AustLit

Halliday critiques two picture books, The Last of His Tribe (Henry Kendall )and The Drover's Boy (Ted Egan & Robert Ingpen) by asking who speaks, who is silenced and what constructions are used to reinforce this silence in texts which purport to represent Aboriginal people and their experiences. Halliday argues that these texts (like many others), say more about the construction of white identity than they do about Aboriginality and that they reinforce an ideologiocal position that is fundamentally racist (p.38). This occurs through the representation of Aboriganal people as '...a race whom history has passed by' and Halliday asks the question, are these texts are an attempt to reconcile [white] feelings of shame and sorrow or are they blatant propganda?(pp.38, 47) She concludes her analysis by arguing that while these texts may introduce the child reader to some of the untold stories and lost histories of Aboriginal people, essentially they reinforce 'a dominant white hegemony as the desired norm for Australian society' (p.47).