Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill and the Development of Boarding Out in England and Australia: a study in cultural transmission

The adoption of boarding out by state children's departments across Australia is often attributed to the influence of English social reformers Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill, whose visit to the colonies in the early 1870s coincided with a period of growing dis-ease with existing provisions for neglected children. However, after their return to Britain, they used their experience in the colonies to castigate English authorities for being too slow to adopt a similar course. This article complicates existing theories of cultural transmission in relation to ideas about child welfare. It analyses the ways in which the Davenport Hill sisters laid claim to their expert speaking position, and argues for the importance of informal networks in the development of child welfare policy in the years before the rise of transnational children's rights organisations.