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Opinion
By ROSEMARY JOHNSTON

In the first few pages of Seven Little Australians, published in 1894, Ethel Turner proclaims Australian children as `different' because of the distinctiveness of the land they live in: `It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliancy of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and the people are young-hearted together, and the children's spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadows of long years' sorrowful history.' There is, she says, `a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion in nature here, and therefore in children.'

Children's books are produced by a nation for its most precious commodity, its posterity. Yet despite the fact that contemporary Australian children's literature is highly respected, I am not sure that Australians value its rich provenance, or the diverse ways it has contributed to ideas of nation and national identity. When the Australia Council hosted a literature roundtable discussion last month, it took a strong stance on the importance of teaching Australian texts in universities and schools (and training teachers to be able to do so), but did not appear to make any reference to Australian children's books.

Australia's top 10 best-selling children's books are all unabashedly British Harry Potter titles, says figures from Nielsen BookScan. When Angus & Robertson asked children around Australia to vote for their all-time favourite book, only two of the top 10 books were Australian.

Such indifference is in stark contrast to other nations. Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Secret Garden and the Narnia series are English classics continuously in print. Similarly so Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz and Little Women in the United States. Anne of Green Gables has carried Canada across the world and the landscapes in which she and her author lived are now a national park. Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking, in Sweden, and Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll, in Finland, are celebrated national icons, as is Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark (Princess Mary is a Hans Christian Andersen Ambassador).

Children's literature plays a significant role in the making of national imaginations. Books read and reinforced by family, school and peers become part of the images we think with, part of a shared folk culture. Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo, published in 1899, prefigures a disposition towards environmentalism long before it became today’s hot topic. Its dedication reads: `To the children of Australia in the hope of enlisting their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures of their fair land whose extinction, through ruthless destruction, is being surely accomplished.'

Because books designed for children have the intent of providing what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘comprehensive grasps’ of life and various organizations of it, a retrospective look at a country’s literature for its children reveals a telling accommodation of social agendas. Turner's original manuscript of Seven Little Australians included an Aboriginal legend which was excised in the published version, no doubt because of her criticism of the country's policies towards its indigenous population: `...when Tettawonga's ancestors were brave and strong and happy as careless children, when their worst nightmare had never shown them so evil a time as the white man would bring to their race ...'. This passage was re-inserted in the centenary edition.

In her popular Billabong series, beginning in 1910 with A Little Bushmaid, Mary Grant Bruce writes an Australia made distinctive through its landscapes of space and distance: ‘Norah’s home was on a big station in the north of Victoria – so large that you could almost, in her own phrase, “ride all day and never see anyone you didn’t want to see.”’ The comparison to the Old World is less explicit but is clearly there, and Turner’s ‘lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion in nature’ is given another favorable gloss: at Billabong there is ‘a huge front garden, not at all a proper kind of garden.’ These ideas of ‘difference’ have found incarnation in characters as diverse as the comic book Ginger Meggs, and the Lawson family in Gwen Meredith’s long running ABC serial, Blue Hills.

What we could call a sort of Australian Romantic Nationalism is overtly reflected in ‘the sunny brilliancy’ of such books as Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding, published in 1918, May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, also published 1918, and Ruth Park's Muddleheaded Wombat series, published between 1962 and 1982. Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, like Dot and the Kangaroo, begins with a strong environmental message: ‘Humans, please be kind to all Bush Creatures and don’t pull flowers up by the roots.’ In all these books, Australia is `read' and `written' through its flora and fauna – gum trees, wattle, kangaroos, koalas, possums and wombats.

These texts have contributed to some of the stereotypes of Australianness that we may either love or deplore: ideas about the bush and bush mythologies, about constructing home as nation, about national consciousness. Such images are alive and well, as we can see at Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, which mixes connotations of `wildness', `warriors' and `the environment' into a powerful cultural brew. Irwin's young daughter has been chosen to run with the legacy, enlarging it into the new but strongly emerging field of children's performance culture.

These and other books have introduced children to a complex Australian poetics of time, space and distance which is marked by dualities of nature, such as droughts and floods; distinctive landscapes; and different ontological perspectives: here and there, inside and outside, home and away, belonging and not belonging

Imaginations feed the image-making of future writers. The strangely strong sense of the surreal that we see in the work of Elizabeth Jolly, Tim Winton, David Malouf and Christopher Koch, for example, is also apparent in Colin Thiele's Storm Boy and the work of writers such as Gillian Rubinstein, whose novel Space Demons won the Children's Literature Peace Prize in 1987, and Patricia Wrightson, who was awarded the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1986.

A host of talented writers and artists are now conceiving stories about other concerns and experiences. But without a sense of the past, both good and not so good, we are oddly bereft. Children's books are a significant part of national journeys, histories, and futures.

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Associate Professor Rosemary Johnston teaches at the University of Technology Sydney. She is on the executive board of the Children's Literature Association, based in North America, and is Vice President of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes (affiliated to UNESCO).

Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licensed copy
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday 6/9/2007

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