AustLit

'This introduction situates the representation of plants in Australian children’s and young adult literature in relation to Indigenous Australian stories of and relationships with plants, and the field of critical plant studies. The first section discusses the notion of “storying plants,” grounded in Palyku writers Gladys Idjirrimoonya Milroy and Jill Milroy’s call to tell the “right” stories about trees. It then introduces the field of critical plant studies, reviews previous forays into the intersection between children’s and young adult literature and critical plant studies, and provides a historical overview of plant representation in Australian children’s and young adult literature, from colonial and postcolonial engagement and dislocation to recent Indigenous publications drawing on ancient relationships to Country and to plants. The subtitle, “Roots and Winged Seeds,” alludes to the ways in which plants, and the stories of plants, are at once anchored in the ground and travel widely. Thus, while considerations of Australia and its plants form the core of the book, it also includes transnational perspectives, including that of Aotearoa New Zealand, Ukraine, and Poland. The editors hope these contributions to plant studies and children’s and young adult literature act as winged seeds, flying across the world to take root.'  (Introduction)

'Walking through the Australian bush is a walk through a living library. From the moment the Ancestors moved through Country, creating all the sentient beings, we can still see today, and those that we can’t, Australian plants and trees have held both physical and psychic, tangible and sacred knowledges. This chapter explores the possible portals of access that are opened to hearing the stories and languages of Australian plants and trees when shared by Aboriginal Australian peoples through the form of the picturebook. Such contemporary Australian books weave with ancient ways of knowing to create nurturing spaces for all readers to see, touch, smell, hold and taste the world around them. Through their own forms of Story and Language, plants and trees give insight into medicines, tools and food, as well as kinship, seasons and ceremony. When woven with picturebook modalities, they encourage embodied relationships with non-human and more-than-human elements of Country.' (Publication abstract)

'The picturebooks Welcome to Country: A Traditional Aboriginal Ceremony by Aunty Joy Murphy and Lisa Kennedy (2016) and The Rabbits (2008/2020) by John Marsden and Shaun Tan both thematise human relationships to land, from differing cultural viewpoints. Here, I investigate the role played by plants in the representation of the human-to-land interrelationship in the two works. Inspired by a diffractive reading methodology, I explore how both picturebooks, although they sprout from differing cultural epistemologies, draw on the power of trees to symbolise and explain cultural and ecological relationships. Since the two primary texts establish their own life world governed by differing epistemologies—and since uncovering this as a significant part of the analysis—I do not approach the texts with the same analytical lens. Rather, focussing on plant representation, I draw on the stories of Aboriginal Elders in my reading of Welcome to Country and on perspectives from colonial botany to discuss The Rabbits.' (Publication abstract)

'Jeannie Baker uses mixed materials, including real plants, to illustrate relationships between nature, humans and suburban and urban development in her textless collage picturebooks Window (1991) and Belonging (2004). These popular texts are read and studied in the classroom to raise environmental awareness and explore themes of sustainable development and community action. How can a reading of these two books through the lens of Indigenous writer and academic Ambelin Kwaymullina’s verse manifesto, Living on Stolen Land, reveal and disturb the mechanisms of settler-colonialism as they appear in Baker’s work? Placing these texts in juxtaposition with each other generates new understandings and new narrative possibilities.' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter draws on ecocriticism and critical plant studies to argue that Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins’ My Place ([1987] 2008) can—and should—be read as a plant-centred narrative. Australia’s unique landscape, with its towering ghost gums, sun-baked bushland and vast red sand, plays an intrinsic part in Australian picturebook storytelling. In My Place, this landscape is transformed—both figuratively and literally—as a bustling Sydney suburb in 1988 slowly transforms into an Aboriginal creek camp in 1788. Ultimately, only one natural element endures the centuries of change and industrial progress: a centuries-old fig tree. While it is the social and political nature of My Place that is most often critically examined, this chapter focuses on the environmental elements of the book, while examining the ethical issues of non-Indigenous authors telling First Nations stories. It argues that the fig tree acts as both a keeper of memories and a “survivor tree.” Not only does it create a shared bond between the book’s narrators across time, but it also ties all of their stories—and thus all of the history and memories held within them—together.' (Publication abstract)

'Bindi (2020), by Gunai poet and children’s author Kirli Saunders, is a verse novel dedicated to “those who plant trees.” Told from the perspective of eleven-year-old Bindi, it is a story of a community caring for Country, while experiencing and recovering from a bushfire. The planting of she-oak seedlings forms the core of the narrative and provides a structure: the verse novel’s three parts are named “Seedlings,” “Cinders,” and “Sprouts.” While Anglophone Australian poetry traditionally depicts the voice of the wind in the sighing branches of the she-oak tree as mournful, the pods of she-oak trees are the only food of the threatened glossy black cockatoo, and in Bindi, the trees are connected with hope and resilience. The “vegetal hope” manifest in Bindi is connected to the materiality, culture and ecology of plants, not just their symbolic function, and is underscored by the use of Gundungurra words within the poems. Drawing on John Charles Ryan’s approaches to vegetal poetics and Palyku writers Gladys and Jill Milroy’s essay “Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Family Too” (2008), this chapter argues that she-oak trees in Bindi function as material and semiotic agents of hope.' (Publication abstract)

'May Gibbs, creator of the gumnut babies—humanoid bush babies associated with eucalyptus trees—is popularly recognized as one of the early illustrators of Australian children’s literature to represent indigenous Australian plants in her work. A British settler on colonized Indigenous land, Gibbs participates in both the shaping of an Australian identity for settler-culture children through connection with the Australian landscape and the erasure of Australian First Peoples. This chapter offers a new perspective on the tangled relations between human settlers and indigenous plants (as well as other indigenous more-than-human beings) through a critical plant studies approach, considering the implications of the genealogy and hybridity of the gumnuts, as well as the books’ treatment of multispecies kinship. Whereas the gumnuts embody plant-human kinship and model existence within lively multispecies entanglements, the gumnut books also raise difficult questions about identity and belonging on settler-colonized land, challenging some of the values of settler culture and propagating others.' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter examines Ukrainian Australian literature for children and youth written by 14 authors between 1950 and 1990. All but one of these authors moved from Ukraine to Australia in the aftermath of World War II. The analyses combine Donna Haraway’s (The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003) concept natureculture with the notion of gaze. The compound “natureculture” challenges the intellectual tradition of separating nature and culture to highlight interactions between the two. Human influence on plants has been normalized to the extent plant influence on humans is rendered invisible. We use the notion of “gaze” to make visible aspects of human-plant interaction that might otherwise go unnoticed, highlighting instances where the authors either obscure or celebrate plant autonomy. This chapter focuses on the representation of the Australian bush in literature for Ukrainian children and youth. We examine representations of bush as a place, then as a plant or group of plants. The former exposes Ukrainian settlers’ imposition of “Ukrainian gaze” onto the landscape: i.e., seeing the Australian bush through the lens of Ukrainian landscapes. However, we also identify works where Ukrainian Australian authors recognize plant autonomy. We suggest this becomes more evident when the bush is conceived as a plant and/or in relation to the Indigenous populations of Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter analyses the relationships between European protagonists and the plants of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in Polish adventure novels for young adults by Stanisław Majchrowski (The Mysteries of the Island of Aotea, 1963), Mieczysław Smolarski (The Mysteries of the Southern Islands, 1959), and Alfred Szklarski (Tomek in the Land of Kangaroos, 1957). The term “green strangeness” refers to the depiction of plants by Polish writers who had never visited Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand. The worlds they describe, located far from Europe, introduce young readers to the notions of “strangeness” and “freedom” conceptualised through the human-plant relationship. This chapter draws on plant studies, ecological realism (Anna Barcz) to examine the intersection of adventure novels, colonialism, and botany in narratives about young Poles who are fascinated by the “exotic” natural environment and the Indigenous people of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.' (Publication abstract)

'Australian authors Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s 2019 young adult space adventure Aurora Rising features several unsettling representations of plants. These do not just serve to create suspense but also to address questions concerning the relationship between humanity and nature. Approaching the plant horror elements in the novel from a postcolonial ecoGothic perspective enables engagement with the underlying anthropocentric bias of Aurora Rising and its entanglements with imperialist ideologies. Based on selected close readings, this chapter argues that the novel eventually does not critique exploitative (neo-)colonial-expansionist ways of thinking but perpetuates them by pitting two imperial powers (humans vs aliens) against each other. This fight leaves other living beings caught in the crossfire, reducing nature in the novel to a mere battleground against which a Cold War-like quest for dominance takes place.' (Publication abstract)

'In colonial Australian children’s literature, the desire to exert control over the land, its inhabitants, and the construction of a national identity has been a central concern, exemplified in the narrative of the lost child in the Australian bush. The lost child trope offers a reflection of “Australian anxiety” (Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge University Press, 1999), symbolising the troubled negotiation in integrating European ideals onto an Indigenous landscape (Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, xii. Cambridge University Press, 1999); this is heightened when the lost child is female. Colonial texts place deviant female characters as being subsumed by the bush as a culmination of concerns about national identity and gender roles. This chapter explores the colonial tradition of representation of the girl and the bush as entities to be feared and dominated through A Little Bushmaid by Mary Grant Bruce and Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner. It considers how contemporary Australian Young Adult texts rewrite the lost child in the bush trope through the complex symbolic relationship between the girl and the bush in Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden and The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf reclaims a focus on Indigenous land, identity, knowledge, and narrative, returning to Indigenous roots.' (Publication abstract)