This paper recovers from the archive the seven week visit to Australia of the psychoanalyst and educationalist, Susan Isaacs as a delegate to the New Education Fellowship Conference in 1937. It focuses upon Isaacs's articulation of changing ideas of child development - from the eighteenth century idea of the ‘wild child’, born in a primitive state, naturally wicked and corrupt, whose impulses were to be tamed into civilized adulthood to the notion that the child's mind developed from the accumulation of experience beginning in infancy - a child with its own subjectivity - whose actions and experiences had meaning. While recognizing the centrality of Freud's theories of infantile sexuality as part of normal development and their extrapolation in subsequent writings by British Psychoanalytic theorists Merell Middlemore, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and John Bowlby, all of whom underlined the importance of early infant life in the formation of the infant and child's minds, I suggest that these ideas, and thoughts, albeit in a nascent form, were gaining currency in Australia from the late nineteenth century onwards and expressed in child welfare policy and practices. I will examine the part that Susan Isaacs played in re introducing these ideas. I use the term ‘re-introducing’ because some of these ideas concerning the importance of environment over heredity - had been widely discussed - and repressed - in Australia some thirty years before. This stream of thinking, the basis for developments in education and child psychology during the inter war years, was a significant springboard for the development psychoanalytic theory and practice in Australia.