Australian Children's Literature

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...