Children

Despite the 1873 Victorian legislation limiting working hours to eight for women and children, enforcement was slack. In 1883 inspectors at James Miller's South Melbourne ropeworks found ten year olds working sixty hours a week. Young children, employed extensively in the tobacco industry, worked similar hours as did those in the clothing and other industries. They were paid a pittance, and often nothing for the first few months. Their health suffered from cramped, unsanitary, and poorly ventilated conditions. In 1882 Dr Beaney described how

A little girl was brought to me three days ago by her mother, a little worn-out looking thing. She had been in a factory twelve or eighteen months already, and she is only thirteen now. She is like a little old woman, pale and shrivelled, and suffers from palpitation of the heart.

'Swallow and Ariell's Biscuit Works'

Hours of sitting led to a number of health problems including curvature of the spine.

Compulsory education laws, introduced in Victoria in 1872, were frequently ignored as truant officers failed to inspect factories. At the time of this image, one truant officer testified that 'there were fully twenty children … between ten and eleven years of age' working at the Swallow and Ariell biscuit factory in Port Melbourne.