And your petitioners humbly pray ...

How the exhibition fits with VELS and VCE

The petitions were grouped to give an idea of how some issues have developed over the past 150 years. The petitions show the changing attitudes of society to various activities over time. The petitions demonstrate how some of the larger petitions were able to influence parliament and why laws were changed.

The petitions were grouped into topics to help illustrate these changes:

Drinking
Liquor licences and laws over the past 150 years have aroused much interest and concern from many quarters as demonstrated in the various petitions here.

Race
Aboriginals requested many changes to their rights. Chinese also protested that they were often being unjustly treated.

Women’s rights
The Women’s suffrage petitions demonstrate the various attitudes prevailing at the time towards women’s rights. While the Barmaids Bill demonstrates how late in the 20th century it was before women gained the right to work as barmaids in hotels.

Animals
Animals often aroused people’s passions. Over 44,000 people signed the petition against having hens in battery cages. While in Bayside residents wanted some control over the numbers of possums destroying their gardens.

Cars and roads
The Half -mile petition 1936 requested that road registration fees be lowered and the law was changed.

Sunday Trading
The petitions requesting that the laws change to allow various activities to take place on Sundays demonstrate the effect on all aspects of life that the restrictive Sunday laws had.

Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS)

The study of petitions is relevant to specific strands of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS), for levels 4, 5 and 6.

Strand: Physical, Personal and Social Learning
Domain: Civics and Citizenship

Level 4 The process of making and changing laws.
Level 5 Origins and features of representative government; political rights and how they were achieved in Australia; purposes of laws and the processes of creating and changing them.
Level 6 Although this level focuses on Federal government, aspects of the Parliament of Victoria are almost identical to the Federal Parliament, which shares a common Westminster heritage.

Strand : Discipline-based Learning
Domain: Humanities (History)

Gathering and documenting evidence from a variety of sources including artefacts, documents and graphics, and interpreting evidence.

The conventions of a range of forms of representation such as timelines, media reports, multimedia presentations, oral presentations, posters, photographic and written essays.

Level 4 Growth of the Port Phillip District; the 1850s Gold Rush to Federation.

Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE)

Certain elements of the exhibition hold some relevance to the following VCE Study Designs:

History
Unit 3: Australian History – imagining Australia
Area of study 1 – A new land: Port Phillip District 1830 – 1860

Legal Studies
Unit 3: Law-making
Area of study 1 – Parliament and the citizen

International Politics
Unit 3: Democracy in the making
Area of study 1 – Washington to Canberra

The values, ideas, social and historical contexts of the political systems of Australia and the United States, including reference to the British system (the Victorian Parliament mirrors many of the structural features and traditions of the British Parliament at Westminster).