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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Each chapter describes an incident in the life of Harry and Sydney Lawson. The Lawsons deal with bushrangers, snakes, and lost children with courage and humour, and details such as life on the goldfields and the influence of and attitudes to the Chinese are presented in a direct, often ironic style. Rowe subscribes to the superiority of the native-born Australian over the immigrant: "They're a queer lot the blackfellows ... but they're a long sight better than the new chums -they were born in the colony just like us. A blackfellow can ride like a native but those Englishmen look so scared when a horse begins to buck."' (The Oxford Companion to Australian Children's Literature ed. Stella Lees and Pam Macintyre (1993): 371).
Notes
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Serialized in Good Words 1869 under the pseudonym of Edward Howe; First edition (Anon) Pub. by Bell & Daldy, 1869, 3 vols. (Marcie Muir Australian Children's Books: A Bibliography: Volume One 1774-1972 (1992): 360).
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Britishness and Australian Popular Fiction : From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Sold by the Millions : Australia's Bestsellers 2012; (p. 46-66) 'The analysis offered here is [...], a panoptic perspective of the tangled skeins of literary imagination and imitation, gender and genre requirements, editorial control, market considerations and the sheer economics of the international book trade that knotted Australian popular literature into the cultural and economic fabric of the British empire.' (47) -
y
Fading to Black : Aboriginal Children in Colonial Texts
St Lucia
:
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource
,
2009
Z978090
1999
single work
criticism
Bradford identifies the discursive and narrative strategies involved in the representations of Aboriginal children in nineteenth century children's texts and argues that, 'white child readers are interpellated by colonial texts' to view the mixing or hybridization of identities as an 'ambiguous and threatening possibility (14). Bradford critiques the inherently 'ideological work' that permeates white representations of Aboriginality and in particular, the representation of Aboriginal children as 'hybrid grotesques' which threaten 'racial purity' (15) and who 'wilfuly reject the advantages of civilisation' (20). For Bradford, the Aboriginal children in these colonial texts carry a 'range of significances', all of which 'offer the white child readers absolution from colonial guilt by naturalizing the deaths of individual Aboriginal children and Aborigines collectively' (29). She concludes that it is the obsessive and visible linking of death and Aboriginality that discloses racial anxieties about the legitamacy of Australian nationhood (29).
-
God's One Country : The Description of Asians by Australian Children's Authors
1997
single work
criticism
— Appears in: La Trobe Library Journal , Spring no. 60 1997; (p. 62-73) 'This paper will examine some of the representations made of Asian characters in Australian children's literature, with particular reference to the image of Chinese, who are the Asian people most frequently alluded before World War I and who have continued to be present in more recent writing' (62).
-
God's One Country : The Description of Asians by Australian Children's Authors
1997
single work
criticism
— Appears in: La Trobe Library Journal , Spring no. 60 1997; (p. 62-73) 'This paper will examine some of the representations made of Asian characters in Australian children's literature, with particular reference to the image of Chinese, who are the Asian people most frequently alluded before World War I and who have continued to be present in more recent writing' (62). -
Britishness and Australian Popular Fiction : From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Sold by the Millions : Australia's Bestsellers 2012; (p. 46-66) 'The analysis offered here is [...], a panoptic perspective of the tangled skeins of literary imagination and imitation, gender and genre requirements, editorial control, market considerations and the sheer economics of the international book trade that knotted Australian popular literature into the cultural and economic fabric of the British empire.' (47) -
y
Fading to Black : Aboriginal Children in Colonial Texts
St Lucia
:
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource
,
2009
Z978090
1999
single work
criticism
Bradford identifies the discursive and narrative strategies involved in the representations of Aboriginal children in nineteenth century children's texts and argues that, 'white child readers are interpellated by colonial texts' to view the mixing or hybridization of identities as an 'ambiguous and threatening possibility (14). Bradford critiques the inherently 'ideological work' that permeates white representations of Aboriginality and in particular, the representation of Aboriginal children as 'hybrid grotesques' which threaten 'racial purity' (15) and who 'wilfuly reject the advantages of civilisation' (20). For Bradford, the Aboriginal children in these colonial texts carry a 'range of significances', all of which 'offer the white child readers absolution from colonial guilt by naturalizing the deaths of individual Aboriginal children and Aborigines collectively' (29). She concludes that it is the obsessive and visible linking of death and Aboriginality that discloses racial anxieties about the legitamacy of Australian nationhood (29).
Last amended 14 Jul 2011 09:31:50
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