Australian Children's Literature

Set in the 1890s, this is one of few novels about a girl’s maturation that has come to be understood as a “classic”.  State Library of Victoria From David Copperfield to Holden Caulfield, most canonical coming-of-age novels depict boys becoming men. Jane Eyre’s traumatic journey to adulthood is considered a female version of the Bildungsroman , or novel of development. Yet books about girls are most commonly seen as only weighty enough for girls themselves to read. Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom is remarkable because it is one of few novels about a girl’s maturation that has come to be understood as a “classic” and also because it is ultimately a girls’ school story. HG Wells, who described the protagonist Laura Tweedle Rambotham as “an adorable little beast”, considered the book to be the best school story he’d ever read. But was Wells paying Richardson a great compliment? The genre of school stories is maligned and rarely considered as literature. ...

This is the first in an ongoing series of posts about some of the most popular, influential, and enduring Australian children's and YA novels.  Perhaps the most popular and successful Australian young adult novel series is an invasion narrative. John Marsden ’s "The Tomorrow Series" (1993-1999), which began with Tomorrow, When the War Began , has been reprinted more than thirty times with sales of more than three million copies, translated into various languages, and adapted into a film in 2010 and a television series in 2016.  The sequel series, "The Ellie Chronicles", reveals that the force that has invaded Australia is a coalition of South Asian countries seeking the space and natural resources that are limited in their populous region.  Given the origins and evolution of Australian children’s literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, it is unsurprising that an invasion narrative is one of the most notable Australian young adult novels. The ...

A prince flies in a carriage propelled by kingfishers in Hume Cook’s Australian Fairytales. Author provided Michelle Smith , Monash University Content warning: this article contains reference to racist depictions of Aboriginal Australians. Most of us grew up reading fairy tales adapted from the European tradition: stories of kings, queens and princesses set in palaces and forests, such as Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast. But what about the history of Australian fairy tales? Australia’s vast distances, deserts, harsh temperatures, deadly wildlife, and the ongoing cultures of Aboriginal Australians made the country a complicated fit for fairy tales. Indeed, few tales by Australian authors were published until the late 19th century. These early Australian fairy tales mythologised aspects of the country’s history and environment to sanitise the process of white settlement. In doing so, they helped to invent traditions and cultural explanati...