'This article focuses on the representation of girlhood, gender and mateship particular to Australia, and to a lesser extent New Zealand, within the context of an emerging nationalism, social change and political upheaval. In it, I apply an illustrator’s perspective to interrogating the cultural significance of Mary Grant Bruce’s iconic outback heroine, Norah of Billabong Station. By comparatively examining Norah’s sequential representation in the narrative text, and the illustrations produced by John MacFarlane, I argue Bruce and her little-known, and rarely discussed immigrant illustrator combined to create an ideal and national type that was counter to anything that had been created for colonial girl readers before.' (Author's abstract)
'Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children's literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children's books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose's rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children's literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children's texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.' (Source: Author's abstract)
McGillis offers an insightful review of Clare Bradford's critical text, Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature, which posits that Bradford's work is crucial in recognizing the 'continual cultural practice of the effacement of Aboriginality' (p.52). McGillis gives an overview of each chapter, briefly referring to the main points of Bradford's analysis including the link between religious tropes and women and children, Aboriginal masculinity in colonial texts and gender representations in contemporary books. McGill posits that it is Bradford's acumen as a 'close reader' that effectivly articulates the more sinister side of Aboriginalism, specifically 'the apparent sympathy of non-Aboriginal for Aboriginal peoples that manifests itself in a paternalistic and appropriating attitude, or as Bradford puts it, "...[T]he warm glow of Aboriginalism conceals its appropriating and controlling strategies" (p.52).
'This article focuses on the representation of girlhood, gender and mateship particular to Australia, and to a lesser extent New Zealand, within the context of an emerging nationalism, social change and political upheaval. In it, I apply an illustrator’s perspective to interrogating the cultural significance of Mary Grant Bruce’s iconic outback heroine, Norah of Billabong Station. By comparatively examining Norah’s sequential representation in the narrative text, and the illustrations produced by John MacFarlane, I argue Bruce and her little-known, and rarely discussed immigrant illustrator combined to create an ideal and national type that was counter to anything that had been created for colonial girl readers before.' (Author's abstract)
'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)
