Childhood is complex and contested territory, and definitions change according to time and place. For instance, a 12-year old girl would already be married off if she was rich and born in 16^th century Italy or working in a factory if she was poor and born in 19^th century England. Teenagers were not really even ‘invented’ until post-war America. These shifting boundaries make it interesting cultural territory and potent subject matter for artists. The artists in Playing Field approach the subject from diverse angles, building up complex, multi-layered portraits of childhood. These connect with the various ideas of childhood that swirl through our culture, signifying our society’s different desires and demands. To place some of these ideas, let me introduce three kids – Alice, ‘Piggy’ and Whiz Kid Stanley Spector – each a version of childhood that is symbolic of something potent in our culture.

Childhood version 01: Alice in Wonderland

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872)

People who subscribe to the ‘schooldays’ platitude usually mourn the loss of their childhood – they see it as a lost world where they were once free and innocent. They position adulthood as a time in which freedoms must be limited and imagination shackled so that they may enter a more quotidian adult reality. However Lewis Carroll, whose poem Jabberwocky I have quoted from above, once noted: ‘It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’ He reminds us that the rich imaginative potential of childhood is not something we have to give up.  I like that Carroll refused to drain himself and continued to be curious about all manner of things and not-things. His brain could hold dodo birds, mad hatters, giant rabbits, small and large Alices, snarks and the jabberwocky, whilst also working as a mathematician, an Anglican deacon and inventing an early version of what was to become the word-game Scrabble. He was living proof that you can make your own worlds – and your own words – at any stage.

The exhibition Playing Field is also full of these gestures towards the imaginary and the marvellous. The artists curated into the exhibition use their art practices to explore their own rich imaginative potentials, and this is as much a process of self-actualisation as it is a flight of fantasy. Maybe you could sit there and mourn the loss of your childhood. Or maybe you could make a brain out of stones like Ben Pearce. And maybe the brain could also be a cave with a room in it. Perhaps, like the collaborative duo Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison, you could unbridle your imagination and create endless fantasy worlds in which multi-coloured fish fly. Or, maybe you could slump on your mum’s chintz sofa and play your Game Boy like in David Ray’s work. Perhaps for you, like in Tim Fleming’s Flatland OK project, real life and its representation, fact and fiction, fold into each other endlessly, like some kind of otherworldly Möbius loop. The imaginary will not be suppressed – it is as much a part of real life as is the bus you catch or the table you sit at. Some people do a damn good job of trying to be unimaginative but, as the sci-fi writer Ursula K Le Guin said, ‘I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.’

Childhood version 02: Lord of the Flies


Still from Lord of the Flies (1963)

‘You’re talking too much,’ said Jack Merridew. ‘Shut up, Fatty.’

Laughter arose.

‘He’s not Fatty,’ cried Ralph, ‘his real name is Piggy!’

‘Piggy!’

‘Piggy!’

‘Oh, Piggy!’

A storm of laughter arose and even the tiniest child joined in. For the moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy outside: he went very pink, bowed his head, and cleaned his glasses again.

William Golding Lord of The Flies (1954)

It is also worth reminding all the nostalgic eggplants out there that not all childhoods are great. Some were non-existent and some were horrible. To illustrate this Childhood: version 2 is symbolised by an excerpt from Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a study in the sometimes terrible morality of the playground. If Alice represents one idealised utopian vision of childhood, Lord of the Flies is the terrible shadow side.

This shadow side of childhood is also represented in Playing Field. In Michael Doolan’s work the Disney vision many of us were drip fed as children has become horribly raucous and deranged. In his hyper-sized inflatable at Federation Square, Teddy has been bulldozed by the nursery’s train set and he is probably not ok. He is unlikely – as most of us are – to bounce back like Wile. E Coyote. Similarly Jenny Bartholomew’s work sits in an unsettling space – part playful but also somehow distorted and reminiscent of ‘The Beast’ slain in Lord of the Flies. Bern Emmerich’s works explore tableaux of terribly troubled youth. Based on a true event, Bottled Ship presents a boatload of 220 young boys transported to Van Diemen’s Land, consigned to the end of the earth for misdemeanours probably as insignificant as stealing a loaf of bread or giving a bit of lip. Her Pickets and Crosses too, which depicts a brutal stolen generation scenario, blasts through any warm fuzzy nostalgia for an innocent childhood. Try telling someone forcibly removed from their family and community and then sent to some god-awful state institution that those were the best days of your life.

Childhood version 03: Stanley Spector 


Still from Magnolia

Jennings Police Department employee, Eleanor Beal was just crossing the street to go to work when something dropped from the sky.

The sky wasn't falling. She says it was worms, large tangled clumps of them.

Beal says, ‘When I saw that they were crawling, I said, “It's worms! Get out of the way!”’

She even called her co-worker outside to prove she wasn't making it up.

Sure enough, she saw worms, and globs of them.

Where they came from is a mystery, but some believe that a waterspout spotted less than five miles away at that same time near Lacassine Bayou could have something to do with it.

Eleanor Beal says she hopes she doesn't see it again.[1]

As reported in Louisiana’s online news channel, wafb.com, on 7 July 2007.

Numerous incidences of ‘raining animals’ have been documented throughout history. For instance:

On several occasions throughout the month of June in 2009, cities in Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture reported downpours of tadpoles. Over a few days surprised residents described incidents in which ‘clouds’ of dead tadpoles rained from the sky.[2]

On 6 April 2007, a holidaying Argentinean, Christian Oneto Gaona, was hiking with his friends up San Bernardo Mountain. Two hours into the trip they came across an area carpeted with ‘spiders of many colours’. When they looked up, they realised that hundreds of spiders were falling from the sky. ‘It felt more like a science fiction movie than reality’ said Christian.[3]   

Closer to home, in the remote community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of small white fish – most likely spangled perch – fell from the sky. Resident Christine Balmer said ‘It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night. They fell from the sky everywhere. Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere.’ On further reflection, she noted: ‘I haven’t lost my marbles. Thank God it didn’t rain crocodiles.’[4]

A ‘rain of animals’ is a rare but documented event; it is a thing that happens. The reason is unclear however scientists hypothesise that it is caused by strong winds, waterspouts or tornados that sweep up animals such as fish, frogs and birds and drop them miles from their original place of habitation. Sometimes the animals are still alive (though described in reports as ‘startled’) and sometimes they are frozen. I like these events because it reminds us that life is weird. Just when you think you have a bit of it figured out, something fantastic happens. And that thing may be fantastic-good, fantastic-bad, fantastic-weird or, perhaps, fantastic-fantastic. You can be going about your day and a ‘glob’ of worms may unexpectedly fall on your head.

‘Raining animals’ also reminds us of something we seem to understand easily as children: that the imaginary and the real are in fact not so distant. They often interweave, one becoming the other.  A sense of the oddness of the world, and the interplay between imagination and reality, is contained in some of the fantastic visions presented in Playing Field. In Anika Cook’s work, diver and grizzly bear confront one another in weird Mexican standoff, and a girl calmly watches as a head explodes (or perhaps that’s a ‘glob’ of worms?). Greer Honeywill’s work comprises a mysterious assemblage – part tricycle, part fortress, part hair – that emanates a strange symbolic intent. Anna Davern has transformed biscuit tins into inventive dioramas, and clustered little images together, a flotsam and jetsam of visions that are part picturesque and part post-colonial.

An incidence of raining frogs was beautifully scripted into the 1999 P. T. Anderson film Magnolia. At the end of the film, various types of havoc are caused as big fat toads dive-bomb from the sky and squelch horribly on pavements and cars. It is all watched over by a kid, Stanley Spector, who is, for me, a very compelling and complex portrait of childhood. He is smart and he is sensitive, and he is also stuck. He is a kid who is supposed to ‘know stuff’: he spends his days carting four plastic bags of books to school, which he dutifully swats up on so that he can be trotted out by his greedy money-grubbing father to win big on the quiz show What Do Kids Know?. Poor Stanley is caught in a weird contemporary version of child slave labour. He is a kid stuck in a system over which he has little control, which is, I think, a pretty core element to being a kid. Stanley is spirited and mournful, resilient but also oppressed. He has his whole life in front of him but – as any good psychoanalyst will tell him – the experiences he is having now will leave an indelible mark. He is focused on learning facts, on rationalising the world into known elements. He is trying to grid the universe so that he can learn its facts, answer the quiz questions correctly, and please his father. And then – amazingly and inexplicably – frogs start raining from the sky.  

Stanley is a wonderful portrait of a kid trying to navigate systems set up by others. The film nicely explores the sense that childhood is marked by a feeling of trying your best to understand all the mystifying codes and protocols around you. Basically, you are a newbie. You don’t really know how to respond. You parents or your teachers half own your decisions anyway. Maybe you are having the perfect childhood. Maybe you come from a crappy home. Maybe you are ‘Piggy’ at school. Maybe you can’t control your bladder. There is a lot to deal with. It’s hard to stay calm. All you can do is stare somewhat philosophically out some window – just like Stanley Spector does at the frogs falling from the sky – and say ‘This is something that happens’.