Cirrus@Austlit

Rowe argues: 'Porter's texts - and here I am deliberately merging autobiography and fiction on the grounds that they employ the same fictive strategies - permit a reader to return paedophilia to narrative and examine how it functions within stories that make a virtue of secrecy even as they evacuate those notions of goodness and responsibility that make virtue credible'.

Rahbek suggests that, rather than being a tale of being lost in the bush, Dot and the Kangaroo is in a fact a story of being found. 'It is the indigenous creature who can show Dot how to find the true values of the Australian land and its bush creatures ... Dot learns, this paper argues, the importance of security and a sense of place from these animals, a security they themselves have lost in the wake of the European settlers' arrival.'