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.
'Gwen Cope enjoyed a significant reputation as a gifted Australian child-poet throughout the 1930s. Nevertheless, her two collections remain unacknowledged in the history of Australian literature despite their popularity. This article situates Cope's fairy-poetry against the ideological backdrop defined by adult fairy-poets of the 1930s to reveal fundamental discords between the child-poet writing her vision of fairy-folklore and the canonical writers who aimed to re-conceptualize " faery-lore" in the interests of Australian national literature.' (Author's abstract)
'Each year, the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers a number of Book of the Year Awards, including the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The books chosen by the CBCA constitute a contemporary canon of Australian children's literature, and serve to both shape and reflect current educational policies and practices as well as young Australians' sense of themselves and their nation. This paper reads a selection of award-winning Australian non-fiction children's literature in the context of colonialism, curriculum, military myths, and Aboriginal perspectives on national history and identity.'
