Agents of settler colonialism?: childhood, time and exclusion in the fairbridge scheme, 1913–1924

ABSTRACT Drawing from Kingsley Fairbridge's writings, this article explores the first Fairbridge Farm School from its establishment in 1913 until Fairbridge's death in 1924. Fairbridge's scheme sought to turn poor, urban British children into agriculturists who would occupy contested land in the colonies. Fairbridge attempted to instil the children with ‘love of the land’ by determining their conditions of existence in quite complete ways. I draw from the history and philosophy of childhood to understand how Fairbridge – much like A O Neville – targeted childhood as a distinctive site of ideological intervention. At his first farm school, Fairbridge sought to exclude the person that each child was going to become. But this explicit repression of existing urban identities often failed; most of the first thirty-five farm school alumni elected to live in Australian cities. Just one member of that group ran a successful farm, and only one other worked as a farm hand into middle age. Ultimately, though, the children's escape from the life that Fairbridge attempted to impose on them did not mean escaping the settler colonial structure; most remained in Australia throughout their lives. Nonetheless, many felt the loss of family and the person they might have been.