Little_Boy_from_Manly

Little Boy from Manly

Little Boy from Manly

National personification of Australia

The Little Boy from Manly was a national personification of New South Wales and later Australia[citation needed] created by the cartoonist Livingston Hopkins of The Bulletin in April 1885.

The Little Boy from Manly, drawn by Norman Lindsay during the 1916 Conscription Referendum

In March 1885, as the New South Wales Contingent was about to depart for the Sudan, a letter was addressed to Premier William Bede Dalley containing a cheque for £25 for the Patriotic Fund 'with my best wishes from a little boy at Manly'. It was Australia's first overseas military adventure, and the little boy became a symbol either of Australian patriotism or, among opponents of the adventure, of mindless chauvinism. Hopkins put the boy in a cartoon, dressed in the pantaloons and frilled shirt associated with English storybook schoolboys of the namby-pamby kind. Over the following decades, he became The Bulletin's stock symbol of Young Australia.[1]

The 'Little Boy' has been identified as Ernest Laurence (1876-1963), later Alderman of Strathfield Council (1915-1920) and Mayor of Strathfield (1917-1918).[2]

References

  1. [1]
    Davison, Graeme, 'The Little Boy from Manly', in The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998), p.395, ISBN 0 19 553597 9.
  2. [2]
    Jones, Cathy. "From "Little Boy from Manly" to Mayor of Strathfield". Strathfield Heritage. Retrieved 3 November 2023.
  • nla.pic-an6426507 Cartoon A jubilee featuring the Little Boy from Manly, National Library of Australia.
  • itemID=844353 Cartoon The Roll Call - or The Contingent's Return with the Little Boy from Manly in right foreground (1885) by Livingston Hopkins, State Library of New South Wales.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Little_Boy_from_Manly, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.