Australia

Play appears to be a universal characteristic of childhood throughout history. Children, compared with mature adults, are small, weak, ignorant, and largely powerless. They are also intensely curious, imaginative, physically active, and, past infancy, passionately attached to the company of other children.

They inhabit a play culture shaped and patterned by the particular adult world in which they are reared, and this world determines whether the children play with sticks and stones or miniature battery-operated cars and talking dolls. It is also from the adult world that children receive the songs, rhymes, and stories (oral, written, and electronic) that provide both models for their own verbal lore and subject matter for exploration and parody.

Connected and yet separate from the play activities and traditions provided by adults lies the playlore of childhood, with features remarkably common across place and time. A continuing children's play subculture exists in communities where children are kept apart from much of adults' daily life and sent to special institutions for learning called schools, just as it does in hunter-gather and agrarian communities, where children are closely integrated into the family's daily activities. Australian children, both before and after European settlement in 1788, exhibit a range of playways familiar to children anywhere in the world, though everywhere marked and modified by the particular circumstances in which the children live and by the ingenuity and imagination of the players.

The children of Aborigines, whose many tribes and clans have inhabited this ancient continent for at least 40,000 years, are known to have had—and continue to have—a rich variety of playlore. There is a smattering of evidence that some children from the British Isles who came to Australia after 1788, as well as some Australian-born children of immigrant families, especially those who lived outside cities (in what Australians call the bush, or outback), learned games and songs from Aboriginal playmates. There was certainly a mingling of play practices, such as marbles—whether the clay and glass European-imported variety or the local small shells and stones—and string games—the latter a popular and widespread tool for story-telling in many Aboriginal communities.