australian continent during the nineteenth century were united, and spurred on by, a dominant ideology of material progress, combined with a strong fear of being engulfed, both numerically and culturally, by foreign invaders. These bulwarks of Eurocentricism gave voice to strongly pro-natalist policies, coupled with intense immigration drives. The image of vast, uninhabited stretches of country waiting to be tamed by resolute, hard-working Britons added to the momentum for increased population. Progress, conceived in the masculinist framework of aggressive expansion, ruthless destruction of the Aboriginal people, economic development and environmental exploitation, needed not only capital, brawn and sheer determination to succeed but, also, healthy young citizens. Demographers graphs, however, fuelled anxiety that this dream might be undermined - for infant and maternal mortality rates in the tropics and sub-tropics were high compared with the rest of Australia and Britain. Masculinist attributes alone could not build the new society. Childbirth was potentially a hazardous and lethal undertaking which threatened to deprive the nascent colony of many fertile women and, in their demise, future generations.

The first European community in Queensland, the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, was established in 1824 and continued until 1842 when the area was opened up to free settlers. In the official records of the time there is little mention of the health of children, although the presence of a small number is noted. It is only possible to speculate which diseases were prevalent among the young. Epidemics of ophthalmia, presumably trachoma, dysentery and intermittent fever were recorded in the adult population and, as these conditions were infectious, undoubtedly children would have been included amongst their victims. At the time, one death for twenty-two live births was recorded, a comparatively low infant mortality rate. This may have been because the young population was so small and the children were isolated from the epidemics of childhood disease which occurred in Sydney in the same period.

In January 1878, Mary Anne Fogg's evidence at the inquest of the death of her infant daughter, Louisa, was recorded as follows:

The Queensland School Reader series occupies a special place in the childhood memories of many Queenslanders, evoking mixed reactions from those who used them. The Readers were significant because in Queensland schools they were used, virtually unaltered, for close to fifty years. They were central to the early school experiences of at least two generations of Queensland children - central because for many years other sources of reading material were scarce - particularly in isolated areas. Consequently, teachers based much of their teaching on the Readers which, in turn, were carefully “rationed” out in small doses to ensure that they lasted the allotted time. Other sources, such as The School Paper, were used as supplements but textbooks were in short supply, particularly during the Great Depression and war years.

Since the education explosion in mid-nineteenth century England, when astute publishers began to capitalise upon a newly created and burgeoning market, Australia has always featured prominently in fiction aimed at children and adolescents. Those British children who initially made up the bulk of the reading audience for books set in Australia were eager to read episodic stories set in exciting countries far from home, and an Australian setting offered a glamorous backdrop for tales of high adventure. Moreover, it appears that while the nineteenth-century British reading public perceived Australia as an exotic place, then Queensland was quintessentially so. A disproportionate number of early tales about life in Australia is set in this colony, most often in the outback regions, but also in the vicinity of the coastal tropics. Nineteenth-century Queensland was viewed by the British, as well as by many Australians, as a remote outpost of Great Britain; it was commonly thought of as the least urbanised, the least “civilised”, the least industrialised and perhaps the most remote of all the regions of Australia. It was widely seen as an area of great and diverse (if also mysterious and desolate) natural beauty, of rural innocence as yet unpolluted by dark, satanic mills (even Brisbane was a sleepy, sprawling country town in picturesque contrast to the bustling southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne). Children's novelists capitalised on the mystique of Queensland, archetypal frontier colony, by creating a cluster of tales showing what it was like to be a Queensland kid.

The child of the law, like the man of the law, is a particular kind of legal young person who bears no necessary relationship to a “real” young person. Children are, nevertheless, very much present in the law. This chapter examines the ways in which the language of the law, expressed in statutes relating to child welfare and juvenile justice, has articulated particular notions of the criminal child and deviant childhood. The object, using the words of King and Piper, is to find out how the law has “thought about” children.

The material practices of school, as they relate to the child, have not figured prominently in the repertoire of educational inquiry. They have been examined only in so far that their understanding might result in optimising the conditions of learning or provide systematic explanations as to why school processes are inadequate. Any idea that the practices themselves might encode and instantiate visions of childhood and pedagogy contingent on broader schemes of social planning and ideas of the public good, does not appear to have entered the purview of those writing about education. Under the impact of the nouvelle histoire of Philippe Ariès and Michel Foucault, this situation is being redressed and there is an evolving body of literature devoted to the genealogy of classroom practice, with a specific focus on its origins and underpinning logics. Of special significance to such practice is the venue in which it takes place, namely, the school, which is a specialised form of architecture, housing a range of furnishings and facilities designed to enhance the positions of teacher and child in such a way as to advance the cause of education.

Most Australian school children, whether public or private, primary or secondary, had been finely tuned for warfare long before the Great War of 1914–18 had actually begun. School papers and reading books, history, geography and civics lessons, the personal persuasiveness of teachers trained to accept unequivocally “the power for good in teaching patriotism” to captive and captivated young audiences, the “rhythmic harmony” of loyalist singing, marching and versifying, the Imperial pageantry of Empire Day and the militaristic inculcations of highly disciplinary cadet training schemes all combined, in the closed educational environment of the schools, to produce young Australians well primed for unquestioning obedience to the State and martial sacrifice to the Empire. Children at a Sydney primary school were ordered to chant, in 1907, “I give my mind to my country to think for it; I give my heart because I love it; I give my hands to my country to work for it”; — “[and] to fight for it”, all the boy pupils were then expected to intone. Such orchestrated love of country was subordinated, in tum, to love of Britain's Empire — “our peace-bearing, peerless, guardian Empire” as one educator described it - which was presented as not only the largest but the worthiest empire in world history. The “cement of Empire”, it was said, contained such essential ingredients as social conformity, duty and sacrifice, which non-Catholic private schools and state schools applied with a heavily-laden trowel to impressionable young minds both preceding and during World War One.

In Sex Education in the Eighties, Mary Calderstone concludes her article with the most common raison d'etre for formal, school-based sex education: