Shaping Our Identity: Growing Up

Growing up in Ipswich from the 1860s to 1870s

Growing up in Ipswich during this time was a much harder way of life, than most children of today experience. The death rate was high, there were issues with orphaned and poor children resulting in child welfare legislation being implemented and a child migration scheme bringing children from their homes in the United Kingdom to work in the new colonies.

In 1860 the mortality rate for children in Australia was very high, forty percent of children under the age of 5 did not live to reach their fifth birthday. That same year (10 July 1860), The Moreton Bay Courier  highlighted the need for a home for orphans and destitute children in Brisbane. 

Queensland passed the Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act in 1865, this was the first child welfare legislation for the new colony of Queensland. The aim of this legislation was to "set up special schools to educate and care for neglected children and young offenders under the age of 15 years."

In 1869 a child migration scheme called "Home Children" was established in the United Kingdom which resulted in 100,000 poor or orphaned children being sent to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa to to increase population and to help with shortages of labour. Children often worked from a young age. A visitor to the Cotton fields in Ipswich in late 1867 commented that "five industrious kids, aged from about 8 to 12, planting the seed with a most bounteous hand, while the mother stood at the end of the field with a supply of tay for the urchins". A farmer in the West Moreton district wrote to the local newspaper in 1873 about the difficulty many Ipswich people faced in trying to get a child from the Orphan School to help on the cotton farms for a period of 6 months.

Toys

J. Levy advertised in The Moreton Bay Courier in July 1860 the opening of his store in the Queensland Arcade in Queen Street, Brisbane. Mechanical toys in great variety, rocking horses, and a large assortment of every description of toys too numerous to particularise.