Playtime: Taking Children’s History Seriously

Wattle fairies, talking magpies, excursions to the South Pole, unbreakable dolls, flesh-eating monsters, and toddler kings. Is there anywhere the childhood imagination cannot take us? In her recent book Playtime, Emily Gallagher explores children’s play and imaginative lives in the half-century before the Second World War. Often overlooked in Australian history, children were a significant demographic group throughout this period, and they deserve to be taken seriously as historical subjects. This lecture will delve into the life of Sydney’s very own Cinderella before challenging the long-held assumption that children’s voices are rare in archives and considering some of the creative and surprising ways that young people have navigated their changing worlds. It is a story about young dreamers and aspiring journalists, old schoolrooms and backyard cubbies, war and modernity, and the enduring power of the imagination to defy the routine and powerlessness of everyday life.

Dr Emily Gallagher is a historian at the Australian National University. She began her career as a teacher in Sydney before deciding to pursue her passion for history and writing in Canberra. Her first book Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood (La Trobe, 2025) won the prestigious W.K. Hancock Prize and was shortlisted in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards and ACT Literary Awards. Emily is also a research editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and a research fellow on an ARC-funded project writing the first history of grandparenting in Australia.

Image: Bird Day fun at Grenfell in central New South Wales, c1934. Courtesy of the State Library of NSW, Papers of Ella McFadyen.