Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature (review)

What do you have to gain from reading Clare Bradford's study of the "language of texts for Australian children" and "the cultural discourses which inform them" (13) if you didn't grow up reading Mary Grant Bruce's "Billabong" books (1910-1942), or some of the other texts which may be unfamiliar? Actually, a great deal.

First, the history of the United States suggests that the role of children's texts in the formation of national identities for children can be a powerful one. The flow of nationalism into picture-book children's literature after the events of September 11, 2001 is a prominently visible example. Consider books published in response in 2002 such as America: A Patriotic Primer (Cheney), as well as books on the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and even on Irving Berlin's God Bless America. Have 8-year-olds all over the U.S. been clamoring to learn more about Irving Berlin? Just who is being served by having the Bill of Rights explained to them as a set of rules for making a camping trip proceed amicably (Catrow)? Bradford asks, "How do the ideologies of books read in childhood relate to the socializing practices of families, schools and social groups?" (3). Anyone who has studied series books or censorship controversies will see that this question crosses national boundaries.

Bradford's general assumptions—that the strategy of colonizers is often to efface any past history of differences, and to construct their new territory as an empty continent and indigenous populations as weakened, needy, and just about running out of gas before the good guys, the colonizers, arrived—come out of a postcolonial discourse with many applications within our own contemporary culture. Her discussion of these "strategies of silence and concealment" (15) and references to Peter Hulme's "classic colonial triangle—the relationship between European, native and land" (14) would benefit U.S. teachers contemplating discussing similar events in the Americas, such as ways in which the event most would call "The First Thanksgiving" is presented to children. Even with the best of intentions, the mainstream press in the U.S. offers many examples of publishing houses using indigenous material based on assumptions of easy co-opting; hence, it's a relevant cautionary tale to follow the ways in which representations of aboriginality continue to be used.

Bradford's focus, however, is twofold, because she considers both how nonindigenous writers represent aboriginality, and how indigenous writers for children present a different reality. It is this second focus that may seem most distinctive to American readers, as she introduces us to writers with a fundamentally different attitude toward the conditions of producing texts and the "ownership" or "authority" of storytellers. Throughout, she makes clear that she does not share a belief which she uses bell hooks' words to describe—"liberal belief in a universal subjectivity . . . the myth of 'sameness' "(13)—and focuses on difference. She is trying to move beyond what she characterizes as "the essentialised indigeneity" which assumes common strands involving, for instance, "the valency of ancestral knowledges; a preoccupation with questions of valuing and of spirituality rather than with the acquisition of material possessions" (232). On the formal side, for example, she draws our attention to how Eurocentric is an assumption that "Aboriginal narratives will fall into Western genre categories" (175). As she points out, "Aboriginal societies do not recognize fiction as a category of discourse" (176).

Rather, they recognize two types of discourse: written texts which deal with the past, and "talk," spoken language which may be true or not, and which foregrounds the speaker as the key player. (176)

Clearly, to use just this one example, the assumptions of our criticism about the role of the storyteller and the nature of autobiography must then be re-examined. To point out even further consequences of this disjunction of assumptions, is there a clash...