Votes for children: the 1931 NSW Children’s Peace Vote for international cooperation, peace and security

Abstract This article investigates the Children’s Peace Vote of 1931, conducted in New South Wales schools in support of the League of Nations, to explore the possibility of writing a different kind of history that grapples with the political power of both ‘idealism’ and ‘performance’ and takes seriously children’s contributions to movements for peace and global unity. In doing so, this article explores the diversity of adult hopes and agendas that have surrounded – and continue to surround – visions of children’s political participation. In turn, I highlight how the nexus between adult-centrism and realism has obstructed meaningful engagement by historians with children’s contributions to movements for peace and disarmament in the interwar period.

Conference was 'likely to be ridiculed as a "babies vote" and perhaps do as much harm as good'. 5Writing four decades after the vote, an article in the Journal of the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society by Harrison-Mattely described the vote as 'a striking example of the way in which idealists permitted themselves to be carried away by their emotional attitude to peace'. 6Dismissed and largely forgotten as an embarrassing and meaningless fancy, the Children's Peace Vote issome would arguebest left that way.However, in this article I want to revisit this somewhat obscure cul-de-sac of Australian history to explore the way it illuminates questions about children's political participation, and the limits, anxieties, hopes and fears that surround it.Although primarily concerned with internationalism, this article also sheds light on questions of children's participation in Australian politics, a topic no more relevant than today, with momentum gathering behind proposals to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 years of age.
A 2022 opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition Spokesperson Justine Landis-Hanley demonstrates the hopes and fears that surround increasing the electoral participation of young people.Dismissing criticisms that 'young people are idealists, ill-prepared to understand the practicalities and limitations a good government must navigate', Landis-Hanley declared, 'the reality is that young people have the capacity to see things more clearly'. 7This capacity, while regularly dismissed as abstract and impractical, has, just as frequentlythroughout the twentieth century and beyondbeen praised and cultivated by those who have seen it as the key to more peaceful and liveable futures.Whether today, as children are hailed as fundamental to action on climate change and the health and survival of democracy, 8 or in the interwar period, when children were seen as the foundation upon which to build peace and global unity, young people offer the promise of political renewal and change.Yet, in being elevated as 'seers of truth, small humans with the capacity of seeing through "barriers" of culture, nationality, race, class, and religion', Liisa Malkki has argued that childrenrather than being central to political actionare in fact relegated to 'an infantile utopian dimension that is freely celebrated and almost as freely ignored'. 9Malkki thus argues that 'it is nearly impossible for actual children to act in the world as effective political, historical subjects'. 10While Malkki emphasises the way children 'are called upon to speak for mankind and ritually miniaturized into silence', 11 I suggest here that children's political participation is directly limited by the decisions and priorities of individuals and committees.Likewise, I explore the ways in which dominant scholarly paradigms of realism, and the rigidity of conceptual frameworks such as 'agency', have further limited our ability to understand the diverse political contributions of children, and in turn to recognise these contributions as 'history making'.

Making peace, making history
The LNU's work with children in the interwar period clearly demonstrates the centrality of young people to reconstructive political agendas, and in turn illustrates the prominence of debates about human nature, socialisation and education to visions of peace, internationalism and global unity.Although new to this workbeginning programmes in English schools in 1919the LNU was not alone, joining numerous other organisations, who as Susannah Wright has argued, were 'keen to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the First World War, and to promote a united and peaceful world order'. 12In Australia, many of these organisations in fact began mobilising during the war, with the Women's Peace Army (WPA) forming a Children's Peace Army (CPA) first in Melbourne (1915) then later in Brisbane (1917), 'so that children might be educated in the ideals of peace, and become the peace propagandists of the future'. 13Other organisations such as the Sisterhood of International Peacedrawing on 'work being done in other countries to educate children toward fellowship and brotherhood'were working as early as 1915 to challenge the Victorian Education Department to include in its School Paper 'lessons designed to point children to nobler ideas than those of conquest by slaughter'. 14Formed in coalition with other groups such as the WPA and the Society of Friends, these deputations were at times ridiculed in the press.In one notable example from 1917, the Weekly Times took a sarcastic swipe at Vida Goldstein for her 'horror at the "abominable" sentiment taught to present-day children through the medium of a child's ABC Book, which contained such degrading observations as "A for army", "B for battleship" and "C for Cruiser"'. 15dopting a similar focus upon school curricula, the first LNU branch in Australia formed in South Australia in 1920passed a motion in its very first meeting to take steps to 'spread the knowledge of the League in the schools of the state'. 16lthough already a key priority in many countries, the importance of education was internationally affirmed at the Fifth Assembly of the League in 1923, which passed a resolution asserting the fundamental importance of familiarising young people throughout the world with the principles and work of the League of Nations and of training the younger generation to regard international co-operation as the normal method of conducting world affairs. 17s Julie McLeod has argued, the 'promise of educational endeavours to advance international understanding' was foundational to the heightened internationalist sentiment of the interwar years. 18However, as McLeod illustrates, the translation of internationalist ideals into 'everyday educational practice' has been neglected within the skewed historiography of internationalism, which has focused on 'the role of elite networks, governmental organisations and committees'. 19Similarly, while historians have devoted special interest to the way the League regarded changes to history curricula as offering the 'richest possibilities for internationalising the story of humanity's past and future progress', 20 little attention has been given to how children themselves understood such circumstances and their role as participants in historical events.
Demonstrating the value of greater engagement with children's experiences of internationalism, Susannah Wright has explored the 'micro-contexts' of LNU junior branches in English schools, illustrating how 'ideals of liberal internationalist world citizenship were negotiated, promoted, taken up, passed on, altered, and, sometimes, challenged or ignored'. 21Additionally, the work of Helen McCarthy is noteworthy for its discussion of how public ritualswhich frequently involved school childrenprovided new narratives of collective identity that stressed belonging to an international community. 22While McCarthy argues that within junior branches 'Model Assemblies, pageants and plays facilitated a kind of embodied learning', 23 a focus on children's experiences rather than adult pedagogical agendas might instead emphasise how children were frequently invited to embody the functions, values and hopes of the League.
Although naturalised as key foundations of a new peaceful world order, the nature of children's participation and the meaning of their contribution to internationalism were subject to debate during this period.Writing in 1932, internationalist Alfred Zimmern made a distinction between 'fancy-dress internationalism' and 'more fundamental and less recreative methods' of engaging children with League principles. 24immern, who advocated engaging children in educative rather than symbolic ways, reminded his readers that 'the younger generation is not a herd of cattle but consists of growing human beings, with souls, minds and wills of their own'. 25Zimmern's distinction between symbolic or 'recreative' forms of engagement and fundamental educative principles has interesting resonances with contemporary debates about children's political 'agency', which similarly critique symbolic and affect-laden mobilisations of childhood.Sarah Mazamaking a nearly identical argument to Malkki about the 'political impotence of children'has suggested that 'children's activity in the past may be best conceptualised not as agency but as performance'. 26By privileging autonomous agency as a precondition for making history, Maza argues, 'it is nearly impossible to find examples of children acting effectively on the world without stretching beyond recognition the definition of autonomous action or that of childhood'. 27Likewise, by emphasising autonomous action, Maza seemingly excludes educational settings from the domain of political practice, instead emphasising 'pedagogic programming and top-down teacher-pupil relations'. 28Both Malkki's and Maza's conclusions arguably reflect what Vallgårda, Alexander and Olsen have described as 'a problematic way of conceptualizing the subject and relationships of power inherited from liberal Enlightenment thinking'. 29This in turn suggests that weas both historians and adultsmust critically interrogate our assumptions about what it means to act effectively on the world.The title of this section, 'Making Peace, Making History', is thus primarily a challenge to the notion of 'effective action', and a reorientation to the complexities of meaningfully representing children's contributions to abstract and communally embodied political projects like peace and international unity.
Sunil Amrith argues that 'internationalist ambitions and international initiatives all need to be embedded in the broader political debates to which they emerged as a response: debates about the shape of the world, about inequality, and about the (differential) value of human lives'. 30Making a similar intervention, Andrew Webster demonstrates that although the limitation and reduction of armaments were held in such high regard by the public, no other area of the League's work has been 'more completely condemned in subsequent judgements'. 31Rather, as Webster highlights, scholarly literature on disarmament tells a story of inevitable failure, incorporated into a still 'larger narrative of failure of collective security'. 32Taking both Amrith's and Webster's interventions seriously thus requires not only grappling with the centrality of children to interwar movements for disarmament and international peace, but also acknowledging how subsequent historical treatment of this period hasin emphasising realism, rationality and 'effective action'diminished children's contributions.Additionally, by erasing both the figure of the child and the contributions of innumerable children to the cause of disarmament, this adult-centric, realist position intersects in interesting ways with what philosopher Duane Cady calls warism -'the view that war is both morally justifiable in principle and often morally justifiable in fact'. 33Warismtypically accompanied by a tendency to regard pacifism as 'wellmeaning but naïve'is identified by Cady as 'the primary cultural obstacle to taking pacifism seriously'. 34Investigating the enmeshment of warism, realism and adult-centrism in judgements about children's political participationand specifically children's peace activismis thus vital to any sincere engagement with children's contributions to the work of the LNU and the movement for disarmament.
Grappling with the symbolic force of the figure of the child, this article explores how LNU materials for childrenplays, poems and articlesconsistently centred children as foundational to a new peaceful world order.Yet, in reading these adultauthored texts, I combine a critical approach with a child-centric approach that tries to imagine what it might have felt like to read these texts as a child.This is no doubt a deeply speculative practice, but one that I argue is necessary to properly understand the sense of responsibility and seriousness with which children were invited to contribute to the political project of internationalism.This speculation is however grounded in analysis of child-authored materials, including 26 prize-winning essays by children published in Australian newspapers between 1923 and 1936.These essays contextualise the kinds of messages children received, and saw fit to reproduce for their own purposes, but also provide insights into children's own understanding of the meaning of their participation in the movement for disarmament.Moving then to a discussion of the peace vote itself, I analyse LNU committee debates, highlighting both the limitations and unrealised potential of this initiative.Rather than conclude by rehashing familiar argumentssuch as those made by Malkki and Mazaabout the symbolic dominance of the figure of the child and the impossibility of children's political action, I turn again to children's essays to highlight children's own emphasis on performance and symbolism as powerful forms of political action.Indicating a more complex story about 'doing politics' under the sign of childhood, what is perhaps most interesting about these essays is their focus not on the limitations of children's political action, but on the political failures of adults.

All the World Children's Friendly League: reading and writing the League of Nations
Early League publications from the UK such as Teachers and World Peace asserted simply that: 'any normal child of eight or nine years old can grasp the conception of the nations joining together for common purpose'. 35The transformative potential of education in cooperative values was repeatedly stressed in publications for teachers that declared: 'the League of Nations depends for its success upon the educational work of the League of Nations Union', or put more simply, 'the whole business of making a better world, of securing human progress, consists in making better people'. 36This message comes through clearly in LNU publications for children such as the 1922 play The A.W.C.F.L. (All the World Children's Friendly League). 37In the final scene of the play, Professor Experience addresses the AWCFL assembly, declaring: This great Association is not a dreamit is a practical effort on your part to train yourselves, while young, not to allow hasty tempers, selfishness, pride and ignorance to rule your lives, and to spoil each other's lives and friendship.You make this effort because you see grown-up people often do not let their fit of anger or fear pass by, or seek to get to know and understand their enemy better, or to try to please himbut nurse their anger and try to make many others angry until they make a great war. 38e message that adults have failed where children can succeed is clear here, and in other LNU publications for children.Yet it also emerges in children's own work for the League, such as the following League song from England, written by a 16year-old pupil from the Central Foundation Girls School, Esther Staub: Then come, O ye children, belov'd, ever-dear, And see the great radiance of Peace drawing near.Ye young of the earth, Thrice-blessed from birth, 'Tis ye who shall welcome her here!Peace!Peace!The song shall not fail when we're gone!Then sing, nations, sing At the message we bring, The children shall carry it on! 39 In the accompanying commentary to this song, Esther's teacher, Miss Winifred Jay, not only comments on how the song expresses 'in a rather charming way, the hopes we all have for the future of the League, and for the part that the children will play in building it up', but goes further to add: 'personally, I feel that most of my enthusiasm for the League was due in the first instance to that song'. 40Rather than a simple one-way pedagogical interaction, this anecdote illustrates the importance of children's creative and performative contributions to building conviction and sustaining enthusiasm for the League and its work.It suggests the need to look critically at what might be easily dismissed as a pedagogical project of socialisation, to instead consider how the LNU's educational programmes themselves produced political action.
Australian children's introduction to the League of Nations began in early 1919, when the Victorian Education Department's The School Paper began to make mention of the League, with extended illustrated articles appearing from 1921.The first of these concluded by addressing children directly: 'You, young readers, are on the threshold of the citizen life and citizen duty.See to it that you help the world to make progress!' 41 Yet, while children were addressed here as budding citizens, elsewhere in this article childhood is employed as a metaphor to introduce the League's systems of mandates.The article, itself abridged from British LNU publication The Wonderful League, declared: While children are at school, the teacher has a trust, or mandate, to watch over their welfare.Foster-parents take care of children who are 'not yet able to stand by 38 Ibid., 14-15. 39 Winifred Jay, An Experiment in a Secondary School (London: LNU, n.d.). 40Ibid. 41Education Department Victoria, 'The League of Nations', The School Paper -For Grades VII and VIII, 1 December 1921, 17, included in R1018/13/45569/41815 Youth Questions -Correspondence with the Government of Australia, League of Nations Archive.
themselves'.If you read the voyages and travels of such men as Cook (in the Pacific Ocean), Livingstone (in Africa), Bates (in South America), and Sturt (in Australia), you will observe that there are many peoples who are backward, and 'not yet able to stand by themselves '. 42 This quote clearly demonstrates a particular teleology and notion of civilisational process that emergedas Olga Nieuwenhuys has arguedonly 'when both the child and colonized could be envisioned as representing imperfect specimens of the enlightened European man'. 43Furthermore, such sentiments naturalise what Julie McLeod has described as 'the dividing practices of internationalism and its racialised hierarchies of who could embody the spirit of world mindedness and cooperation', or what Aden Knaap has referred to as 'white internationalism'. 44hese racial and civilisational hierarchies are perhaps no more clearly demonstrated than in two illustrations from two British LNU publications for children (see Figures 1 and 2).
That childhood remains a time 'mandated by' adults is in other articles for Australian children attributed to the animality of human nature itself.With dogs, wolves, tigers, 'savages' and boys all marshalled to make its key point, one article in the NSW School Magazine from November 1924 argues that the great lesson of history is 'how men discovered that it was not a profitable thing "to take the law into his own hands"'. 45Children's introduction to the League here thus takes the form of a grand evolutionary narrative of progress, a fight against man's very nature to which children are called to join.Yet to reinforce this, the article concludes by quoting from the first World Wireless Message by the Children of Wales 46 from 1922: Will youmillions of youjoin with us in your prayer that the efforts will be blest of the good men and women of every race and people who are doing their best to settle the old quarrels without fighting?Then there will be no need for any of us, when we grow older to show our pride in our country by going out to hate and kill one another.Three cheers for the League of Nations, the friend of every mother, the protector of every home, and the guardian angel of the youth of the world. 47is message strikes a rather different and more pragmatic tone that identifies young people as potential soldiers, requiring a guardian angel to ensure they will not have to go 'out to hate and kill one another'.
While these texts highlight the need to guide and shape children's growth and socialisation away from a Hobbesian vision of animality and violence, other texts emphasise and reify the innocence of children as the basis for new peaceful futures. 42Ibid., 170. 43Olga Nieuwenhuys, 'Theorising Childhood(s): Why We Need Postcolonial Perspectives', Childhood 20, no. 1 (2013): 5. 44 McLeod, 'Everyday Internationalism as an Educational Project', 462; Aden Knaap, 'White Internationalism and the League of Nations Movement in Interwar Australia', Global History (2023): 1-21. 45Ibid., 152. 46Also known as the Message of Goodwill of the Children of Wales, the messagewhich continues todayhas been delivered annually for 100 years and remains perplexingly under-researched. 47'League of Nations', The School Magazine, 2 November 1924, 151.This sentiment is clearly on display in the following highly circulated Ethel Blair Jordan poem (see Figures 3 and 4): In hearts too young for enmity, There lies the way to make man free, When children's friendships are worldwide, New ages will be glorified.Let child love child, and strife will cease, Disarm the hearts, for that is Peace.provided to hasten the millennium'. 48The article contextualised the boy's comment by explaining that 'the millennium is the age in the history of the world when war shall be no more; when the lion shall lie down to the lamb, and the sword shall be turned into the sickle'. 49The Director's tale was met with hilarity from his audience, but the examiner, who was also present, asserted the truth of the story, adding: 'he was a very precocious youth'. 50

Writing the League in Australia
This kind of precocity is rarely on display in prize-winning essays on the League which began to be published in Australian newspapers, beginning in Tasmania, as early as 1923. 51These competitions were organised by state branches of the LNU, but also a range of other organisations including the National Council of Women, 52 the Junior Red Cross, 53 the Country Women's Association, 54 the Australian Labour Party 55 and Rotary; 56 with agricultural shows, 57 individual schools 58 and local members of parliament 59 also organising their own competitions.It is hard to determine the number of children who participated in many of these competitions, though figures available for the South Australian LNU's essay competition suggest 1000 entries for the 1926 competition; 60 over 800 essays from state schools and great interest from the 'leading private schools' for 1928; 61 and participation of children from 'all secondary schools in the state' in 1929. 62As for the age of children participating, prize lists for the NSW LNU's competition record the participation of younger children with an under-13 category.Although typically solicited as part of pedagogical exercises to raise awareness about the League, the fact that these essays were published in newspapers and read widely by the public suggests the need to recognise the political contributions and implications of these texts, in particular to the saturation of the League's internalist project throughout everyday life. 63hile some children's essays are almost entirely descriptive, introducing the formation and various functions of the League, children at times offer interesting metaphors for the League's work.One example of this comes from William Williams of Wallarooa serial prize winner of the South Australian LNU competitionwho, in his first winning essay from 1930, described the League as 'the world's gardener' targeting 'weeds in the political garden … lest they should destroy the growing plants of peace'. 64Proceeding in a more pragmatic tone, William conceded that although 'mistakes have been made and no doubt will continue', people should not belittle or hamper the progress of the League 'unless they are able to suggest something to take its place'.Returning to his gardening metaphor to conclude, William wrote: 'let us hope that the sower's seeds have fallen on good ground, and not among the thorns of this world'. 65Another fairly circumspect conclusion is offered by Elaine Huntley, a pupil from St. George Girls High School, Kogarah, who was awarded first prize in a competition promoted by MP T.J. Ley. 66Elaine concluded that: It is safe to say that opinion is divided as to the future of the League.Many contend that until man is given a new heart and mind the goal being sought is unattainable while others claim that the League had already justified its establishment and is worthy of a lengthy trial.However, all agree that war should be prevented, indeed outlawed and realising the noble efforts of the League towards this end, it should be honoured and given all possible support.It is doing great work; its scope may be said to be without limit and its task unending. 67her essays, such as the entry by 13-year-old Jean Geldert of Collie High School to her school's competition on the League, are far more emotive.Jean began: 'Nations sufferedmen sufferedwomen and small childrenall the mighty universe suffered because of the last war of hideous inventions'. 68Focusing on the way 'sciencesleepless and restlessis revealing every day some new method of destruction', Jean used her essay to describe the development of a gun with a range of 150 miles and an American invention of a poisonous liquid, a few drops of which could cause instant death. 69Declaring that it is impossible to think of the next war, Jean instead offered the following haunting vision: Like Jean, Max is concerned that 'science is bringing forth every day some new atrocity in preparation for future war'. 73In the face of 'poisonous gases and bombs dropped from aeroplanes', Max concluded by stating that 'if the League of Nations and the Kellogg Pact achieve the ends they were framed for, then there shall come a blessed time when'and here he quotes from Isaiah 2:4 -'nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war any more'. 74Reference to the same verse was made by Rosa Howarth, third prize winner in the same competition who wrote: A new era of international peace will assuredly dawn if the youth of every land be united in thought and action for the betterment of the world, and if everyone determines to become an Apostle of Peace the Hebrew prophecy will be fulfilled, and nations will begin to 'beat their swords into ploughshares'. 75at Max and Rosa, as well as students from other states, 76 used this verse from Isaiah in their essays signifies the likelihood of a shared reference source, but also indicates the resonance of Judaeo-Christian religious imagery to children in their efforts to imagine new peaceful futures.That Rosa signed her essay 'Hopeful' also suggests a personal political commitment that transcended the educational exercise of the competition.
To understand the views of other children joining the League in the 1930s, we can also look to the following essay by Frances Homes, submitted to a competition held by the Davenport Practicing School in 1933.Frances wrote: Being the first girl in Tasmania to join the Victorian branch of the League, I would like to express my opinion on the matter.War is the most cruel and stupid relic of barbarism left on the earth.If we ever have another war, think what a terrible thing it will be, because of the bombing from the air. 77ke other essays, Frances demonstrates her concerns about aerial bombing, a recurrent fear that provides important insights into what drove children's pacifist sentiment in the period.Having briefly introduced some of the League's work, Frances continued: 'Think what a beautiful thing it would be if everyone in the world would keep the motto "Si vis pacem para bellum"if you wish for peace, prepare for peace'.Preparing for peace in this period must be understood as a political project that not only involved children, but was also adopted enthusiastically by many young people who rightly recognised the true horrors of war.

The League's Day and its vote for peace
Encouraged by both state and federal governments, throughout the 1920s the LNU gradually increased its influence in Australian schools. 78However, this work did not go entirely unchallenged by influential bodies like the 'League of Empire, to whom 73 Ibid. 74 Empire Day was the most important anniversary in Australia's post-war calendar'. 79et, with growing support in NSW, with schools becoming corporate members as early as 1925, and a sympathetic Education Minister -D.H. Drummondwho was himself an early vice-president of the LNU, the NSW LNU decided to inaugurate the first League of Nations Day in schools in 1930. 80Officially observed throughout departmental schools on Armistice Day, the celebration, apart from a few specific addresses on the League, and a pageant staged in Bathurst called 'Humanity Delivered', 81 proceeded much as Armistice Days had before it.Thus, when planning the League's Day for 1931, the LNU chose a new date -27 Augustto commemorate the signing of the 1928 Paris Peace Pact for the Renunciation of War.The initial proposal for a Children's Peace Vote to mark this day was made to the NSW council of the LNU in April by executive member Thomas E. Shonk.The proposal was supported by National Secretary Raymond Watt, who in a letter to Shonk later that year indicated a certain shared tendency to regard children as central to peace work by describing the Rev. Gwilym Daviesthe organiser of the World Wireless Message by the Children of Walesas 'a man after our own heart'. 82What exactly this shared heart consisted of, and what it enabled, is glimpsed in descriptions of Raymond Watt as idealistic and 'a man of very deep convictions'. 83But it is perhaps best illustrated by briefly exploring the life and schemes of Tom Shonk himself.
Shonk, who had served in the 14 th Field Ambulance in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in WWI, had by the 1930s established himself as a well-known organiser, whoas Sydney newspaper Truth remarked in 1931 -'stands out like [the] Barenjoey light'. 84Here, likened to a lighthouse marking Sydney's northernmost point, Shonka decade earlier representing himself as 'the Dry Digger'was described as one of the 'big three prohibition orators': a 'Pussyfoot with a punch' known for his 'thrilling and educational address "Drink versus Democracy"'. 85During this period and into the 1940s, Shonk was also involved with the Co-operative Movement, 86 and was well known as a general organiser for the Benevolent Society of NSW.Involved as a member of the executive of the NSW branch of the LNU from at least 1928, Shonk appears to have spent the early months of 1931 hatching several grand schemes for peace.One of these schemes was revealed in a February 1932 letter to the Secretary of the League of Nations responding to the proposal for a Peace Army promulgated in the London Daily Express (25 February 1932) by Maude Royden, Rev. H.R.L. Sheppard and Dr Herbert Grey. 87Shonk's letterincluded in correspondence 88 with hundreds of others professing their willingness to 'make the supreme sacrifice' for peaceinstead claims that he had himself detailed a similar plan to LNU Secretary Mr Raymond Watt in January 1931.In the attached three-page description of his plan, Shonk made reference to H.G. Wells' 1918 novel Joan and Peter, writing: H.G. Wells emphasises that youth will welcome the idea of working for world peace only if the quest is charged with adventure and heroism.The Peace Army idea meets the need, and in addition offers service divorced from the brand of Cain. 89is attentiveness to youth is perhaps also what drove Shonk's other far less dramatic 1931 peace scheme: the Children's Peace Vote.
Shonk's enthusiasm for his initial plan, which included the possibility of launching the scheme on a worldwide basis, was rather quickly dampened by fellow committee members who suggested that 'the value of an individual vote by children was very small'. 90Nonetheless, a motion was approved to discuss the plan with the Minister for Education.However, less than a week later, the LNU executive reconvened for an extraordinary meeting to discuss the 'objections of the minority' to the peace vote proposal. 91Some objections concerned the difficulties of handling 'certain matters through schools' and the necessity to 'convince the authorities that any plan proposed fitted in with true educational purposes'. 92Other criticisms cut to the core of the proposal, with one committee member questioning whether individual votes from children could be considered 'an accurate expression of feeling', while another argued that children were 'incompetent to make a decision on such a complex question as disarmament'. 93While Shonk argued his preference was for children to vote as individuals, he suggested that 'if the consent of the parent had to be gained, that would add weight'. 94He further conceded that 'it may be left to schools whether they would vote individually or collectively'. 95Yet, with council support mobilising behind a collective vote, by 24 June, Shonk informed the council that his 'original scheme had been so modified that he wished to withdraw from the committee'. 96espite Shonk's brief resignationhe rejoined the committee on 4 Augustplans for the scheme continued, and on 1 August a letter from the Education Minister was published in the Education Gazette.It declared: Seeing that the Day is primarily for the children, I desire, in so far as it is practicable, that the children should be invited to participate in the actual observance.In view of the importance of the World Disarmament Conference to be held early next year, it has been decided to permit the carrying out of a Children's Peace Vote Campaign in Departmental schools.Ibid. 93Ibid. 94Ibid. 95 The LNU also intended that children support their declaration 'where practicable' with a payment of one penny, which was to be collected by the school and used to become a corporate member of the LNU.Demonstrating the hopes for the day, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate, quoting an unspecified source, declared that 'this movement partakes of the nature of a children's crusade.It should give voice to those whose destinies are more at stake than those of any other section of the community, and must exert a spiritual influence of tremendous power'. 98The article further noted that the LNU hoped that under the leadership of the Federation of the League of Nations Societies in Brussels, global results might be collected, and then presented to the President of the World Disarmament Conference by at least two children from each country. 99n the day itself, the vote was put to students at assemblies and in classrooms.Some schools hosted visitors who gave addresses on the League, while at other schools the vote was put to students by senior students as part of a broader series of orations, performances and model assemblies. 100At one school, students spoke on diverse topics, including the Junior League of Nations, before the motion was moved by a male student and seconded by 'Jessie Simon (Girls' captain) who referred to women's efforts for peace'. 101That students at some schools couldand 181 didvote against the ideals of the League is clear from the results, but the reasons for these students' objections are unfortunately never explained. 102Conversely, the number of articles that emphasised that schools voted unanimously for peace indicates that the vote was largely symbolic.That this was primarily the fault of the LNUresulting from its choice to support collective votingis arguable, but it does not discount the possibility that children participating in this vote did so sincerely, with real hopes for disarmament and a sense of contributing to an international movement.

Combating the nonsense of armaments with brass bands for disarmament
To understand in a broader sense what the peace vote might have meant to participating children, I turn now to children's essays from 1931 onwards, specifically those dealing with disarmament.In these essays we see children adoptingor perhaps judges rewardinga far more urgent, critical, and even angry tone.This is interesting, given the following comments by an anonymous adjudicator for a 1933 Rotary competition on the topic 'The advantages of International understanding and goodwill'. 103me of the writers revealed a distinct tendency to stray from the subject, to enter the sphere of controversy, to attribute most of the ills of the day to Britain or America, to have a thrust at Communism or Nazism, to dwell a little too long on the League of Nations, Rotary, and so on. 104ommenting on the 'thoughtful, even forceful articles' and 'vigorous sermons against war [and] powerful pleas in the name of a common humanity', the adjudicator concluded that 'the future is safe with a youth actuated by the high purpose and splendid idealism revealed in these essays'. 105Indicating the strength of children's convictions, these comments are also a good reminder that children's texts selected for publication may themselves demonstrate more moderate and optimistic sentiments than those disqualified for entering spheres of controversy, casting blame, or overstressing the 'disadvantages and penalties due to international misunderstanding'. 106illiam Williams in his 1931 prize-winning essay abandoned metaphor to write plainly that 'the armaments system is not only a crime against mankind, but a mere nonsense for which it fails to achieve the purpose for which it was designed'. 107ssays such as William's were also more likely to emphasise the role of public mobilisation.He stated: The strength of disarmament lies in educating public opinion, for if peoples want disarmament and insist that their governments shall bring it about, it will be brought about … There should be a great and instructed public opinion actively in favour of disarmament; it should not be of a merely passive characterit must be dynamic and constructive … When it is realised that the deciding voice is in the hands of the people it will be seen that the only real solution of the armaments problem is to be found among the rank and file of all nations. 108ed Campbell, an 'eleven years and two-month-old pupil' from Murwillumbah primary school, writing in 1932, emphasised the importance of public support: 'We see that the League has already done some good, but it has no power unless the peoples of the world support it.For that reason, we in schools have lessons about the League, to make us know what it is and what it has done'. 109ikewise, emphasising the role of young people and the need for generational change, Grace Pankard, in her 1934 prize-winning essay 'How Can Youth Help Disarmament?', began: This question comes at a very appropriate time, for now is the time for the youth of today to show its true worth.The world has been, and still is, governed by men of the old ideas, and it is only too evident that they have lost contact with the great stream of life … So much of the work of disarmament is up in the clouds, for we must admit that much of peace work is only talkvague talk, which will vanish like a cloud before the fierce breath of another war.What is needed is one mighty stream pushing towards the common goal, not ten thousand rivulets diffusing their energy over unimportant trifles. 110ile this essay could be read as Grace simply seizing 'the scripts offered by the adult world' and acting them out as a 'virtuoso performer', 111 the remainder of her 105 Ibid. 106 essay suggests an understanding of the complexities of political action.Having diagnosed the dangerous potential for fracturing within the movement, Grace goes on to outline a proposal for an international disarmament corps, stating: 'We all know how much of the war glamour arises from the uniform and the brass band.Why not attach some of this glamour to peace work?Why not have a brass band for disarmament'. 112Grace here offers a powerful critique of those who would argue that war is based in 'a fundamental and unalterable incompatibility between the claims of the state and of the international community'. 113Instead, challenging Maza's 114 distinction between agency and performance, Grace embraces the political power of spectacle and appropriates powerful symbols of warism to conjure a vision of an international peace corps parading through the streets with their bands.To compliment this vision, she describes a broader programme of disarmament work that involves targeting children with lectures, lantern slides, picture films, magazines and correspondence clubs. 115That these activities are similar to many of the LNU's own efforts indicates Grace's conviction that these activitiesrather than being unimportant triflesare precisely what is required for disarmament to succeed.
'Do as much harm as good' While we today may concludechannelling Williamthat the Children's Peace Vote was neither 'dynamic' nor 'constructive', the results were nonetheless impressive, with 1056 schools 116 responding to the minister's request and 155,392 students voting to affirm the League's values.A total of 748 schools collected 60,000 pennies and 115 became full corporate members of the League. 117However, such a feat, while almost impossible (bureaucratically, logistically and ideologically) to imagine today, has not impressed historians, who have largely omitted it from histories of the League in Australia.One exception to this is Harrison-Mattely, who remarked in the 1970s that 'common sense should have dictated that the representatives at Geneva would have paid scant attention to the extravagant compilation of numbers which seems to have been one of the chief preoccupations of the LNU'. 118This interpretation is rather uncharitable given that other groups such as the Women's Disarmament Committee who compiled a petition of 6 million signatures to present to delegates at the Disarmament Conferencewere also engaged in programmes of 'extravagant compilation'.Andrew Webster goes as far as to suggest that 'the combined membership of the public organisations that made presentations at the special session of the Disarmament Conference convened to receive them on 6 February 1932 was an estimated 200 million people, approximately 10 percent of the world population at the time'. 119et high hopes for expanding the Children's Peace Vote on a worldwide basis were crushed before they got off the ground.While still waiting for the final results of the NSW vote, Raymond Wattnow in Genevastruggled to generate interest in the scheme.Explaining this to Tom Shonk, Watt wrote: The British and Welsh representatives are particularly interested (and awaiting NSW results) but depressingly sceptical as to the chances of putting over any similar scheme in their countries.They fear greatly (too greatly) that the educational authorities will look on the proposal as a propagandist effort and suspect any other proposals put before them later on however much they might be purely educational. 120tt then proceeded to describe how Dame Edith Lyttleton had advised him to link up with the World Student Movement and make it a youth vote, as the current plan was in her mind 'likely to be ridiculed as a "babies vote" and perhaps do as much harm as good'.That children's votes for peace could be considered 'harmful' to the cause of disarmament by one of the architects of the League's work with children -Dame Edith Lyttleton was herself the mover of the League's 1923 resolution to promote the teaching of League of Nations principlesreveals some of the hollow rhetoric behind the League's embrace of children.
Although falling significantly short of Shonk's vision, the NSW Children's Peace Vote did not entirely languish forgotten.Results were communicated on several occasions, first in a cable to Lord Cecil in advance of an International Public Meeting in Paris where Cecil was to represent the branches of the LNU throughout the empire, 121 and second in a letter to the President of the World Disarmament Conference.Although not related to the peace vote, a group of children were present at the Disarmament Conference with a 'deputation of 250 boys and girls carrying the flags of all nations' greeting the President on Goodwill Day and presenting him with a response to the Welsh Children's Message. 122Back in Australia, participating schools received specially designed certificates marking their affirmation of League values, and the NSW LNU continued expanding its work in schools, establishing well over 400 junior branches by the end of 1934. 123In Canberra, despite having no adult branches, reports of lavish celebrations for League of Nations Day at Telopea Park High School in 1934 note that this school alone had a junior membership of over 300. 124In Victoria there were 40 junior branches in schools by 1936 with junior members making up over 40 per cent of total members in the state. 125To affirm children's vital role in the League, the NSW LNU designed a membership card that declared: 'you have contributed to the peace of the world' (see Figures 5 and 6).By 1937, over 100,000 school children had joined in NSW, 'representing more than a fifth of all students in the state'. 126Throughout this period, annual reports of the NSW branch regularly described the schools' work as fundamental, with the Branch Bulletin of 1939 describing it as 'continuing to be a cause for lively satisfaction, from any long-range point of view … the most important of all the Unions activities'. 127here is, however, one other possible afterlife for the NSW vote: the British LNU's 1935 Peace Ballot.Described by Martin Ceadel as 'the first British referendum' 128 and Helen McCarthy as 'the greatest single success in terms of publicising the League', 129 almost 12 million voted in the Peace Ballot, 38.2 per cent of the United Kingdom's population over the age of 18. Various polls and questionnaires issued in several locations throughout the UK in 1933 and 1934 130 have typically been regarded as the catalyst for the national ballot.Yet, given that Cecil himself was the recipient of one of the NSW LNU's cables about the Children's Peace Vote, it is possible that this also shaped his thinking.This is, however, mere speculation, as a 1935 booklet entitled The Peace Ballot: The Official History did not mention the Children's Peace Vote, instead writing blusteringly that: The weathercock of articulate opinion whirled in the winds of contrary propagandas, and the still small voice of John Smith and Mary Brown remained inaudible.Obviously, the thing to do was to ask John Smith and Mary Brown.It was so obvious, so audaciously simple that nobody had ever thought of doing it. 131ile this assertion is undoubtedly untrue, what can be gleaned from this ballot is that perhaps nobodyor nobody with enough cloutconsidered that children's votes could make an important ongoing contribution to the movement.

Conclusion
Having recuperated the Children's Peace Vote of 1931, I have sought to do more than just tell a story of this event and the inter-generational streams of idealism that drove and animated it.I have explored the possibilities for writing a children's history that is sensitive to and at times willing to imagine how children sought to both imagine and work for a more peaceful world.Rather than reify this as a pure and innocent sentiment, I have sought to highlight the ways in which children were addressed and invoked as inhabiting specific kinds of childhoodsthemselves situated within civilisational teleologiesthat worked to offer some children a 'widening vision' while excluding others.I have also tried to balance the romantic idealism of some texts for children with the pragmatism, fear and anger evident in children's writing from this period.In doing so, I have also highlighted the need to look beyond the worldly to the otherworldlythe religious and the utopianas well as the importance of contesting easy distinctions between performance and political action.This has required exploring how adult-centrism, realism and warism have hereto prevented a thorough engagement with children's participation in disarmament campaigns, and sheds light more broadly on the biases that face scholars in theorising children's political action.
The Children's Peace Vote is a story of what might have beenan engagement with children as political actors rather than just angelic forms exerting a 'spiritual influence of tremendous power'. 132But it is also a story of something that seems no longer possible, and thisdespite its very real shortcomingsraises important questions about writing histories of ideals and idealists, and in particular writing children's histories of idealism that don't contribute to further reifying the figure of the child.It is my hope that this case also sheds some critical light on the way adult hopes for peaceful and democratic futures can be bound up with children's participation in politics in ways that both seek to deconstruct and reaffirm the status quo.Observing but also being willing to critique these impulses will be important as Australia begins to debate the merits of lowering the voting age to 16.When 16-yearolds can vote in this country, I hope we will be listening to the anger, disappointment, mistrust, grief and idealism in their voices, and not simply our own hopes for a world transformed and made new by young people.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author
Annie McCarthy is an Assistant Professor in Global Studies at the University of Canberra whose work has focused on children's participation in development programmes in India.More recently she has begun to build on her ethnographic research by exploring the historical dimensions of children and young people's participation in development, humanitarianism and peace activism.The focus of this research has been the transnational flows of child-authored materialsdrawings, stories, poems and lettersspecifically the way these texts enact humanitarianism and internationalism and highlight children's critiques and grievances against the adult world.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Cover of Peggy and the League of Nations.F.S. Hallowes, Peggy and the League of Nations (London: LNU, 1921).

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Illustration from The League of Nations School Book.Robert Jones and S.S. Sherman, The League of Nations School Book (London: Macmillan and Co, 1934), in Papers of Raymond Watt, MS 1923, Box 15, Folder 'League of Nations', NLA.
Figure 3. Education Department of Victoria, 'School Paper: Grades II and IV', 1 November 1928.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Front of NSW LNU junior membership card, in MS 1923, Box 1, Folder 12, NLA.Interestingly Raymond Watt seems to have borrowed or adapted the image on this card from the Welsh Children's Wireless message, who had been using a similar image on their materials since 1933.