Alison Halliday Alison Halliday i(A69691 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 Shifting Identities : A Novel to a Play to Performance Alison Halliday , single work criticism
1 An Awfully Big Adventure : Killing Death in War Stories for Children Alison Halliday , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 16 no. 2 2006; (p. 90-95)
Halliday locates a gap in Kerry Mallan's study concerning discourses of death and dying in children's literature, and claims, 'A curious omission is death in war, from the legal killing of and by soldiers, to the horror underlying the euphemism of 'collateral damage'' (90). Halliday suggests that despite a 'proliferation of discourses [on the] manifestations of death... there is a lingering taboo in dealing with death in war stories, especially for older readers' (90). The essay refers to some of the strategies and narrative techniques used to represent war in children's fiction from an array of novels, including several Australian children's texts by contemporary authors, Morris Gleitzman, Sonya Hartnett, Anthony Eaton, Serpil Ural and David Metzenthen. Strategies discussed include discourses of hope, the use of metaphor, reader-subject positioning and setting with Halliday concluding that, 'When death is present and brutally explicit...cultural pressures about the appropriateness of reading material and consequent censorship occur' (94).
1 Patricia Wrightson Alison Halliday , 2004 single work biography
— Appears in: Australian Writers , 1950-1975 2004; (p. 335-340)
1 Colin Thiele Alison Halliday , 2004 single work biography
— Appears in: Australian Writers , 1950-1975 2004; (p. 284-290)
1 Poetry in Australia : A Modern Dilemma Alison Halliday , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Lion and the Unicorn , April vol. 27 no. 2 2003; (p. 218-234)
An examination of Steven Herrick's poetry, as a reflection of the genre, for Australian children at the beginning of this millennium.
1 Minding Your 'Ps and Qs' : Poetry, Propaganda, Politics and Pictures Alison Halliday , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , August vol. 12 no. 2 2002; (p. 38-49)
Halliday critiques two picture books, The Last of His Tribe (Henry Kendall )and The Drover's Boy (Ted Egan & Robert Ingpen) by asking who speaks, who is silenced and what constructions are used to reinforce this silence in texts which purport to represent Aboriginal people and their experiences. Halliday argues that these texts (like many others), say more about the construction of white identity than they do about Aboriginality and that they reinforce an ideologiocal position that is fundamentally racist (p.38). This occurs through the representation of Aboriganal people as '...a race whom history has passed by' and Halliday asks the question, are these texts are an attempt to reconcile [white] feelings of shame and sorrow or are they blatant propganda?(pp.38, 47) She concludes her analysis by arguing that while these texts may introduce the child reader to some of the untold stories and lost histories of Aboriginal people, essentially they reinforce 'a dominant white hegemony as the desired norm for Australian society' (p.47).
1 Place in Poetry; Poetry in Its Place Alison Halliday , 1999 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 9 no. 3 1999; (p. 30-37)
Halliday examines the function of place in Out of the Dust by American writer Karen Hesse and A Place Like This by Steven Herrick, arguing that the unknown places found in children's poetry are 'linked to worlds of fantasy and make-believe and are similarly delineated by clearly recognizable elements' (30). She points out that notions of place are more clearly defined in poetry for children because 'place is a repository for many of the ideologies that permeate poetry that is written and chosen for children' (30). Halliday argues that the texts discussed exemplify the use of the postmodern literary techniques, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, and in doing so reinforce the on-going and intrinsic association of place and structures of childhood in ways that not only define 'place' but empower and validate the idea that 'through the interaction of with something natural it is possible to come to an understanding of oneself' (36-37).
1 y separately published work icon The Ideology of Australian Poetry Anthologies for Children Alison Halliday , 1999 Z978807 1999 single work thesis
X