AustLit

Bradford identifies the discursive and narrative strategies involved in the representations of Aboriginal children in nineteenth century children's texts and argues that, 'white child readers are interpellated by colonial texts' to view the mixing or hybridization of identities as an 'ambiguous and threatening possibility (14). Bradford critiques the inherently 'ideological work' that permeates white representations of Aboriginality and in particular, the representation of Aboriginal children as 'hybrid grotesques' which threaten 'racial purity' (15) and who 'wilfuly reject the advantages of civilisation' (20). For Bradford, the Aboriginal children in these colonial texts carry a 'range of significances', all of which 'offer the white child readers absolution from colonial guilt by naturalizing the deaths of individual Aboriginal children and Aborigines collectively' (29). She concludes that it is the obsessive and visible linking of death and Aboriginality that discloses racial anxieties about the legitamacy of Australian nationhood (29).