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'This chapter explores how Australian writers and illustrators in the twenty-first century depict the act of mothering in picture books for young children in relation to cooking and serving food. It draws on the idea that children’s texts can be understood as sites of cultural production and reproduction, with social conventions and ideologies embedded in their narrative representations. The analysis is based on a survey of 124 books that were shortlisted for, or won, Children’s Book Council of Australia awards between 2001 and 2013. Of the eighty-seven titles that contain food and have human or anthropomorphised characters, twenty-six (30 percent) contain textual or illustrative references to maternal figures involved in food preparation or provision. Examination of this data set reveals that there is a strong correlation between non-Anglo-Australian maternal figures and home-cooked meals, and a clear link between Anglo-Australian mothers and sugar-rich snacks. The relative paucity of depictions of ethnically unmarked mothers offering more nutritious foods is notable given the cultural expectations of mothers as caretakers of their children’s well-being. At the same time, the linking of non-Anglo-Australian mothers with home-cooked meals can be seen as a means of signifying a cultural authenticity, a closeness to the earth that is differentiated from the normalised Australian culture represented in picture books. This suggests an unintended alignment of mothers preparing and serving meals with “otherness,” which creates a distancing effect between meals that may generally be considered nutritious and the normalised self. I contend there are unexamined, and perhaps unexpected, cultural assumptions about ethnicity, motherhood, and food embedded in contemporary Australian picture books. These have the potential to inscribe a system of beliefs about gender, cultural identity, and food that contributes to readers’ understanding of the world and themselves.'
Source: Abstract.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- The Terrible Suitcase 2012 single work picture book
- The Potato People 2001 single work picture book
- Mirror 2010 single work picture book
- The Peasant Prince 2007 single work picture book
- Collecting Colour 2008 single work picture book
- Diary of a Wombat 2002 single work picture book
- A Bus Called Heaven 2011 single work picture book
- Jethro Byrde, Fairy Child 2002 single work picture book
- Tales from the Waterhole 2004 single work picture book
- My Dog 2000 single work picture book
- Eight 2006 single work picture book
- Ziba Came on a Boat 2007 single work picture book
- A Year on Our Farm 2002 single work picture book
- Special Kev 2008 single work picture book
- No Bears 2011 single work picture book
- You and Me : Our Place 2007 single work picture book
- Lizzie Nonsense 2004 single work picture book
- Maudie and Bear 2010 single work picture book
- Papunya School Book of Country and History 2001 single work information book
- Irving the Magician 2005 single work picture book
- A is for Aunty 2000 single work picture book
- Tom Tom 2008 single work picture book
- The Big Little Book of Happy Sadness 2008 single work picture book
- Chatterbox 2006 single work picture book
- Seven More Sleeps : Babs the Baby and Fog the Dog 2004 single work picture book