Children and the State: Child Welfare in New South Wales, 1890-1915

Abstract

The history of the changing relationship between the state and family life has not received an enormous amount of attention, and the aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion of this topic by examining the development of child welfare in New South Wales during a period of extensive and formative change, the years between 1890 and 1915. In this period there was a gradual rationalisation, syst?matisation and expansion of the State Children Relief Board (SCRB); a watershed in this process was the establishment of the Children's Court and a probation system in 1905, which significantly altered the character of both the SCRB itself and its work, as well as increasing the numbers (relatively as well as absolutely) of children and families under its supervision.1 This expansion of state involvement in the socialisation of children is usually explained in one of two ways: either as a process of modernisation and rationalisation, or as an expansion of state and professional control over the behaviour of working-class families. The internal logic of 'rationalisation' can at times appear compelling: one thing just logically seems to have led to another. It is as if the major political turning-point?the state becoming actively involved in intervening into the lives of children and families in order to create 'good and useful men and women', through the establishment of reformatories and industrial schools in 1866, and then the State Children Relief Board's fostering system in 1881 ?had been passed, and all that remained was the question of how to best achieve that goal. Any change and development can thus be seen as a matter of achieving the goal more effectively and economically, within changing surrounding conditions. It is, however, this very obviousness, reasonableness and rationality which is itself a problem; in practice some of the 'problems'?such as children street-trading?could have been defined differently (children supplementing their parents' inadequate income) and for changes to take place there had to be a range of political support extending beyond a small group of reformers. The rationality of an idea is in any case by no means any guarantee of its implementation; a boys' reformatory, for example, was an 'obvious' development in 1866 at the same time that the Shaftesbury Reformatory for Girls was established, and magistrates and newspapers were constantly arguing for one.2 But Parkes was politically committed to the essential goodness and reformability of working-class boys, and did not consider a fully-fledged reformatory necessary, arguing that the ' Vernon' was sufficient and that there were insufficient numbers of boys in adult gaols to warrant it. Any process of rationalisation requires more than logic to be put into practice, it needs a political environment favourable and responsive to the ideas involved, a context which makes it possible. If a particular course of action was rational and worth pursuing in 1900, the question one then has to ask is: if the problems were basically the same, why was it not worth pursuing in 1860? Rather than adopting a 'modernisation' perspective, then, it clearly