Cirrus@Austlit

'Dorothy Blewett's story, 'This Girl Came to Our School' broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1949 and published here in print for the first time, is a more complex work that it seems on first reading. Into its mere 1,600 words are packed themes of colonisation and its collapse, racism and prejudice, guerrilla warfare, constructed white privilege with its perception of the threat of miscegenation, and the enduring impacts of schoolgirl bullying on both the bullied and the bully. The story, written in the late 1940s, is a psychological study of the narrator's dawning recognition that her racist behaviour has, in part, fed into the creation of a revolutionary engaged in a battle against European culture and its colonial enterprise.

'The story was submitted to an ABC short story competition in 1949. Although it didn't win, the story was one of four commended submissions purchased by the ABC and broadcast around Australia in July and August 1949. The story was broadcast in Sydney, Darwin, Adelaide and Melbourne and is likely to have been broadcast across the entire ABC network in Australia.' (Abstract)