ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered on the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the public presence of young people in a metropolitan setting. Homeless, helpless, a passive victim of the urban environment this is a dominant image of youth at large in the late-Victorian city. Growing up through the 1890s and early 1900s, a child in Melbourne was thus likely to experience less scope for autonomy in public than had been enjoyed by the first generation of children born to gold rush migrants in the 1860s and 1870s. Young Melburnians are now increasingly seeking online the autonomy that their forebears searched for outside, and trying, as ever, to stay one step ahead of the authorities called to police this virtual domain. A recommendation by the authors for the Victorian State Planning Policy Framework to explicitly refer to the rights of children to use and enjoy public space is yet to be implemented.
