Two boys in the playground:

1st boy: "Who was in the war?"

2nd boy: "I dunno."

1st boy: (waving hand quickly in front of 2nd boy’s eyes) "Major Blink!"

Three girls with their toes together. One points to each toe in turn, chanting:

"Boy scout, you’re out,

Girl skin, you’re in."

Everybody has been, or is a child. Most of us usually identify bits of our childhood as though they are scattered pieces 
of a jigsaw puzzle. We might remember parts of a game, a few words of a rhyme or song, a favourite toy, maybe even the 
names of some of our playmates. As we ‘grow up’, the play traditions of childhood merge into the background of our life 
experience and become somehow invisible. Yet they are all around us - in our playgrounds, streets, parks and backyards.

In the introduction to her book ‘Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s Folklore in Australia’, June Factor writes, 

"Much of children’s play is spontaneous, haphazard, individual and novel. Children’s folklore, however, exists in that 
portion of children’s play which is social, rule-governed and often traditional. It is part of the continuum of folklore, 
sometimes shared with adults, more often learnt from other children in the long, anonymous chain of the oral tradition, 
subject to the processes of decay, preservation, adaptation and innovation."

Children’s folklore is all about the accumulated traditions of childhood. The Australian Children’s Folklore Collection 
classifies it as either the folklore of children - play lore such as rhymes, games, taunts, jokes and riddles which are 
passed from child to child, or folklore for and about children - the traditional songs, games, finger-plays, stories, 
proverbs and sayings that are passed on informally by adults. It has a long tradition - games like marbles and knucklebones 
have been traced back thousands of years, and rhymes chanted in playgrounds today may have been heard in streets and 
playgrounds for hundreds of years, some surviving almost unchanged.

Children’s folklore is also cheeky and dynamic - a sub-culture reflecting and parodying the broader culture surrounding it. 
It allows us to gain glimpses of ourselves and our society through the eyes of our children: 

Gough, Gough, had a bad cough,

Went to the doctor’s, 

Got three days off.

People yelled, "The country’s in ruin!"

Gough called out, "It’s all the doctor’s doin’."

Ashes to ashes,

Dust to dust,

If Lillee don’t get ya

Then Thommo must.

Mary had a little lamb,

And it began to sicken.

She took it to Kentucky Fried

And now it’s finger-lickin’.

Children’s own culture has survived and adapted, despite war, famine, television, electronic games, school holiday 
programs and mass advertising. As long as children have free time to ‘just muck around’, it will continue to thrive.

Judy McKinty l