Cirrus@Austlit

In this collaborative essay, Mallan, Bradford and Stephens interrogate the links between the family, the social well-being of a nation and its individual citizens in conjunction with representations of 'new social orders'(6). They consider how notions of family are developed in selected texts, including Shades Children (Garth Nix) and Boy Overboard (Morris Gleitzman), pointing out that in all three novels, 'various social imaginaries unfold, each gesturing towards a utopian outcome in which family becomes the unifying point for previously isolated or marginalized individuals' (7). For Mallen et al, the challenge in reading utopian novels that deal with families and difficult times is the need to be sensitive to the atrocities described as well as being able to 'assess the creative adaptation of their utopian refiguration' (19). In this sense they argue, the possibility occurs for wider consideration and discussion of family relationships which affords knowledge of and insights into the world within which we live specifically 'how difference is refracted within both the familiar and alternative social imaginaries they propose' (19).

"Allan Baillie's Secrets of Walden Rising (1996) is a novel about 'the politics of history' (Fernandez 2001, p.42) and an examination of the text's significant challenges to the dominant historical stories of its time seems appropriate as Australia's 'history wars' continue. In this paper [Pennell] examines the critical dystopian strategies employed in Secrets of Walden Rising to subvert some of the utopian national mythologies of white settler Australia."

In this paper, Dudek argues that uptopian impulses can be found within The Lost Thing via the characters of the child, the artist, and the hybrid custodian, all of whom act as figures of resistance and hope in a dystopian world ruled by rigid and repetitive empirical discourses.