To celebrate Children’s Week and History Month in 2020, the Professional Historians Association (Vic & Tas) – in partnership with the Victorian Government – created Write on Time: The Forgotten Craft of Letter Writing for Kids. This collection of teachers resources included short videos by PHA (Vic & Tas) members introducing students to historic letters written by children. In keeping with the theme of Children’s Week – that children have the right to choose their own friends and safely connect with others – the videos were accompanied by lesson plans for teachers and a letter writing template to inspire students to write their own letters to friends.
My video Letters to Aunt Patsy highlighted a letter written in 1916 by an eight-year-old girl called Lucy who lived in Woods Point, one of the gold mining towns that features in my doctoral research on Women and Community on the Upper Goulburn Goldfields. Lucy’s letter was addressed to ‘Aunt Patsy’ who edited ‘The Children’s Corner’ in the Advocate, a weekly newspaper for Catholic readers established by journalist Samuel Winter in 1868 and later produced by the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne. Children from around Victoria wrote to ‘Aunt Patsy’ about their homes, family life, friends, progress at school, and church activities, as well as expressing interest and support for the Catholic charities that ‘Aunt Patsy’ supported.
Like many historic Australian newspapers, digitised copies of the Advocate (between 1868 and 1954) can now be searched online using Trove. When deciding which of the ‘Aunt Patsy’ letters to feature in my Children’s Week video, I narrowed my keyword search to Woods Point, the town where Aunt Patsy herself – author Marion Miller Knowles – spent her childhood. (Marion later taught at Box Hill State School, the school featured in another of the videos on the Write on Time website.) Lucy and her siblings were among several children from Woods Point who had their letters published in ‘The Children’s Corner’, and ‘Aunt Patsy’/Marion Miller Knowles often responded with a few memories of the town and families like Lucy’s. Marion Miller Knowles retired from the Advocate in 1927 but ‘The Children’s Corner’ — and letters from children — continued under new editor ‘Kango’.
The ‘Aunt Patsy’ letters are important because they give us some insight into the everyday lives of children in towns throughout Victoria in the early part of the twentieth century, written by the children themselves. Spanning the period of World War One and the 1919 influenza pandemic, the letters are also a poignant reminder of how these events affected individual families. For family and local historians — or anyone — with an interest in family life in Victoria in this period, they are a valuable source.
My thanks to PHA (Vic & Tas) who — in partnership with the Victorian Government — produced the video, lesson plans, and Write on Time: The Forgotten Craft of Letter Writing for Kids website.
Header image:
Dale, Charles William. Woods Point [picture], 1907, State Library of Victoria H36372