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Perspectives on Children and Young People

Rose Butler

Class, Culture
and Belonging
in Rural
Childhoods
Perspectives on Children and Young People

Volume 7

Series editors
Johanna Wyn, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
Helen Cahill, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
Hernan Cuervo, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13560
Rose Butler

Class, Culture and Belonging

in Rural Childhoods

123
Rose Butler
Deakin University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2365-2977 ISSN 2365-2985 (electronic)

Perspectives on Children and Young People
ISBN 978-981-13-1101-7 ISBN 978-981-13-1102-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1102-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945905

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Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the generous participation of the
children, young people, parents, caregivers, families and teachers whose lives are
represented here, as well as the school communities into which I was welcomed—
all of whom kindly devoted time and energy to this project. I am immensely
grateful for all such contributions, as I am for the subsequent friendships I made and
sustained throughout my research and into the present day.
I am indebted in different ways to many people in the imagining, researching and
writing of this book, in particular the unparalleled supervision and mentorship I
received from Melinda Hinkson and Lyndall Strazdins as a Ph.D. student. I am
further grateful for support received from Allison Pugh, Martin Forsey, Megan
Watkins, Greg Noble, Anita Harris, Chris Ho, Eve Vincent, Lyn Craig, Kristy Muir,
Abigail Powell, Jon Altman and Simone Dennis. Thank you also to Jeffrey Olick
and the graduate students of the University of Virginia’s Department of Sociology
where I studied as a Visiting Research Scholar. Thank you to Robyn Kath for sharp
editorial assistance.
With deep gratitude to my family and friends for their ongoing support over the
life of this project. With thanks and appreciation always to Aaron.
This book is based on research undertaken as a Ph.D. student at the Australian
National University (ANU) between 2010–2014 with approval from the ANU
Human Research Ethics Committee and the Department of Education and Training
Victoria. As a Ph.D. student, I was financially supported by a Government-funded
Australian Postgraduate Award (APA), fieldwork funding from the ANU’s
Department of Anthropology, and an ANU Vice Chancellor’s Travel Grant.
Generous support was later received from the Alfred Deakin Institute for
Citizenship and Globalization at Deakin University as a post-doctoral researcher,
where I undertook the final stages of writing this book.
Themes and arguments from this book have been previously published in the
Journal of Intercultural Studies, Education and Ethnography, Journal of Sociology
and Visual Studies. Ideas in development have been presented at academic
conferences in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, with financial support to

v
vi Acknowledgements

participate in such conferences and workshops received from the ANU, UNSW
Sydney, Deakin University, The Australian Sociological Association and the
Australian Anthropological Society. This work has benefitted enormously from
insightful feedback from participants at all such events, as it has from the three
anonymous reviews of an earlier manuscript.
Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
‘Rich’, ‘Rough’ and ‘Somewhere in the Middle’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Economic Insecurity, Class and Morality in Rural Childhoods . . . . . . . 4
Morality and Cultural Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Growing up in Riverstone: ‘Two Stories’ of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Research Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Outline of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2 Class, Culture and Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............ 21
Resurgence of Class Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............ 21
Cultural and Symbolic Configurations of Class, Capital
and Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Working with Class and Culture in Childhood Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Class, Emotion and Inequality in Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Locating Class in Rural Australian Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3 Going Without . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Money and Moral Accountability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Teachers and Classroom Budgets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Dignity, Denial and Care: Going Without to Belong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Rural Schooling and the Distribution of Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Broader Spheres of Mistrust and Scepticism Among Low-Income
Parents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 56
Indications of Morality and Care Through Denial . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 61
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 63
4 Cutting Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Making Shame Matter in Low-Income Rural Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Cutting Down Friends and Strangers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

vii
viii Contents

Racisms and Racialised Collectivities and Exclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

Freezing Out and Mocking ‘Rich People’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Cutting Down and Making Solidarities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Bobby’s Photograph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5 Staying Within . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............ 85
Refugee Settlement in Rural Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............ 88
Youth, Generation and Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............ 89
Beacons and Landmines: Family Views on Anticipated
and Hidden Risks for Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Navigating Social Meanings of Money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Gendered Rural Settlement Pathways . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Obscuring Poverty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6 Stigma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Talking ‘Feral’ and Making Stigma in Riverstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
‘Feral’ and Whiteness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Rurality and Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Negotiating Stigma: Avoidance, Contestation and Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Chapter 1
Introduction

‘Rich’, ‘Rough’ and ‘Somewhere in the Middle’

‘My mum doesn’t want me to go to Mary’s College and everything’, Nicola relays
over a cheese sandwich outside her classroom. ‘Cause they’re private and they’re
lots of money.’ We’re sitting on a bench in a shaded section of her school play-
ground with our backs against one of the school’s red brick buildings. Other stu-
dents run past, laugh, fall, joke, play, stop by for a chat, run off again. It’s February
here in Riverstone, a large country town in rural Victoria, Australia, and school
rules stipulate that kids who have forgotten to bring their wide-brimmed floppy
school hat to school aren’t allowed to play in the sun. Nicola hasn’t forgotten hers,
it sits loosely around her shoulders with an elastic band, but she’s taken a break
from the heat and joined me on the silver metal benches in the shade. I’d asked
Nicola if she saw much difference in wealth among kids at school, and where she
might see herself fitting in. Nicola had replied thoughtfully, ‘Probably in the middle,
because my mum isn’t rich but she’s not poor’. She then followed with a con-
trasting description of classmates who would, ‘bring stuff to school that are very
expensive, and stuff like that … like I saw this girl that had shoes with lots of
different colours and it cost $200, just a pair of shoes! I was so surprised’.
Ashlyn, another girl at Nicola’s school, aged eleven and also from a white/Anglo
background, described these visual differences another day in the acquisitions
children brought to school as well as go-to images of affluence in popular culture.
This included when ‘people come to school like, all the fancy pearls and like, all
like the necklaces and that’. Ashlyn also spoke of herself as ‘probably in the
middle’, despite connecting her family lineage to a landed gentry of white/
Anglo-European origins in the region. ‘Because my pop’s mum and dad, they were
pretty rich, they owned a full 48 acres, they had their own farm and that.’ This was
also despite her family currently experiencing financial hardship, with Ashlyn
growing up within a sole-parent family of four children. She and her three siblings
had moved with their mother Kayleen to Riverstone four years ago and Kayleen

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 1

R. Butler, Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods, Perspectives on
Children and Young People 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1102-4_1
2 1 Introduction

worked locally as a cleaner in town, ‘on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays’,

Ashlyn detailed. ‘So my mum’s got four kids to look after!’ she stated proudly.
In these seemingly minute comments, both Nicola and Ashlyn worked to locate
themselves on middle ground, as ‘probably in the middle’. In the process, they drew
a marker between themselves and others in the community they considered ‘rich’
while hinting at the moral implications of this distinction. Maddison, a ten-year-old
girl also from a white/Anglo background who lived on the outer skirts of
Riverstone, made this much more explicit when she answered a similar question
about wealth philosophically:
I think about it quite a bit, we don’t have as much money as lots of people, and if we’ve got
money we don’t show it off, like there’s people who when they’ve got money they like to
show it off, but we don’t have much money.

Living with her family on a small block of land, Maddison attended another
local primary school in Riverstone. Here in the outer suburbs of the region, houses
quickly dispersed into farming blocks and arid landscapes. Her own family had
recently moved from a suburban dwelling to a ‘block’, where her father was
attempting to make a living off growing and selling local produce in this rural area
with a history of horticulture. Maddison was acutely aware of the difficulties in this
endeavour, describing to me elsewhere how difficult it was to make money off the
‘block’ now and providing glimpses into the stressful ways this economic insecurity
surfaced in her relationships. In an effort to make her own money, Maddison
explained, she sometimes picked and sold local asparagus which grew wild around
her home. She too placed herself in the ‘middle’ of a scale of economic difference
and her own visceral experiences of economic insecurity.
These were far from unusual descriptions among children in Riverstone. As
Connell (1977) showed long ago, this sort of dramatic distinction between ‘wealth’
and ‘poverty’, and children’s own emphasis on themselves in ‘the middle’, are far
from unique among kids of this age. It is well recognised that children are distinctly
aware of economic and classed discourses within their childhoods, just as class is
seen to manifest in children’s experiences, expressions, local identities and tra-
jectories (Lareau 2003; Thorne 2008). However, as I show throughout this book,
these expressions and discourses made by children in Riverstone were also deeply
moral claims about themselves and others in this social mix, which spoke to ideals
around who was seen to belong to local rural life. I argue that children’s repro-
duction and contestation of class in this rural town, depicted in such comments and
practices, was significantly connected to sources of moral worth associated with
popular rural identities and indications of commonality among adults. These
include what Poiner (1990), Pini et al. (2010) and Bryant and Pini (2009; 2011)
define elsewhere within adult rural networks as claims to being ‘ordinary’, the
significance of ‘hard work’ and links to ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘community’, ongoing
associations of rurality with agriculture and agrarian life, and the dominant con-
struction of ‘the rural’ and ‘country’ Australia as ‘white’. As I will show in this
book, in children’s negotiation of economic difference and insecurity, they drew on
a range of such locally constructed, racialised and gendered sources of morality.
‘Rich’, ‘Rough’ and ‘Somewhere in the Middle’ 3

These were negotiated within distinctive symbolic economies (Bourdieu 1984;

Skeggs 2004) and in ways which enabled rural children to shore up feelings of
self-worth and dignity.
The moral undertones of these claims among Riverstone children were even
more apparent in boundaries marked against those seen as ‘poor’. In locating
themselves ‘in the middle’ and as ‘not rich’, children could make a claim to ‘hard
work’ through an association with waged labour or a connection to self-reliance or
‘looking after’ kids, all of which were tied to ‘work’ or forms of hardship in various
guises across this rural country town. However, when children disassociated
themselves from being ‘poor’ they spoke more concertedly of others who were
‘rough’ or from ‘a rough family’, which could be used to indicate a lack of care and
an absence of respectability. Andrew, a ten-year-old boy at school with Nicola and
Ashlyn and from a Greek-Australian background, made this clear when he
described economic differences among his classmates in ‘how they look’. As
Andrew elaborated, ‘[some] people they look like not really wealthy or that …
some people swear at school because, I’m not sure why, probably because of their
parents, or a rough family’. Later, while outlining how he managed being in class
with a particularly disruptive student, Andrew extolled, ‘I just walk away and
ignore him … my mum told me if there’s a fight just to not get involved’. On the
other hand, he explained, his friend Tyler would, ‘go in and fight back. I think
‘cause his parents don’t care. I’ve been to his house heaps of times. His parents
don’t care’.
As we will see, signs of ‘care’ and being cared for had strong positive overtones
among children in Riverstone. These were employed as sources of commonality
and social standing, and subsequently, respect, whereas ‘rough’ was seen to indi-
cate a lack of care within another family. However, far more explicit in its
judgement, value and affect was the label ‘feral’, an often racialised term in
Riverstone for poverty among white/Anglo-Australian families which carried more
overt derogatory overtones.1 This was evident in a further conversation with Nicola
during which we discussed things about which children might worry. ‘Well, this
isn’t really a worry’, Nicola outlined, ‘but some kids worry about catching head
lice, like Jessica in our class, everyone thinks she has head lice and that …
sometimes she’s a little bit feral.’ Nicola went on to clarify this description, through
a failing of respectability, signs read by outsiders as family neglect, a lack of trust,
and an indication of her own disgust. These perceptions of ‘feral’ were clearly
symbolically coded within talk and behaviour of children like Nicola, and signalled
the forms of self-positioning among children used to navigate this diverse terrain.
In this book I argue that such claims about wealth and poverty, being ‘rich’ and
‘poor’, highlight differently situated sources of morality that children drew on, and
put to use, in their efforts to negotiate economic difference and insecurity in this
rural Australian town. In the promotion of being ‘in the middle’, in the selective

1
This term is not specific to Riverstone but had racial overtones within this particular region.
I cannot speak empirically to its use in other Australian contexts.
4 1 Introduction

negation of individualism, in identifying with ‘work’ and in showing they were

cared for, children staked claims to belong within the symbolic economies of
meaning that wove throughout their social lives. Working with theorists of class
culture and inequality, I examine these claims and their symbolic economies within
children’s social lives. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that
these sources of moral worth which surface in the cultural narratives and practices
of these childhoods are deeply classed, and that in drawing on such sources to
negotiate economic difference and insecurity, children reproduce, contest and
articulate rural classed cultures, identities and experiences. I refer to this work
among children as a form of ‘social labour’ in that such negotiations take ongoing
effort. This social labour undertaken to connect and join in with others is both
central to children’s need to belong (Pugh 2009) while often being precarious and
contested, and in constant need of reaffirmation.

Economic Insecurity, Class and Morality in Rural

Childhoods

This research builds on, and contributes to, scholarship which seeks to understand
impacts, affects and negotiations of economic insecurity among children in affluent
nations. Over the past decade, scholarship on children’s economic lives and their
contextual negotiations of economic stress and financial insecurity in affluent,
post-industrial nations has been on the rise (e.g. Davis and Ridge 1997; Ridge 2002,
2011; Sutton et al. 2007; Walker et al. 2008; Chin 2001; Thorne 2008; Pugh 2009;
Kwon 2014; Redmond 2008; Skattebol et al. 2012). While class is recognised in
some studies as a factor among others in the social labour of children to navigate
economic experience (Lareau 2000, 2003; Kwon 2014; Pugh 2009), experiences of
class culture and associated morals, values and mechanisms of self-worth among
children in rural places are under explored.
Research into children’s negotiation of economic insecurity in affluent nations
has long made clear that children do not experience economic insecurity and
inequality in a similar sense. The complex nature of inequality and disadvantage
means that different contexts frame young people’s experiences of economic
insecurity. This in turn impacts on children’s relationships, how family incomes
affect children at the micro-level, and the meanings that children attribute to the
social situations which arise through economic insecurity. Factors such as age,
gender, class and language acquisition (Backett-Milburn et al. 2003; Lareau 2003),
innate personality, peer groups and existing relationships, may all impact on how
children are affected by, and respond to inequality and economic insecurity (Van
Economic Insecurity, Class and Morality in Rural Childhoods 5

der Hoek 2005).2 In other words, a child’s unique configuration of social difference
will play a role in the strategies that they develop to understand their economic lives
and cope with economic difference, insecurity and inequality (Chin 2001; Pugh
2009; Kwon 2014). This existing research, with a focus on children’s agency and
coping mechanisms, also discerns that while economic disadvantages in childhood
constrain social engagement, many children adapt to, and strive to manage such
difficulties (e.g. Ridge 2002; Redmond 2008; Skattebol et al. 2012).
At a broad level, economic adversity among children in such contexts is most
often a problem of relativity—having less, in material terms, than is considered
adequate according to community criteria (Redmond 2008). As Skattebol et al.
(2012) have shown, this means that in most cases it is not economic adversity per se
that children worry about, but the experience of exclusion which is its frequent
accompaniment. Children therefore experience financial hardship in terms of social
relationships—these are the places in which inequalities can be located
(Backett-Milburn et al. 2003). The most fundamental and significant impact on
children resulting from financial hardship is not being able to ‘join in’ with others,
and being denied the dignity that this affords (Pugh 2009). However, as Pugh
continues, ‘joining in’ comes not only from having the material goods required to
belong. It also stems from having the language or ‘scrip’, and knowing what the
‘tokens of dignity’ are that matter within children’s own symbolic economies. It is
the distinctiveness of some forms of scrip over others in children’s social lives that
children reappropriate and use to stakes claims of belonging within their own
communities. This enables children to draw dignity from some sources and to dis-
regard others, and, in the process, to shore up dignity among those with whom it
matters to children themselves (Pugh 2009: 59).
As mentioned, class has been a feature of recent scholarship as a factor in the
work of children to navigate economic differences and insecurity (e.g. Lareau 2000,
2003; Kwon 2014; Pugh 2009). Historically, research on children and class has
primarily focused on children’s awareness of classed differences and how these take
shape through economic and symbolic means. This has included peripheral
dimensions that define economic class among children, such as clothing and
behaviours, and how children classify ‘rich and poor’ in ways seen above. Previous
scholarship also shows children’s early awareness of class contestations, stratifi-
cation, structural and individual circumstances and prestige (Connell 1977; Leahy
1983). Further studies chart the early internalisation of income differences among
children (Weigner 2000) and how class stereotypes and beliefs about the causes of
‘class differences’ come to be normalised and enacted among children by the time
they reach adolescence (Chafel 1997; Streib 2011). More recent scholarship has
turned specifically to the socialisation of class within family life, and the role of

2
For example, research based on children’s self-reporting in the U.K. shows that severe or per-
sistent income poverty or material deprivation that is associated with some aspects of exclusion by
some children has different associations among others (Adelman et al. 2003; UNICEF 2011).
6 1 Introduction

class, among other factors, in navigating economic insecurity (Lareau 2000, 2003;
Kwon 2014; Pugh 2009).
Building on this foundation, this book positions class culture and morality at the
centre of understanding the social labour of children to negotiate and navigate
economic difference and insecurity within a rural Australian town. It draws on a
rich lineage of scholarship on class culture from scholars whose work has shone a
light on how cultural and symbolic factors are bound up with ‘class’ identities, used
to maintain differentiation from others, and which in turn reproduce inequalities
(Ortner 1998; Bourdieu 1984; Bettie 2003; Skeggs 1997, 2004; Sayer 2005). While
class is, at a basic level, a sociocultural phenomenon arising out of industrial
relations of production and the modern state, it is as much about symbolic practices
and identities as it is economic and material categories and experiences (Heiman
et al. 2012). I prioritise these cultural and symbolic configurations and struggles of
class here in order to show, as Skeggs (2004) discerns, how class is fundamentally
relational and always in production and contestation with other forms which are not
only political and economic, but also moral. Morality is produced and obscured
within classed cultural constructions, reproductions and exchanges (Sayer 2005). It
is this moral evaluation of cultural characteristics which is central to the workings
and transmission of power (Skeggs 2004).

Morality and Cultural Narratives

As Sherman (2009) argues, morality is also a ‘moving target’—its sources depend

on settings and social relations, and it takes numerous forms which are often
incongruent with one another. Sources of morality are thus never equally available.
Nor does it follow that moral pride in ourselves will be evaluated in the same
positive terms by others (Lawler 2005). This book examines sources of morality
that children in Riverstone adopt, adapt and work with to negotiate economic
difference and insecurity among others. It considers when, and how, such resources
are available and used by some children, and not others, and raises the implications
of this for children’s belonging in this rural country town. As we will see, as
children draw on moral tenants of their childhoods to negotiate their economic
lives, they also maintain specific social formations which sustain existing power
relations and privileges.
A focus on moral sources of self-worth among school-age children, and their
connection with broader cultural narratives, supports the long-held argument of
child scholars that childhood is not separate from the influences of modern life. Nor
does childhood sit apart from the everyday economy of labour, meaning and value
through which adults live (Pugh 2009). Children’s experiences develop within
regional, nationalist and global discourses, structures and practices (Cole and
Durham 2008) and, as a result, everyday adult discourses and practices have
Morality and Cultural Narratives 7

fundamental socialising implications between children, their parents and care-givers

(Miller et al. 1996). Children acquire, discover, construct and reconstruct collec-
tively shared norms and rules of their environment through repeated interaction
with adults (Fung 1999). In early years this takes place particularly through play,
where young people try out, manipulate and reproduce the social norms of adult
culture (Thorne 1993; Larkins 2004). Yet while strikingly adept at acquiring adult
culture, children are also adept at creating their own cultures, though such work is
far less obvious. Children’s culture is thus loosely based on the majority adult
culture within which it exists, but is moulded and amended from the adult world to
suit and accommodate their own purposes (Harris 1998, in Hirschfield 2002).
In this process of negotiating adult culture and constructing their own cultural
worlds, children observe, barter and compare different forms of knowledge,
working to make meaning from the multiple discourses that pass through their lives.
This makes them dynamic and skilled collectors of cultural knowledge as well as
interpreters for themselves and others (Hochschild 1983; Ahn 2010). It is through
such processes that children come to rework the dominant stories and myths which
saturate their upbringing. In doing so, they also make these stories more forceful,
accountable and relative, and into something that serves locally in the given
moment (Meyer 2010, in Marsh 2012: 513). All of this means that children make
sense of new experiences through their collective behaviours—in other words, they
do most of their own culture making in their lives with other children (Hirschfield
2002). A key component of children’s social identities more broadly is that they are
drawn from shared local experiences, with young people collectively experiencing
the world as they perceive, interpret, form opinions and act in concert with their
peers (Adler and Adler 1998, in Pugh 2011).
This is also the point in which dominant cultural stories and their moral affinities
take on such significance. Cultural stories and narratives offer significant moral
accounts of social life and play a profound role in how we locate ourselves in the
world. They are a central means by which we learn about who we are, and how we
think about who we should or will become, within our culturally distinct envi-
ronments (Campbell and Rew 1999; Greig et al. 2003; Liechty 2003). Although
they may emanate from formal myths and origin stories, such stories effectively
become a part of everyday practices and expressions and a means through which we
learn of, and retell, specific social and cultural orders within which we live
(Campbell and Rew 1999). We can see examples of this in the glimpses of identity
work from Nicola, Ashlyn, Maddison and Andrew outlined at the start of this
chapter. There is clear moral worth at stake here in claims to ‘the middle’ as
opposed to being ‘rich’, ‘rough’ or ‘feral’. As we will see, such claims draw strong
parallels with moral stories among adults in contemporary rural Australia, but also
show how children pick up, rework, contest and reclaim these notions of moral
worth among themselves. Morality has clearly been rendered into something
self-serving here, taken up by children in distinctive attempts to meet immediate
and sustained needs of connection, inclusion and belonging in this visceral land-
scape of economic difference, and at the expense of specific others.
8 1 Introduction

Growing up in Riverstone: ‘Two Stories’ of Change

Riverstone is a rural ‘city’ in the Australian state of Victoria, in the south-east of the
nation. The term ‘rural’ is used throughout this book to refer to the region, as are the
terms ‘rural town’ and ‘rural city’.3 I refer to these childhoods as ‘rural’ to recognise
the distinctive social, cultural, economic and structural differences for children
growing up in regional and rural Australian places as opposed to suburban, densely
urban and metropolitan cities. Non-urban Australia faces significant, complex and
widespread economic and social challenges for children and young people
(McLachlan et al. 2013). At the same time, I use ‘rural’ to reflect the heterogeneity
of life for children and young people in rural Australia and rural childhoods across
affluent nations. This recognises that settlement patterns across Australia differ
historically by states and territories (Bryant and Pini 2011). It supports critiques
among childhood scholars of the limitations in how children’s lives in
non-metropolitan spaces across the global North have been historically depicted
(Panelli et al. 2007), and contributes to criticisms of the ‘rural idyll’ which fails to
capture the complexities of identities and place in the globalising circumstances of
contemporary rural locales (Kraak and Kenway 2002).
The city of Riverstone is today an economic and social hub in its geographic
region of Australia and is enormously diverse in its local economies, social histories
and current population. The school of Nicola and Ashlyn, Inner North, is a public
primary school composed of a large section of low-income and ethnically diverse
families at the tail end of what was described to me among teachers as ‘changing’
and ‘different’ enrolments. One experienced white/Anglo teacher described the
school as having been previously composed of ‘all doctors and lawyers, [but] those
people have moved out, now it’s quite a transient community, low-income renters, a
lot of social disadvantage’. Another sole-parent, Zoe, an Indigenous-Australian
mother of two, claimed, ‘I see it as true to what Riverstone is like. You have your
public housing, and you have your more affluent families’. Much of the content
through this book comes from my engagement with this diverse school community.
The second social context discussed here is Redfield, a smaller and more eco-
nomically and ethnically homogenous school and its community on the outskirts of
town, which was attended primarily by children of families of white/Anglo back-
grounds. Redfield’s central building perched on a large block of land where the
edges of regional suburbia cleared into blocks.
These different experiences of ‘your public housing’ and ‘your more affluent
families’, while not new, also speak to a crude yet significant divide in Australia’s
non-metropolitan socio-economic landscapes which experts argue has widened
(McLachlan et al. 2013). On one side appears a more prosperous income group with

3
The Australian government classifies regions into 5 areas according to the Australian Standard
Geographical Classification—Remoteness Areas (ASGC-RA 2006) systems: Major Cities, Inner
Regional, Outer Regional, Remote, and Very Remote, http://www.doctorconnect.gov.au/internet/
otd/publishing.nsf/content/ra-intro.
Growing up in Riverstone: ‘Two Stories’ of Change 9

both historic and new forms of middle-class economic, social and cultural capital, a
broad cohort that can be defined here as ‘affluent’. ‘Affluent’ is of course relative, a
descriptive term based on positionality and subjectivity, but in this context is used
to denote degrees of relative prosperity and privilege. While such families crossed a
range of incomes and lifestyles, they ultimately possessed significant capitals which
buffered them from the most damaging impacts of economic restructuring that has
taken place across rural Australia, and what are insecure labour markets for many.
These were, namely, job security for one or two parents and a secure income, a
significant element of choice and agency in their children’s education, and home
ownership, all of which constitute a substantial accumulation of class capital across
economic and cultural resources. These were also the strongest factors absent
among participants in the second group, a broad collective I refer to in this book as
‘low-income’. This was a porous demographic which consisted of several broad
cohorts: an economically insecure ‘lower-middle class’ and ‘working class’
demographic, a ‘working poor’ group, and those experiencing intergenerational
poverty.4
These two broad groups reflect the ‘two stories’ about regional and rural change
that surface through this book in the reflections of research participants, as well as
in the broader narratives of the region and its economic trajectories. Carmen, an
affluent mother from a South Asian-Australian background in her late forties,
summarised these views in her comment that:
Economically I only hear two stories [about Riverstone]. Personally I’m not sure, but one is
that growth, which is visible, the buildings in the city growing, but financially, because it’s
… farming region, from that point of view it’s going downhill … farmers are struggling a
lot more … that’s the depressing side, which was different when I first started.

This socially constructed divide, or ‘two stories’, is not unique to Riverstone.

Very different economic livelihoods have evolved across the country as a result of
structural, technological and environmental change (Cuervo and Wyn 2012), with
local environmental variables bringing different consequences for communities
(Poiner 1990). While ‘two stories’ collapses a myriad of complexities and a range
of experiences in rural Australia, it also reflects outcomes of the spatial distribution
of resources which have unfolded through processes of globalisation across
post-industrial states more broadly (Sassen 2012). While impacts of such changes
vary depending on local economic histories, financial shifts at both global and
national levels have seen new geographic inequalities created across states, which
have enormous consequences for children and young people (Katz 2004; Farrugia
2014).
Carmen was herself a part of an affluent and reasonably stable ‘middle class’ in
this rural town. Like other such parents with whom I undertook research, Carmen
was well aware of the significant differences in resources and socio-economic
demographics between families, schools and their communities, both across her

Referred to problematically as an ‘under class’ in some literature. For a critique of this term see
4

Marshall et al. (1996) and Chap. 6.

10 1 Introduction

local district and with an eye turned to the cities. She was also critical of the tendency
to wholly depict rural Australia as always ‘in decline’ or ‘in crisis’, a trend also
widely critiqued in the literature (Anderson 2008; Carter et al. 2008; Cuervo and
Wyn 2012; Corbett 2015). Indeed, prominent narratives of uncertainty have domi-
nated social imaginaries of rural Australia for decades (Anderson 2008), despite the
fact that regional and rural communities and networks encompass a range of
livelihoods and diversity. As scholars argue, in this focus on decline and despair,
significant or new industries and networks are often overlooked (Lockie and Bourke
2001; Burnley and Murphy 2004; Carter et al. 2008; Corbett 2015). Some regional
and rural places are experiencing a further growth in young demographics (Cuervo
and Wyn 2012), while internal and overseas migrants and refugees have also made a
considerable degree of social and economic transformation to country life (Jordon
et al. 2009; Argent 2011). Riverstone itself is emplaced within a region of long-
standing cultural diversity and is home to many newly arrived immigrants from Iraq,
Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Burundi, among many other nations.
However, as indicated above, non-urban Australia is also facing significant,
complex and widespread challenges that cannot be denied, particularly for children
and young people (Farrugia 2014). Across Australia, deprivation is greatest in large
towns and rural areas, with the uppermost experience of persistent and severe
exclusion occurring among people living in outer regional areas. Such places are
typically characterised by higher rates of unemployment, dependence on income
support and children living in jobless families (McLachlan et al. 2013). A broader
decline in the demographic, economic and political influence of Australia’s regional
and rural locales has led to general patterns of geographical inequity, with char-
acteristics typically including out-migration, especially of youth (Geldons 2007), a
loss of steady employment, business closures, loss of skills, and the regionalisation
or withdrawal of services (Stilwell 2000; Gray et al. 2009; Argent 2011). Many
regions also face persistent inequalities in access to basic services such as public
transport, which connects regions and towns to one another and to cities, not to
mention affordable quality childcare, communications infrastructure, and mental
health services (Cuervo and Wyn 2012). Among low-income families, the impacts
of these changes on increased economic uncertainty and precarious working con-
ditions have become increasingly evident (Withers and Powall 2003; CSSV 2010;
Cuervo and Wyn 2012). Regional areas also tend to attract a greater concentration
of families not in work, particularly as a result of cheaper housing and lower living
costs than those available in Melbourne or Sydney (Birrell et al. 2000; CSSV 2010).
Certain locations then come to suffer place-based economic disadvantages as
low-income livelihoods interweave with other forms of disadvantage (Gray et al.
2009; Connell 2011).
Extensive changes to farming enterprises across Australia have also led to strains
on individuals, families, communities and townships. The adoption of economic
reforms by successive governments in regional and rural Australia, in conjunction
with environmental transformations, has led to a broad shift away from equity
schemes and protectionism to policies which promote greater efficiency,
self-reliance and competitiveness, and which ultimately demand flexibility from
Growing up in Riverstone: ‘Two Stories’ of Change 11

employees (Cheshire and Lawrence 2005). One of the direct results of such
developments has been a substantial increase in the size of agricultural enterprises
(Cheshire and Lawrence 2005). Toni, another affluent parent in the region and from
a white/Anglo background, explained this experientially:
When I first moved here it seemed that people were more able to make some sort of living
off a small holding … whereas it’s really I think now very hard to do that, you have to be of
a reasonable critical mass to actually make any money.

As the financial impacts of these changes flow through communities, farms that
were economically sustainable for previous generations are today no longer viable
(Cuervo and Wyn 2012). The rising prevalence of irregular, part-time or seasonal
work (as opposed to full-time or regular work, and potentially synonymous with
underemployment) also reduces the opportunity for adequate income (NRHA and
ACOSS 2013). Today’s workers must be flexible and entrepreneurial within
farming employment conditions which are far less stable than they were for pre-
vious generations (Cuervo and Wyn 2012). Workers and contractors who risk
losing employment then need to consider relocation, and this results in rising
numbers of itinerant workers (Alston and Kent 2004, in Tonna et al. 2009).
Environmental factors and human-driven climate change exacerbate and complicate
these problems (Lockie 2010; Strazdins et al. 2010), all of which have enormous
social, cultural and economic implications for children and families across regional
and rural Australia.
These experiences also contribute to inequities in schooling in rural places.
Place-based disadvantages impact on educational levels, expectations and oppor-
tunities for children and youth (Cuervo and Wyn 2012; McLachlan et al. 2013).
There have also been changes in the social demographics and resources available to
schools across Australia, and significant polarisation in the economic and cultural
resources of the nation’s diverse school communities, in tandem with the growth of
‘school choice’ policies and the idea of ‘unconstrained choice’ in a school market
(Campbell and Proctor 2014). As academics stress, the outcomes of such policies
coupled with housing markets in particular locales work to advantage affluent
families and those with multiple capitals, while disadvantaging those without
existing resources (Campbell et al. 2009). Children in Riverstone were well aware
of discourses around school selection as well as differences between ‘public’ and
‘private’ schooling and the profiling of school ‘quality’ more broadly. This came
across in many guises, such as when three school kids at Inner North asked me
pointedly one lunchtime why I had chosen to do research in ‘this school’ and not
another, with one girl claiming that other schools must be ‘better’.
12 1 Introduction

The Research Project

This book draws on research with differently situated children and families across
this culturally diverse and economically polarised rural landscape. It examines the
social labour of children to navigate forms of economic difference and insecurity as
they are experienced and felt in children’s own social relationships and everyday
social interactions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with children and
their families in two school communities, I argue that children negotiated such
experiences by drawing on a range of moral sources which surfaced in the cultural
narratives of their childhoods associated with popular rural identities and indica-
tions of commonality. As I will show, such moral resources were significantly
anchored in children’s classed cultural worlds in this rural town, and, in their use of
such resources, children reproduced, contested and remade their own classed cul-
tural identities.
The children and parents who participated in this study came from a distinctive
range of economic and ethnic backgrounds, experiences which coalesce to inform
their identities in this rural town. The breadth of this difference provides insights
into a range of experiences of rural Australian life and how the economy is lived
beyond its capital cities. Participants were from white/Anglo-Australian,
Indigenous-Australian, South Asian-Australian and Tongan-Australian back-
grounds, and were from families of refugee backgrounds from Central Asia and
African nations. While this book draws on sustained ethnographic research with
children from both ‘affluent’ and ‘low-income’ backgrounds across this range of
participants, it is the experiences of children and their families within ethnically
diverse, low-income communities that take central focus. In depicting these
childhoods, this book moves between the lives of children, their parents and their
schools, though is shaped around the talk, expression, social practices, friendships
and interactions of children themselves.
The research is strongly ethnographic in design and analysis, weaving data from
sustained participant observations over 18 months fieldwork in Riverstone with
interview data and a range of further material, as outlined below. Ethnography was
particularly crucial to excavate subtle social meanings of phenomena, events and
social interactions in context for children themselves, just as it was to approach
children’s lives from a child-centred and relation-centred perspective (James and
Prout 1990). This includes prioritising children’s own perspectives of subject
matter, rather than seeing children as passive objects of the environments in which
they live (Roets et al. 2013; James et al. 1998). This is the place from which ethical
research with children now begins (James 2007), as a ‘genuine change in gaze’ has
led to new configurations of the field (Hirschfield 2002: 613). At the heart of the
ethnographic project is a focus on ‘the nature of interaction itself’ (Wise and Noble
2016: 424), and this lends itself adeptly to situated research with children, and to
relationships between children and adults. Ethnography enables us to make ‘cate-
gorical opening[s]’ in the research field, and these can provide a window to what we
may think of as a normative standpoint from which research participants evaluate
The Research Project 13

the social order (Honneth 2001: 134). Ethnography was also crucial to this research
project in rural Australia because the predominance of scholarship on the lives of
children and young people beyond the metropolis has been quantitative or
interview-based. Such methods on their own can absolve the complexities and
ground-up orientation of children’s lives in context and lend themselves to a deficit
model within the broader depictions of rural decline outlined above. In education,
for example, research which has dealt with the intersection of rurality and schooling
rarely takes place within rural spaces. This leads to abstracted analyses of rural
‘underperformance’ (Corbett 2015) with a focus on what is not in young people’s
lives from the standpoint of middle-class urban expectations and experiences, rather
than what is (Martin 2015). As Lawler (2005) agues more broadly, one effect of
such narratives of lack is that they ultimately rob their subjects of moral value.
The ethnographic fieldwork consisted of ongoing participant observations in chil-
dren’s schools and homes, semi-structured interviews with children and adults, and
visual media research methods with children. Sixty-three children between the ages of
eight and thirteen participated in an interview, and many children were interviewed
twice over the course of the research.5 Forty-six parents and a further twenty profes-
sionals, including teachers, were also interviewed. Several of these interviews were
undertaken with parents and children who attended neighbouring primary schools,
both ‘public’ (government schools) and ‘private’ (non-government/‘independent’
schools), or who were in grade 7 in high school. This range of participants provided a
greater perspective on the diversity of this social landscape for children and families in
Riverstone, and supplemented the primary ethnographic research I undertook within
the Inner North and Redfield primary school communities.
I undertook ongoing participant-observations of children within their schools,
during which time I sat in classrooms, joined in with games, listened to informal
conversations and attended school excursions and initiated group discussions.
Where permitted by children themselves, I read their school work, school journal
entries and creative stories. While I followed social interactions of certain children
with consent from both themselves and their care-givers, I maintained a pretext of
being interested in the lives of all children so as to avoid any individual child
feeling singled out. Interviews with children were informal chats which took place
in children’s schools or homes and lasted between 10 and 40 minutes. In most
cases I interviewed children after I had spent time in their class or with their family,
and when they had become familiar with my presence. Some children declined an
interview or changed their minds over time, and I reminded children and their
parents throughout the research that they could withdraw at any time. Interviews
with parents took place in their homes, workplaces, cafes and children’s schools.

5
Age bracketing is relevant here. Researchers emphasize that children become more aware of
inequality as they approach secondary school (e.g. UNICEF 2011). However, primary school aged
children in Australia are deeply cognisant of inequality due to, among other factors, media,
immersion in social media from a very young age, and a prolific consumer culture. Nor do children
strictly abide by age lines, particularly in small schools where schoolkids frequently socialise
across grades and ages.
14 1 Introduction

These were in-depth and lasted mostly between one and two hours. I interviewed
several adults twice. Through these parent interviews I also sought to detail dif-
ferent experiences between parents in terms of class, ethnicity, age, gender, edu-
cation, family structure and income across the research field.
I supplemented these observations and interviews with data drawn from chil-
dren’s own creative outputs in stories, photographs and drawings, and initiated
visual research activities if class time permitted. I asked children to complete visual
research tasks both within and outside of the school. In one class activity, I asked
children to draw pictures of what was important to them and to discuss these images
with me. In another I lent digital cameras to children to document their lives, after
which they talked me through these images on a laptop at school. My intention here
was not, as Strassler (2006) warns against, to take children’s own vision and
representation of their experiences as something pure and unfettered. Rather, it was
to introduce content and topics that might otherwise be overlooked, with pho-
tographs and images having the potential to trigger new information, memories and
meanings (Luttrell 2010). I continued to stress throughout this research period that
children could decide for themselves whether they wanted to be written about
(anonymously), and I received a wide spectrum of responses. I also sought to
reduce the inherent power dynamics of children’s participation in all of my
adult-led research where possible (Spyrou 2011), but do not claim to have tran-
scended these inherent power dynamics.
Being based within the two schools and living in town enabled me to transition
my research beyond the school walls, as I was able to build relationships within
different parent communities over time. Undertaking research in the schools made
me visible to parents, who then had the opportunity to investigate and decide for
themselves through informal networks whether they wanted to be involved in the
research or not. As I came to know students’ parents, I conducted home observa-
tions with five families. These included, among other activities, after-school
extra-curricular happenings, attending sports and music training, shopping,
attending birthday parties, watching TV, playing video games, going out for dinner,
and cooking and sharing meals in family homes.
In studying children’s lives across these different sites, I also paid particular
attention to actions and talk—where they took place, in whose presence, and the
emotional content they appeared to contain. I recorded emotions alongside practical
actions—what people appeared to be feeling, and what they were saying alongside
these apparent feelings (Hochschild 1983, 2003). As such, I focused not only on
what children and parents said in different social contexts, but how what they said
played out in their relationships with others (Bluebond-Langer and Korbin 2007).
Through these means I prioritised language on many levels—the language used
between people in different circumstances, in the school curriculum, and in the texts
and media that children and parents consumed (Bourdieu 1991; Spitulnik 1997;
Barber 2007). Language served as reference points for the circulation of words,
phrases and discourse styles (Spitulnik 1997; Anderson 1991), and I prioritised how
the use of certain words created possibilities for children’s shared, moralised
identities to be imagined.
The Research Project 15

The research design prioritised the fluidity of children’s friendship groups and
social connections across their school, rather than working with reified identity
‘groups’, which have been more commonly depicted in ethnographies with
high-school aged youth. While children have strong friendship groups within and
outside of school life, children in primary school live just as much amidst ongoing
social change, from impartiality and nonchalance to the heated break-down of
affiliations and trust within friendships. This sort of making, shifting and breaking
of alliances and solidarities is a central component of children’s social worlds
(Adler and Adler 1998). Recognising these shifting social lines enabled greater
understanding of the complexity of children’s friendships across classed, racialised
and gendered contours within the different sites and spaces of childhood, as well as
the contradictions that children negotiated every day. As will be seen, this emphasis
on the flexibility and fluidity of friendship among children also helped to excavate
children’s lived experiences of racism as they coalesced with class and gender in
this multicultural environment (Nayak 2003).
My own identity throughout this research appeared to change among children
depending on context. The general consensus among students in the two schools
came to be that I was someone who was ‘doing research’ and ‘writing a book about
kids’, though I was allocated many different formal and informal roles. Being called
by my first name I was seen by children to hold a number of roles, from teacher,
teacher’s assistant, social worker and counsellor, to an older sister or aunt-type
figure, baby-sitter or ‘spy’. My white/Anglo, gendered and classed identity unde-
niably shaped my experience of this research, of the relationships I formed, of the
expectations placed on me by the different people with whom I undertook research,
and their own views of my intentions for this research. It also shaped the rela-
tionships that children developed with me, particularly white/Anglo children and
their assumptions about my own views of race. I use the term ‘white’ throughout
this book, following whiteness studies scholars who reveal the way whiteness
functions as an ‘invisible norm’ through which it maintains its dominance in
multicultural societies like Riverstone (Moreton-Robinson 2004).

Outline of the Book

The opening vignettes of this chapter highlighted several uses and positionings of
morality in children’s negotiation of economic difference and insecurity. This came
across in references to status, identity and social norms around humility (‘we don’t
show it off’), in ‘work’ and ‘looking after’ kids, in identifying with being ‘cared’
for, and in signalling their positioning in an economic ‘middle’ (‘my mum isn’t rich
but she’s not poor’). These were also claims to being ‘ordinary’, unremarkable and
in ‘the middle’, to ‘egalitarianism’, ‘fairness’ and ‘community’, those long recog-
nised among adults, particularly in rural Australia. As we shall see, such moral
resources were significantly classed, racialised and gendered, both in origin and as
they were put to use among children themselves. I argue throughout this book that
16 1 Introduction

such talk and social interactions among children connected with broader classed
cultural narratives around morality and moral worth in rural Australia, as well as
broader public culture, and that this had significant impacts on children’s classed
identities and their negotiation of economic insecurity.
In Chap. 2, I position the research project within a lineage of scholarship on
symbolic and cultural analyses of class as it relates to inequality. I also draw on
scholars of rural cultural studies to show how ideological versions of ‘rurality’
shape class relations and identities in rural Australia, and chart a way forward for
analysis of the making and contesting of class among rural children through a focus
on culture and symbolism. Chapters 3 and 4 then turn to the ethnographic material
at hand. Drawing on a range of data, I demonstrate how diversely situated children
adopt, adapt and contextualise moral resources as they negotiate economic differ-
ence and insecurity in the rural town of Riverstone. I show how local classed
manifestations of moral ideals surface within these negotiations and are in turn
crafted and contested among children themselves across varying social contexts of
difference. Chapter 3 demonstrates how children from primarily (but not exclu-
sively) white/Anglo backgrounds drew on moral connotation of ‘hardship’, and
subsequently ‘fairness’, within their local symbolic economies to negotiate situa-
tions from which they were economically excluded. Chapter 4 then turns more
concertedly to the socialisation of ethnicity and race within these symbolic
economies, and examines how local cultural sources of morality became racialised
among Riverstone children.
Chapters 5 and 6 continue to examine how classed cultural resources are pro-
duced in dialogue with race and gender. Chapter 5 maps the social labour of
children from non-white refugee backgrounds in Riverstone, namely from Iraq,
Burundi and Sudan, to transform their experiences into forms of symbolic capital.
Chapter 6 looks at the social labour of children from white/Anglo backgrounds
experiencing sustained inter-generational poverty who were also denied access to
these specific, locally sanctioned sources of morality. Both chapters chart alterna-
tive means through which such children worked to shore up belonging within these
symbolic economies of meaning. These chapters together show how children draw
on local classed resources pertaining to morality in their negotiation of economic
difference and insecurity. They demonstrate how children take up, rework and
negotiate these powerful sources of meaning within their everyday cultural worlds.
This provides insight into how children manage economic circumstances and
associated challenges to connection and belonging in affluent nations, at the same
time as it shows how such social labour contributes to the making, contesting and
reproduction of children’s own classed identities and experiences in rural Australia.
References 17

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Another random document with
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delicacy and had given that expression of questioning pathos to the
profound wide-open eyes.
It is not possible here to enumerate all her portraits, admirable as
many of them are. Her likenesses of Mdlle. Armandine, of a
Parisienne, of Prince Bojidar Karegeorgevitch, of Georgeth, and of
Mdme. Paul Bashkirtseff, have the same convincing air of intense
realism which she adored in Bastien-Lepage’s works of that kind.
The enthusiastic words, full of light and colour, in which she
describes his portraits, might in many an instance be applied to her
own without exaggeration.
Not to be overlooked are some of her landscapes and
townscapes, if one might be allowed to coin such a word. There is an
extremely good little picture of a portion of a street near the Rue
Ampère. A plot of fenced-in building ground gives it a dismally,
unfinished look. The houses and walls behind, seen through a pale
morning mist, are bathed in an atmosphere, whose grey tones are
delicately touched with pink. Two heavy cart-horses are standing at
rest in the bit of waste ground, in the centre of which a flame of fire
shoots up from a rubbish heap—a spot of brilliant colour amid the
general dimness. This is just a finely felt, finely rendered impression.
As characteristic and full of atmosphere is the study of a landscape
in autumn—a long, straight avenue, with the look of trees about to
lose their foliage. Wan clouds, waning light, withering leaves
blending their tones in a harmony of grey in grey. The mournfulness
of the misty avenue is like a feeling in the air. A mood of nature has
been caught which corresponds to a mood of the human mind. The
sense of desolation, decay, and impending death seems to breathe
from the canvas, as from some actual presence, which though
unseen, is none the less there. I cannot help thinking that the artist’s
own state must, by some subtle process, have literally passed into
her canvas. How intensely Marie Bashkirtseff had identified herself
with this picture is shown by Julian’s remark on meeting her just after
she had painted it. Without knowing the subject she had been at
work upon, he exclaimed, “What have you been doing with yourself?
Your eyes look full of the mists of autumn.”
 I have only picked out the most important of her works here, but
there are many more—bold designs, original little sketches, studies
of all kinds, with always a characteristic touch of expression.
There is that dare-devil sketch of a nude model sitting astride on a
chair looking at the skeleton, between the lips of which she has stuck
a pipe while waiting for the artist. The sardonic humour conveyed by
the contrast of this fair young woman in her fresh exuberance of form
facing the skeleton with a challenging attitude is an unparalleled
piece of audacity for a young girl to have painted. It is especially
good, too, as an arrangement of colour, and shows perhaps more
originality of invention than anything else this artist did. The Fisher
with Rod and Line is an interesting study of a brown Niçois with the
deep blue sea-water below. And last, not least, there is the
unfinished sketch for the picture of The Street by which she was so
completely engrossed only a few weeks before her death. The
background of houses, the bench with the people sitting back to
back in various attitudes expressive of weariness, destitution, or
despair—one with his head hidden by his arm leaning on the back of
the seat, another with crossed legs staring straight before him with
the look of one for whom there is no more private resting-place than
this—all these half-finished figures, even when only consisting of a
few scratches, are as true to every-day life as can be. But when all
the preliminary studies for this characteristic picture were done,
when the canvas had been placed and all was ready, the artist found
but one thing missing, and that, alas, was herself!
Though all the work accomplished by Marie Bashkirtseff is strictly
modern and realistic, the dream of her last years was to paint a great
religious picture. The subject was to be the two Maries mourning
beside the tomb of Christ. She imagined these women not as they
had hitherto been represented by the old masters, but as forlorn
outcasts, wayworn and weary, the “Louise Michels” of their time,
shunned of all pharisaic, respectable folk. They were to embody the
utmost depth of love and grief. Her descriptions of this picture that
was to be, as given in her journal, are highly suggestive and poetical.
The figures of these women—one standing, the other in a sitting
posture—would have shown in their pose and attitude different
phases of sorrow. The woman on the ground abandoning herself to
the violence of unrestrained mourning; the other as rigid as a statue,
as if in confirmation of Mrs. Browning’s line, “I tell you hopeless grief
is passionless.” Only a few inadequate sketches, however, are left of
this pictorial vision in which the crescent moon was described as
floating in an ensanguined sunset sky above a waste dark with the
coming night.
This word-picture never took shape in line and colour. But it
haunts you with a suggestion of lofty possibilities to be reached by
Marie Bashkirtseff as an artist had she only lived to carry out her
conceptions. And as the poet declares “songs unheard” to be
sweeter than any that we may ever hear, so it is with this unpainted
picture as compared to the painted ones; for, remarkable as her work
is, it is to a great extent remarkable as having been done by so
young a girl after only a few years of study. It is as a promise even
more than a performance that it claims our admiration.
As we already know, Marie Bashkirtseff belongs to the modern
French school of naturalists, more particularly to that branch of it of
which Bastien-Lepage was the most representative man. But her
work is not exclusively French. There is in it also a pronounced
Russian element. There is a marked race-likeness between her work
and that of other eminent Russian painters and novelists. Matthew
Arnold’s definition of the Russian nature in his article on Count Leo
Tolstoï might with very little alteration be applied to Marie
Bashkirtseff herself. “Russian nature,” he says, “as it shows itself in
the Russian novel, seems marked by an extreme sensitiveness, a
consciousness most quick and acute, both for what the man’s self is
experiencing and also for what others in contact with him are
thinking and feeling. He finds relief to his sensitiveness in letting his
perceptions have perfectly free play, and in recording their reports
with perfect fidelity. The sincereness with which the reports are given
has even something childlike and touching….”
This was ever Marie Bashkirtseff’s paramount aim, both as a
painter and writer, to make a perfectly faithful report of nature, of
human nature and what is external to it—to give a living picture of
gesture and manner as well as of thought and feeling—in short, to
produce human documents. Her mind and temperament, happily for
her, were in touch with the times. For the specially Russian alertness
to impressions and its genius for recording them has also become
the mark of the latest phase of European art. And Marie Bashkirtseff
took to it as if to the manner born (as indeed she was), rather than in
imitation of the modern French style, or of Bastien-Lepage in
particular.
In realizing this dominant quality, one wonders how it had fared
with this impressionable artist if, instead of being surrounded by
Parisian influences, she had lived in her native land, the South of
Russia. Supposing she, with her intense receptivity, had imbibed
those primitive aspects of life still to be found amid the remoteness
of the Steppe? Faithful to what lay around her, Marie has painted
dreary houses blurred by mist, waifs and strays of the Paris
boulevards, unlovely children in unlovely rags. The critic who blames
her preference for what is ugly and sordid does not do so without
cause. But when he asks why she does not paint the elegances by
which she is surrounded, she replies on her part, “Where, then, shall
I find any movement, any of that savage and primitive liberty, any
true expression?”
That natural movement and primitive liberty she could certainly
not expect in Paris night-life. But in the Ukraine she might have
found it without admixture of ugliness; she might have been inspired
by its coquettish villages gleaming white amid orchards; by the
robust and handsome peasantry still clad in their picturesque
national garb. What splendid models a realist like herself would have
had to paint from in those well-shaped peasant girls, whose
movements had never been hampered by anything more artificial in
the way of clothes than an embroidered chemise and a petticoat
reaching no further than the ankles. Here she would still have met
something of the “savage and primitive liberty” which her soul longed
for preserved in many an old Cossack custom and village rite. Still
more so in the aspects of primitive nature—in the boundless
expanse of the Steppe, “that green and golden ocean” as Gogol calls
it, “variegated by an infinite variety of iridescent tints.” What a virgin
soil for an artist in love with nature! What new types! What splendid
opportunities for the expression of beauty in form and colour!
Perhaps it is idle to speculate on such possibilities, but it seems as if
Marie Bashkirtseff might have produced work of a much higher order
had her astonishing gift for recording impressions found impressions
more pictorially attractive to record; had she lived in an atmosphere
bathed in an ampler light, amid a population still partial to the display
of brilliant colours in their dress. However that might have been will
never be known now.
There is a passage in her Journal where, speaking of the
sacrifices which art exacts, she says she has given up more for it
than Benvenuto Cellini when he burn his costly furniture; indeed, it
was her life itself which she gave. To quote her own striking words:
“Work is a fatiguing process, dreaded yet loved by fine and powerful
natures, who frequently succumb to it. For if the artist does not fling
himself into his work as unhesitatingly as Curtius did into the chasm
at his feet, or as the soldier leaps into the breach, and if when there
he does not toil with the energy of the miner beneath the earth, if, in
short, he stays to consider difficulties instead of overcoming them
like those lovers of fairyland who triumph over ever fresh difficulties
to win their princesses, his work will remain unfinished and die still-
born in the studio. The general public may not understand, but those
who are of us will find in these lines a stimulating lesson, a comfort,
and an encouragement.”
Marie Bashkirtseff’s work, unfortunately for us, was left unfinished,
but it has not died still-born in the studio. It is astonishingly alive.
More alive to-day than on the day it was painted, and resembles that
plant of basil which throve so luxuriantly, rooted in a dead man’s
brain. For the energies of her glowing vitality are now alive in her
pictures.
I subjoin here a complete list of Marie Bashkirtseff’s works:—

1. Portrait de Mdlle. Bashkirtseff.

2. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
3. Portrait de Mme. P. B.
4. Jeune femme lisant.
5. Le Meeting.
 6. Fleurs.—Salon, 1884.
7. Fleurs.
8. Les trois Rires.
9. Tête (Étude).
10. Profil.
11. Nature morte.
12. Intérieur d’une chaumière à Nice.
13. Portrait du Général Pélikan.
14. Georgette.
15. Portrait de Mdlle. Bashkirtseff.
16. Esquisse.
17. Tête d’enfant.
18. Coco.
19. Étude des mains.
20. Esquisse.
21. Marine.
22. Monsieur et Madame (Étude).
23. L’Atelier, Julian.
24. Tête (Étude).
25. Tête d’enfant.
26. Le Soir.
27. Ophélie (Étude).
28. Paysan de Poltava (Étude).
29. Tête (Étude).
30. Grand-Père malade.
31. Copie.
32. Étude.
33. La Rue.
34. Avril.
35. Portrait du Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch.
36. Le Parapluie.
37. Jean et Jacques.
38. Étude d’enfant.
39. Paysage d’Automne.
40. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
41. Étude de femme.
42. Portrait de Jacques Rendouin.
43. Jeune Garçon (Étude).
44. Tête de femme.
45. Étude.
46. Coin de Rue.
47. Portrait de Mdlle. de Canrobert.
48. Une Vague.
49. Étude de mains.
50. Paysage à Sèvres.
51. Paysage à Sèvres.
52. Paysage.
53. Portrait de son frère.
54. Portrait de femme.
55. Étude de Main.
56. Vielle femme (Étude).
57. Tête (Étude).
58. Esquisse.
59. Mendiant (Étude).
60. Projet du tableau: “Les Saintes Femmes.”
61. Les Saintes Femmes (Esquisse)
62. Mendiant de Grenade.
63. Une Dame.
64. Parisienne.—Salon, 1883.
65. Tête de Forçat.
66. Irma (Étude).
67. Paysage de Nice.
68. Copie d’après Velasquez.
69. Chiffonière.
70. La Rue Brémontier.
71. Étude de mains.
72. Gommeux.
73. La Bohémienne.
74. Intérieur d’une boutique au Mont Dore.
75. Portrait de Mdlle. C.
76. Intérieur de bric-à-brac à Madrid.
77. Écluse à Asnières.
78. Étude d’enfant.
79. Étude (Modèle).
 80. Modèle.
81. Pêcheur à Nice.
82. Esquisse.
83. Au bord de la mer.
84. A la fenêtre.
85. Thérèse.
86. Wanka.
87. Paysage à Nice.
88. Étude.
89. Étude.
90. Marine.
91. Bébé.
92. Marine.
93. Étude pour le tableau: “Les Saintes Femmes.”
94. Convalescente.
95. Mendiant Italien.
96. Portrait.
97. Étude.
98. Portrait de Mme. Gredelue.
99. Portrait de Mme. Nachet.
100. Japonaise.
 Marie Bashkirtseff.
(After a Photograph.)

PASTELS.

101. Portrait de Louis de Canrobert.

102. Portrait de Mdlle. de Villevielle.
103. Portrait de Mdlle. Eral.
104. Portrait de Mdlle. Babanine.
105. Portrait de Mdlle. Armandine.
106. Portrait de Mdlle. Dinah.
 DESSINS.

107. Portrait.
108. Tête.
109. Soirée Intime.
110. Projet de tableau.
111. Coco, Chèvres.
112. Un Monsieur.
113. Une Dame.
114. Le Sommeil.
115. Les Cartes.
116. La Lecture.
117. La Cigarette.
118. Un Monsieur et une Dame.
119. Une Dame.
120. Une Dame.
121. Une Tête.
122. Mimi.
123. Marie.
124. Rosalie.
125. L’Orateur.
126. Ophélie.
127. Les Enfants.
128. Bojidar.
129. L’Orpheline.
130. Amélie.
131. Devant la Cheminée.
132. Madame B.
133. Une partie.
134. Salon d’essayage chez Doucet.
135. Carnaval de Nice.
136. Tête.
137. Tête.
138. Mademoiselle D.
139. Les Cartes.
140. Étude.
141. à 144. Études d’après le Modèle.
 SCULPTURE.

1. La Douleur de Nausicaa.
2. Femme appuyée.
3. Le Bras.
4. Petit Garçon.
5. Une Femme.

MATHILDE BLIND.
 The Gresham Press,

UNWIN BROTHERS,

CHILWORTH AND LONDON.

 Transcriber’s Note:
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become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple
spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These
have been left unchanged. Obsolete words, alternative spellings,
and misspelled words were not corrected.
One footnote was moved to the end of the chapter. Obvious
printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed
letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the
end of sentences and abbreviations were added.
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