Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada

CHAPTER 9: The Homely Imaginary: Fantasies of Nationhood in Australian and Canadian Texts

My involvement in the “Home” project over the last three years has necessitated a continuous process of comparative reading : my encounters with Canadian texts have been shaped by my knowledge of Australian children’s literature, and conversely I now read Australian texts in the light of Canadian material. The connections between the two literatures, as between the preoccupations that drive Australian and Canadian scholarship in children’s literature, are both obvious and elusive. For one thing, the shared histories of Canada and Australia as British settler colonies are complicated by the fact that Canada had two founding powers , Britain and France. Again, geographical similarities—the vast spaces of the north in Canada, the desert regions of Australia—signify differently and are inflected by Australia’s relative isolation as an island continent and Canada’s contiguity with the United States. Third, while in both nations the development of settler cultures depended on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, treaty discourses are prominent in Canadian discussions of relations between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens and cultures, whereas the Australian nation was founded on the doctrine of terra nullius. Thus, even as I look to the discourses and ideologies that the two discourses and their literatures have in common, I am reminded of the historical and cultural influences that differentiate them. As many postcolonial theorists have pointed out, one of the principal effects of colonization was the separation of space and place, described by Bill Ashcroft as follows: “The movement of European society through° C H A P T E R 9 The Homely Imaginary: Fantasies of Nationhood in Australian and Canadian Texts Clare Bradford 177 the world, the ‘discovery’ and occupation of remote regions, was the necessary basis for a separation of space and place and the creation of what could be called ‘empty space’” (152). The notion of “empty space” was fundamental to the legal concepts that shaped British colonial practices— in particular, the principles that planting, farming, and fencing land established a claim to ownership and that land that did not show the signs of cultivation (according to the colonizers’ definitions of cultivation) was waste land, waiting to be “improved” by being put to profitable use.1 In Canada and in Australia, colonial processes of mapping and claiming the land transformed places hitherto known, named, and occupied by indigenous peoples into empty space, envisaged as a vast resource to be used and enjoyed by European settlers. Citing two Canadian writers, Robert Kroestch and Dennis Lee, Ashcroft observes that in settler societies a sense of displacement manifests in “uncertainties about the location of value, ambivalence or argument about certain kinds of cultural or political affiliation, social contestation over the ‘proper’ use of language, confusion about the use of the word ‘home’” (155). Like children’s texts more generally, Canadian and Australian texts tend to centre on the identity-formation of young protagonists, played out in represented processes of growth, change, and acculturation. Many of these texts exhibit the sense of displacement described by Ashcroft, often centring on imaginings of “home” and proposing interrogations and contestations of the cultural and political meanings that attach to those imaginings. Any formulation of home incorporates a sense of who is included and who is excluded or marginal. In White Nation, Ghassan Hage outlines what he refers to as “the homely imaginary of nationalist practices” (38), noting that discourses of home are frequently marshalled to justify the strategies of inclusion and exclusion that determine who is “at home” in the nation. According to Hage, dominant groups in nation states maintain their dominance in this way: A nationalist practice of exclusion is a practice emanating from agents imagining themselves to occupy a privileged position within national space such as they perceive themselves to be the enactors of the national will within the nation. It is a practice orientated by the nationalists’ attempt at building what they imagine to be a homely nation. (47, my italics) My focus here is on the extent to which a “privileged position within national space” is figured through the homes and the homely places that feature in selected Canadian and Australian novels for children. I begin with two texts published around the beginning of the twentieth century, 178 Clare Bradford Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894). Later I move to a consideration of two novels that usher in the twenty...