From almost as soon as the West Australian government was formed, it began to pass laws related to the minutiae of how people lived, worked and played.
The WA State Records Office holds all the master sets of legislation passed in the state, as well as a host of other documents showing how the laws were enforced.
One of the earliest dates was from 1849 when a new police ordinance was passed that made it unlawful to fly a kite in a public place.
"It doesn't say where you could fly a kite, but you couldn't fly it in the street or in a public place," Damien Hassan, senior archivist with the State Records Office told Dustin Skipworth on ABC Radio Perth.
It wasn't the only law that interfered with kids having fun.
In the records from 1931 is a file, complete with a police photograph, of a 17-year-old boy with tousled hair and a knitted cardigan who had been convicted of playing cricket on the road and received either a fine or 48 hours in detention.
"This was just a week after he had been charged with riding his bike without his hands on the handlebars," Mr Hassan said.
The game of Knock and Run, where children would knock on a front door before they ran away and hid, was also clearly something authorities were keen to discourage.
Street life was regulated for adults too.
"You weren't allowed to dust beat or otherwise spank your carpet in the street, that was completely not allowed," Mr Hassan said.
"You weren't allowed to take your dog into a public garden or park.
"You could probably walk it around the street but not into public parks, which were considered pretty nice places to walk and not to be disturbed by a dog or possibly children."
Corporal punishment commonplace
Things got even tougher at school, where regulations about caning both boys and girls were brought in in 1895.
"We hold the punishment books at the State Records Office, which document the children receiving the cane and what they were being punished for, how many strokes of the cane they got," Mr Hassan said.
"Disobedience, cheating, carelessness. Talking in class — these are common reasons for being caned.
"But then you also have some more unusual reasons such as removing spark plugs from a teacher's car, being caught eating sandwiches in the toilets, forging mother's comment 'good' on reading assignments."
A bad era to look a little 'dodgy'
When it came to adults, life was also about staying in line, and police could arrest someone on a charge of "evil fame", introduced in the Justice Act of 1902.
"For some years we'd come across this charge of evil fame in the police and prison records and we'd always wondered what it was about," Mr Hassan said.
"We didn't get to the bottom of it until fairly recently.
"They weren't even intending to carry out a crime, because there's another law for that — evil design.
"It's just someone who doesn't really have a job that's considered worthy and that officials might have just wanted out of the way."
The records show that thousands of people were charged with evil fame from 1902 through to the 1950s and were imprisoned or had to pay a surety.
"This would have been [in] Fremantle Prison in many instances, which was a pretty hard place to do your time," Mr Hassan said.
"In some cases, officials tried to actually move these people interstate but then there were appeals against that.
"It's a very strange law."
