AustLit
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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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When Australia Calls: The English Immigrant in Australian Children's Literature,
single work
criticism
(p. 5-12)
Pearce's article examines the types of messages that were being disseminated to readers about Australian identity in children's texts in the 1950's, during what she describes as a 'highly complex and interactive process of cultural negotiations regarding a definitive Australian literary tradition and a growing sense of 'Australianness' in wider society (7). Pearce is interested in how the American and British ideology of the time is incorporated into narratives about national identity and looks closely at the W.E Johns novel Biggles in Australia which she argues, 'verifies an image of Australia as deferential colonial offspring needing the manpower of the Mother Country to get it out of nasty scrapes' (7). Pearce reads Allan Aldous' novel The New Australians as indicative of the prevailing masculine ideology which underpins any representation of Australian identity and fundamentally reinforces patriarchal gender roles by connecting men and boys with an idealized British migrant past, while women and undesirable men are associated negatively with an Americanized future (11). Pearce concludes that novels for children were at this time, 'overwhelmingly nationalistic and assimilationist' and that essentially, '[t]he message emanating from children's books of this decade appears to be that real or true Australians are males living in the Bush' (11).
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Some Other Country's History,
single work
criticism
(p. 21-30)Scott explores an 'understanding of the artistic nature of history-making and its political implications' (29) via an examination of two texts which she argues, offer 'non-traditional perspectives in reintepreting history' (21). Scott's comprehensive analysis of the two narratives, Donald Duck (by Chinese-American writer Frank Chin) and Do Not Go Around the Edges: Poems (Daisy Utemorrah), looks at the different narrative techniques employed by both novels as well as reading the illustrations which accompany Utemorrah's poetry, in terms of the representation of excluded and/or marginalized subjectivities - Chinese-Americans and Aboriginal Australians respectively. She posits that both novels 'focus explicitly and/or implicitly on the process of history-making and meaning-making for the individual and involve questions not only of interpretation, but of understanding what 'really' happened' (29).
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The New Fringe Dwellers : The Problem of Ethnicity in Recent Australian Children's Picture Books,
single work
criticism
(p. 31-39)Kroll looks at several children's texts in an effort to investigate a number of questions pertinent to the issue of moving the representation of ethnic groups 'beyond the immigration experience in literature so that the ethnicity of non-Anglo characters is no longer the focus' (31). This includes clarifying the cultural norms against which such characters are pitted, investigating the significance of the landscape in defining nationality and finally, considering whether having more authors/illustrators of non-Anglo origin in the field would 'alter the representation of ethnic groups' (31). She concludes that 'the appearance of non-Anglo children or adults as picture book protagonists has not increased to a substantial degree in recent years' and while ethnic characters are 'visible', the lack of centrality given to migrant groups and individuals continues the process of marginalization, tokenism and stereotyping which continues to dominate representations of non-Anglo experiences in Australian picture books (38).
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The Lost and Possessed Child in Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw', William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty's 'The Excorcist' and Victor Kelleher's 'Del-Del',
single work
criticism
(p. 40-48)Schober examines a range of texts, including Del-Del by Victor Kelleher, in relation to possible contradictory readings of the lost and possessed child. He argues that 'the relationship between childhood innocence and corruption is problematized by the fact that sometimes the lost-possessed child is complicit in the possession' (40). Particularly in Kelleher's text, where the tensions between 'opposing ideologies of childhood' are overt and the lost-possessed child may be read as 'a vessel of good or evil, innocence and corruption ignorance and knowledge, or both' (40). Schober sees the main site of these tensions as residing in a clash between Calvinist and Romantic traditions, whereby the former perceives the mind of the child as particularly susceptible to possession, while the Romatic ideal of the child is one of pure innocence. To this end, he argues that 'it is necessary...to incorporate the notion of a dialectic, where the ideas of the one influence, emphasize, inform and define our thinking of the other' (47).
