Australian Children's Literature

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...

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...