Baby booms have a long history. In 1870, colonial Melbourne was a perspiring juvenile humanity' with an astonishing 42 per cent of the city's inhabitants aged 14 and under - a demographic anomaly resulting from the gold rushes of the 1850s. Within this context, Simon Sleight enters the heated debate concerning the future prospects of a Young Australia' and the place of the colonial child within the incipient Australian nation. Looking beyond those institutional sites so often assessed by historians of childhood, he ranges across the outdoor city to chart the relationship between a discourse...