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...

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 ...