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Children at play

By Judy Crozier - posted Thursday, 9 January 2014


You just don't find them in the pink aisle, is all.

In fact, pink was the manly colour for little boys until the 19th century, when suddenly it became all girlie. And thanks to QI for this quite interesting information.

The other day, a friend described the toys her great-niece had received for Christmas. Besides being suitably shocked at how many gifts this child got, what really attracted my attention was the description of the toddler's favourite – a toy toaster.

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'She was bored with everything else very quickly. But that toaster – she watched the toast pop up over and over and over!'

She looked at me. 'It could have been a Jack-in-the-box, really.'

Certainly it could. But someone will assume this small child is fascinated by the toaster because, as a girl, she must naturally be fascinated by domestic appliances.

But I think she is simply fascinated by highly-coloured objects that fly out of other highly-coloured objects, possibly with a funny noise.

It is high time we looked at definitions and how they mould our understanding. And it's time to discuss and understand what we are seeing.

When I was a child I was often on my own and entertaining myself. I had inherited my older brothers' toy trains and, in these pre-Lego days, a bag full of stick-together bricks, a green rubber roof, and little rubber window frames. I had some dolls, small and large, and access to a very handy old-fashioned coat-rack.

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Trains went round and round on the tracks I put together, houses were built and demolished, and I festooned that coat-rack with string, toy cradles and scraps of material to make a complex construction I swore was a hotel for dolls. I dressed up in lovely draggy things I found in my mother's drawers; I created prison cells from sheets and the backs of chairs, where I lived on bread and water for about half an hour before defeating the Enemy. I made a fire in an old Churchman's cigarette tin and then tried to disguise with desperate crayoning the blackened patch in the cupboard.

Outside, I peered at beetles and ants and the tail of a lizard to my lucky mother. I made a cubby-house from a huge crate and I tried to glue things with melted plastic. It is not necessarily possible, I discovered, to distil the colour from a rose by boiling it in water. I climbed trees. I tried to make a bow and arrow. I read, in equal parts, Superman comics and the classics.

And so on.

How would you gender-define this play – and why, really, would you bother?

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About the Author

Judy Crozier began as a baby journalist with the Melbourne Times back in the 70s, and did some editing and writing for other small journals for a time. She's been a local government representative, a community worker, a singer and a proof reader. Now she writes fiction and some freelance non-fiction, and teaches creative writing in Melbourne.

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