1950s: Oblaten Swaps

May 21, 2019

By AHNZ

Swaps, also known as Oblaten, were an institution for young Kiwi girls from the mid-1950s to early 1960s. Perhaps the early 1970s also.

Not stickers!

They were for adding to young girl’s own scrapbooks which were shared with friends as a form of social media. So, rather than ipad tablets or cell phones conveying human memes and comments and hieroglyphics and photos, girls carried around these albums.

Of course, not being digital, to ‘share’ a post or a picture involved physical “swapping” from a store of these little 2D pictures. So, a little children’s economy was in place as integral to the practise- hence the name ‘swaps’.

What fascinates me though is the content! See from these examples how young girls of this time period were preoccupied with getting married, babies, children, child-rearing, and angelic Christmas purity! Was it perhaps an forward-looking, aspirational, photo album of the family the girls wanted to make just as a photo album is full of good memories of the family the moments have passed?

Preparation for the Life You Want

My premise is that a child’s play is preparation for life. In this era, young people’s natural drive to build a home and found their own family was up-front and they wanted to be ready for that future. This was no less than the environment they lived in, the Baby Boom was going off around them like storks making an air raid!

Bad news though. The 1960s counter-culture changed that K-selected priority to an r-selected one. Like Darth Vader, Barbie massacred all the parents and children here depicted in Swaps form. The new priority was to be engrossed with make-up, clothing, jewellery, accessories, shoes, hats, hair etc as modelled by your own Barbie doll. If you don’t like that I suppose you’ll have to be some kinda tomboy and read horse books and Nancy Drew. Or, the counter-counter-culture of late-eighties Sylvanian Families which got a ‘pass’ by directing the healthy maternal energy into pets (or, anthropomorphic families.)

More about this on my post about Happy Families, the card game.

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note: It has also crossed my mind that the WW2 conquest of Europe will have meant bringing back the spoils to the home culture. Oblaten thus became an appropriated form the same as the ostrich feather or the tiki doll. Ref. 1950s: Conquered Pacific Theatre Converted into Americana and 1884: Eulogy for Helvetia.

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