Cirrus@Austlit

'This book critically investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children and childhood figure in Australia’s cultural life to mediate Australians’ ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial futures. Engaging with representations in literature, film, governmental discourse, and news and infotainment media, it shows how ways of representing Aboriginal children and childhood serve a national project of representing settler-Australian values, through the forgetting of colonial violence. Analysing the ways in which certain negative aspects of Australian nationhood are concealed, rendered invisible, and repressed through practices of representing Aboriginal children and childhood, it challenges accepted ‘shared understandings’ regarding Australian-ness and settler-colonial sovereignty.

'Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach that engages critical theory, post-colonial theory, literary studies, history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, Representing Aboriginal Childhood responds to urgent questions that pivot on the role of the Indigenous child within settler nation-state formations. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social geography, collective memory, politics and cultural studies.' (Publication summary)

'May Gibbs’s gumnut stories are central to the development of an Australian national imaginary. By connecting the natural ‘bush’ environment to settler-colonial social issues and scenes, Gibbs’s imagery and narrative reimagined the bush as a ‘home’ for colonizers, essentially ‘indigenising’ them in the image of white gumnut babies. The most comprehensive and influential interpretations of Gibbs’s work emphasize its currency to contemporaneous life and cultural trends, and its deft negotiation of sexuality, through the figures of the voluptuous gumnut babies and scrawny bad Banksia Men, who are covered with hair and ‘lips.’ A less prevalent but no less convincing interpretation underscores the dimension of race within Gibbs’s work: the whiteness of the stories’ heroes, and the blackness, even Aboriginality, of their nemeses, the wicked Banksia men. Through the concept of the fetish, this article interprets the banksia as an object produced in an intercultural space, and reproducing (in Gibbs’s stories) a set of racial anxieties about the Other in terms of sex and sexuality. How does race come to be parsed as sex? And what does the confluence of these anxieties reveal about settler representations of Aboriginality and the colonial mindset?' (Publication abstract)

'The presence in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale of children, and of violence against them, has so far been little commented upon, as much commentary has focused on the film’s depiction of rape and colonial gender relations. Yet key plot points are articulated through violence against a child — and the exclamations at these points by the film’s antagonist, Lt. Hawkins, of “shut it up” and “I can’t stand the ... noise of it,” indicates a critical role played by representations of children that may be turned against colonial power. This article examines the-role of the child as a site of immanent critique of colonial violence in The Nightingale, in the context of the use of representations of childhood in settler-colonial film and culture more broadly.' (Publication abstract)