Cirrus@Austlit

'Reading Race addresses the important question of how knowledge about Indigenous people, their cultures and social lives is created and circulated within colonising societies like Australia. As a child growing up during the 1940s, I found that storybooks offered a glimpse of a world beyond my own, but very few of them mentioned Aborigines. One exception was Annie Rentoul and Ida Outhwaite’s Little Green Road to Fairyland, first published in 1922 and one of the first books to offer Australian fairies to Australian children (Marcus 1999). Among the things I learned from that book was that Aboriginal people had become a shadowy and ethereal presence in the land and that there was nothing to fear from them. As a way of overcoming the stereotypes and normalising the assumptions of such texts, Bradford has set out to write beyond the conventions of literary practice and, in doing so, to illuminate the ways in which children’s books use images of Aboriginal culture to create a ‘white’ subject.' (Introduction)