British Family Values

I must confess that when politicians, lobbyists or community leaders talk about Australia’s "sound family values", I always feel a little surge of cynicism.

For millennia in the west, a family has been a unit which, above all else, defined a person's social and economic rights, inheritance and responsibilities based on provable blood lines. The notion of a [nuclear] family unit consisting of two or three generations with a strong emotional bond is a relatively recent construct.

White Australia was built, initially, on British values, and the popular idea in Queen Victoria’s Britain was that "children should be seen and not heard". Where possible, children were hidden away in nurseries, ignored by all except nannies and tutors, and only trotted out for display on appropriate occasions.

The middle classes, who could only afford to imitate the upper classes, were often similarly cold, distant, and demanding of disciplined behaviour. The era of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ would be a long time passing.

Prior to this, during the dawn of the industrial revolution, children had been little more than factory fodder. Children as young as 9 were transported as convicts; the youngest on the first fleet being a John Hudson aged 13.

While there were some small numbers of Asians and non-Anglo European settlers in Australia from the mid 19th Century on, it was really only with Post-World War II immigration from non-Anglo Europe that Australians finally came to accept, more than once was the case, that it is okay to take children with them to restaurants or when visiting friends; we are now generally more tolerant, for example, of the screaming and tantrums which are part of a two-year-old's job description.

It is now socially acceptable to "enjoy" children more, but that seems a recent phenomenon. In truth, children have not always been viewed by everybody in this country as an essential component of a family unit but, rather, as things or as potential people with as yet unformed feelings or personalities.