AustLit

'W.E. Johns’s failure to adapt to the postwar era left Biggles a shadow of his wartime self, writes Adam Nicol'

'Biggles, the hero of a series of children's books by Captain W.E. Johns, was massively popular in the mid-twentieth century, with Australia being one of the major markets. In Australia there was also a radio serial that in the early 1950s, as well as a series of comics, at times with the same story available in three different modes. Many stories had a Cold War background, imparting important messages to an impressionable age group.' (Publication abstract)

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).