Children in Paradise: Growing Up on the Australian Goldfields

Paradise, a gold mining town in Queensland, Australia, was occupied only briefly towards the end of the 19th century, a single fleeting moment in the boom-and-bust cycle of the Australian gold rush. At its zenith, Paradise was home to more than 600 people, and contrary to popular expectations about the nature of the goldfields, a substantial proportion of the inhabitants were children. While the presence of children in the archaeological record is frequently overlooked, evidence from Paradise not only confirms the existence of children at the site but also illuminates community attitudes toward children and the nature of childhood in colonial Australia. The evidence from Paradise strongly suggests a deep-rooted tension between middle-class Victorian ideals of childrearing and the realities of life in a frontier mining town.