AustLit

Pennell examines 'some of the changes and tensions in the Australian cultural context which have been influential in altering the ways that domestic settings, or spatial frameworks, are represented in [recent] realist fiction' (38). She focuses on Simon French's All We Know as an example that represents 'the suburban domestic settings as the normal site for Australian children to grow up' rather than the more traditional and dominant image of 'real Australians as people of the land, or the bush' (38). Pennell argues that the dominant spatialized images of Australia, the Bush and the city, sets up a dialectic between two paradigms of spatiality based on the dominant, patriarchal paradigm of binary opposites. Pennell argues that urban/suburban spatial frameworks are extremely under-represented in Australian fiction but the work of Simon French has been influential in 'leading children's literature in Australia way from representations of childhood settings as either pastoral idyll/adventure or outback disaster adventure' (39). Arguing that French's novel 'represents the plurality of spaces in the Australian suburbs' (46), Pennell views All We Know as an influential marker regarding Australian texts which foreground the experiences of children growing up in suburbia (47).