Emily Gallagher Emily Gallagher i(11732556 works by)
Gender: Female
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.

Works By

Preview all
1 y separately published work icon The Childhood Imagination in Australia, 1890-1940 Emily Gallagher , Canberra : 2023 28622581 2023 single work thesis

'This thesis explores the imaginative lives of children growing up in Australia in the half century between 1890 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The very act of imagining, whether it is the subtle embellishment of reality or the invention of an entire fantasy world, has long been one of the major enterprises of childhood. Yet although historians of Australia have readily embraced the imagination as an interpretative paradigm, little research has considered the imaginative lives of children. Focusing on children's play, writing and art, this thesis examines six imaginative worlds of Australian childhood. These are the worlds of amateur journalism, bird loving, war and adventure, dolls, the future - especially as it relates to a new aerial modernity - and monster and faery folklore. By focusing on children's own processes of meaning-making, and engaging with an older body of scholarship on children's folklore, this thesis enriches and unsettles a historiography that has long privileged the voices and experiences of adults. It reveals a wealth of children's own documentary records and recognises children as cultural, social and political actors, while also paying close attention to how their imaginative lives were connected to the adult world. At a time when the social value and material condition of children's lives were undergoing significant change across the Western world, Australian children were often acutely aware of the politics of age. They were attentive to the webs of dependency that structured their everyday lives as well as the emancipatory power of the imagination. It was a power that both settler and Aboriginal children used often and freely, and it was one of the ways they made meaning out of dynamic social change and exerted control over their lives. By charting a history of children's imaginative lives during the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, this study uncovers a shared world of meaning and experience that sheds new light on the history of modern Australia and childhood. It also offers a deeper understanding of the double helix of children's play and imaginations: one strand representing the universal and ubiquitous aspects of children's imaginative lives and the other the particular forms of imagining that are shaped by circumstances and cultures. Often negotiating a complex set of social and cultural expectations, children embraced the creative and contradictory power of the imagination, crafting new ways of seeing and belonging in a settler society and increasingly globalised world.'

Source: Abstract.

1 Emily Gallagher Review of Cathy Perkins, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross Emily Gallagher , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , August no. 5 2021; (p. 259-264)

— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross Cathy Perkins , 2019 single work biography
Cathy Perkins’s The Shelf Life of Zora Cross begins with a scene not unfamiliar to readers of Australian literary history: a ‘little schoolgirl’ scribbling away on the ‘splintery verandah’ of her family’s bush home. According to family lore, the nine-year-old had been destined for the inky way long before she gripped her first pencil. An ode was written soon after her birth foretelling her career as a writer, and when the poet Mary Hannay Foott met the two-year-old in 1892 she was impressed to discover the youngster could compose rhymes.

 (Introduction)

1 Is Blood Everything? Four New Young Adult Novels Emily Gallagher , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 417 2019; (p. 54-55)

— Review of My Father's Shadow Jannali Jones , 2019 single work novel ; This is How We Change the Ending Vikki Wakefield , 2019 single work novel ; It Sounded Better in My Head Nina Kenwood , 2019 single work novel ; The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling Wai Chim , 2019 single work novel
'A whistleblower’s child hides from a drug ring in the Blue Mountains. A sixteen-year-old rolls through life like an armadillo. A Melbourne high-school graduate wrestles with her insecurities. The daughter of a Chinese restaurateur juggles her responsibility to care for her siblings as her mother’s health deteriorates.' (Introduction)
1 Crawling with Stories : Four New Young Adult Novels Emily Gallagher , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June - July no. 412 2019; (p. 38-39)

— Review of Highway Bodies Alison Evans , 2019 single work novel ; The Honeyman and the Hunter Neil Grant , 2019 single work novel ; Four Dead Queens Astrid Scholte , 2019 single work novel ; How It Feels to Float Helena Fox , 2019 single work novel

'On 20 August 2018 the ABC aired a ‘special literary edition’ of Q&A during the Melbourne Writers Festival. It had a stellar line-up: John Marsden, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Sofie Laguna, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Trent Dalton. Viewers must have been optimistic. Were Q&A’s producers indulging in a long hour of lively literary debate? Unfortunately, they were not. But even though politics overshadowed much of the discussion that evening, the panellists made a considerable effort to draw on their expertise as writers rather than as political commentators when answering questions from the audience.' (Introduction)

1 A Love of the Past Emily Gallagher , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Monthly Blog , August 2017;
X