AustLit
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
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).
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 6 May 2015 10:55:14
14-30
Fading to Black : Aboriginal Children in Colonial Texts
Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature
Subjects:
- A Mother's Offering to Her Children 1841 selected work prose poetry
- A Short Memoir of William Wimmera an Australian Boy Who Sailed from Melbourne, April 1 1851, Died at Reading, March 10 1852 1853 single work prose
- The Boy in the Bush 1869 single work children's fiction
- Twice Lost : A Story of Shipwreck, and of Adventure in the Wilds of Australia 1876 single work children's fiction
- Billabong Books 1910-1942 series - author children's fiction
- In Quest of Gold, or, Under the Whanga Falls 1885 single work children's fiction
- The White Stone : A Story of a Boy from the Bush 1900 single work children's fiction
- King Bungaree's Pyalla and Stories Illustrative of the Manners and Customs that Prevailed Among Australian Aborigines 1891 selected work prose
- Australian Legendary Tales : Folk-lore of the Noongahburrahs as Told to the Piccanninies 1896 selected work prose
Export this record