Editor's Introduction: Always Facing the Issues--Preoccupations in Australian Children's Literature

The texts which are the focus of this issue of The Lion and the Unicorn are Australian, and it seems appropriate to begin by addressing the rather elusive question of what that means and implies in and for texts produced and disseminated for children in Australia. What we are dealing with is texts which, in various ways, make assumptions about how readers understand and negotiate the Australian societies and cultures incorporated as settings or as themes in those texts. In the second half of the twentieth century, Australia was utterly transformed from a predominantly "Anglo-Celtic" society, with a mentality that perceived Australia as an outpost of Europe, to one of the world's most ethnically diverse societies, gradually coming to terms with its geographical location in the Asia-Pacific region. Insofar as children's texts seek to shape, impact on, or intervene in, culture, it is to be expected that representations of the common themes of children's literature—personal growth and development of a sense of one's place in the world; conflict with family, peers and community—will be nuanced in particularly local ways in response to this changing society.

"Australianness," needless to say, means more than references to familiar Australian icons, but inheres in broader and subtler aspects of cultural formation. In Making it National, Graeme Turner argues that any construction of Australian identity needs to be grounded in the historical reality that Australian society has not been formed from a single ethnic, religious or cultural source, but constructed through the migration of polyglot cultural traditions (122), and these traditions are tending to form a society which is heterogeneous and hybridized. Early in Manuel Aston's play, Fossils!, which is generically constructed around generational differences, one of the young principals, Julie, describes her parents as a particular kind of social stereotype:

We had Dad carbon dated, and discovered he's from the stone age. He actually likes stuff like family picnics . . . and all those old musicals like Carousel and My Fair Lady!
Mum's on the organising committee of everything. Fetes, raffles, cake stalls, working bees, neighbourhood watch, P & C . . . everything. . . (2)

The traits offered here propose a certain middle-aged lifestyle, with the implication that Dad and Mum have complementary interests. At the same time, none of the components is specifically Australian, and some are obvious imports, indicators of the Anglo-American affiliations of mid-twentieth-century Australia. Presumably, an adolescent audience will identify these parents as part of a fossilized Australian culture. The process is repeated with Michelle's parents, who are specifically labeled "yuppy fossils" (7) and endowed with all the appropriate attributes—the artifacts, attitudes and mannerisms. Finally, Franky's Mum is an ethnic stereotype, an Italian widow, and again endowed with the uniform, artifacts, attitudes and mannerisms. Because they are stereotypes, they are easily recognizable. It is unlikely that many, if any, middle-aged Australian adults would see themselves mirrored in these exaggerated representations, but nevertheless what Aston has done is indicated that what the play's fifteen-year-old characters identify generically as "fossils" is a quite heterogeneous bundle. The divergence within the characterizations of the two Anglo families discloses that what is frequently thought of as Australia's dominant Anglo culture lacks the unity and coherence that would constitute it as a single, recognizable culture. While this is largely incidental to the play's purpose, the social setting is a characteristic Australian hybrid, and the process of hybridity is formally enacted at the end of the play when Franky and Michelle start dating and playing together in a band, and Franky's Mum integrates Michelle into her culture because Michelle is Catholic and possibly, like many Australians (such as myself), has an Italian great-grandparent. The social aspirations and the actual relational configuration at the end of the play illustrate cultural hybridity, as the adolescents...