AustLit

Author's abstract: 'This paper considers Australian children's literature against the list of shared characteristics of 'mainstream' Canadian children's novels, with particular reference to ideas about fear and about national contexts of fear ... It discusses the Tomorrow, When the War Began series by John Marsden as one way of reading Australian national fears and concerns relating to geography and history and of interrogating the nature of fear and the problematical nature of human response to it. It concludes by arguing for a new cultural focus, past assimilation, past multiculturalism, past guilt, and past blame, one that emphasizes a sense of being 'different-but-similar', of oneness within difference.'