Australian Children's Literature

  With Associate Professor Kristine Moruzi (Deakin University), I will be teaching a course on Children's Literature at the Australian and New Zealand Rare Books School at the State Library of Victoria on 8th-9th February 2024. Applications and payment are due by 5th January. We'd love to share an amazing selection of rare and valuable children's books and periodicals with you.  Course description:  Beginning with the earliest examples of children’s reading, such as the horn book in the medieval period, and concluding with the manuscript materials of contemporary illustrators including Shaun Tan, this course will traverse the material history of children’s literature.    Major areas of focus will include visually spectacular children’s books, such as pop-up and movable books, and key genres in the development of children’s literature, including fairy tales, school stories, and adventure fiction. In addition, this course will examine the important role of ephemeral types of

Sister Agnes’ Fairy Tales Told in the Bush (1911?) is an unusual collection of early Australian fairy tales, not least because its author (Agnes Row) was a deaconess of the Community of the Holy Name. It's also unconventional because of the degree to which it depicts, and engages with, First Nations people and stories. William Barak, the last traditional elder of the Wurundjeri people (the owners of the area now known as Melbourne), told the story of the city’s river ‘The Origin of the Yarra Yarra’ to Sister Agnes and he also appears as a character in an original story, ‘The Magic Gun’. This tale is unique for its attempt to merge convict history with First Nations peoples in ways that attempt to shape national mythologies. The tale begins with ‘Old King Barak, the last King of the Yarra tribe’ situated at the historical First Nations farming community, Coranderrk, telling a boy named Tom Jones the story of the Magic Gun. Tom discovers that Barak possesses a gun that once belong to

Recently I was reading an essay by Clare Bradford on the American Printz Award for young adult fiction. Bradford writes that “the Australian texts that have succeeded in the Printz are Australian but not too Australian”. This statement makes sense in terms of the media coverage of iconic Australian animated series Bluey being adapted for the American market on Disney+ . Changes made include the removal of an episode featuring farting and the deletion of scenes that refer to a vasectomy and which depict a dog sitting on a toilet. There are some aspects of Australian life, language, and culture that are too unfamiliar, or which conflict with the sanitised norms of life as it is depicted on American children’s television. Many of the Australian children’s and YA authors who have succeeded at the highest levels internationally are authors of fantasy, perhaps for this reason. Some of the most recognised works of Australian children’s literature derive from fantasies set in the bush such as

I’ve been reading Australian children’s and young adult fantasy for a grant application, and this week came to Isobelle Carmody’s The Gathering (1993). It was joint winner of the CBCA Book Award for Older Readers in 1994. Unlike awards for adult fiction, which tend to marginalise genre fiction, the CBCA prize lists includes many fantasy titles among its young adult prize winners. As part of the project I’m planning, I’m interested in thinking about how Australian children’s and young adult fantasy replicates familiar tropes and conventions from British and American examples, but also in how it might depart from them. The Gathering struck me as unusual because it depicts an Australian small town that is overcome by forces of darkness. Protagonist Nathanial moves to Cheshunt with his mother and dog, The Tod, after a peripatetic childhood in the wake of his parents’ divorce. He discovers that there is a culture of surveillance surrounding teenagers in the town, and is soon pressured by

As an academic, I spend a lot of my research time scouring databases for articles. Marvels & Tales is a journal devoted to fairy tales that I have always admired, and used for both teaching and research. It was an absolute pleasure to co-edit a special issue of the journal on Australian fairy tale with Dr Emma Whatman , whose doctoral work broke new ground in the study of fairy-tale adaptations and postfeminism. In postcolonial contexts, thinking about fairy tale history can be a fraught exercise, particularly when it comes to the way that Aboriginal stories were appropriate by white writers. Nevertheless, our contributors made the job of celebrating, at the same time as critiquing, Australian fairy tales, simple.  Juliet O'Conor, for example, contributes her unparalleled knowledge about Indigenous children's literature to contrast "Aboriginalist" texts such as Katie Langloh Parker's Australian Legendary Tales (1896) with stories written an illustrated by trad

Last year I began writing a chapter on the history of Australian children’s and young adult literature for the Cambridge History of the Australian Novel . As I worked through a list of novels that friends and colleagues loved and remembered, I soon realised that most Australian children’s literature published prior to the 1990s is now out of print. A small number of beloved books had recently been reissued in “Classics” imprints, but their cover designs suggested an intended audience of nostalgic adult readers. I was surprised to find that Victor Kelleher’s Taronga (1986) is still in-print with Puffin. It is a book that perhaps I ought to have read in my own childhood given that I was in primary school from the mid-1980s. Yet it took me 36 years to read this fantasy of a post-apocalyptic Australia in which civilisation has entirely collapsed and survivors behave brutally towards one another. It predates the explosion of young adult dystopian fiction from the 2000s, but has a distinctly