Forging Truth from Facts: Trauma, Historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books

Though they can find themselves constrained by the imagined "demands of children's literature as sanitary, benign, and didactic" (Tribunella 102), children's picture book authors and illustrators regularly attempt to engage with "unimaginable, unspeakable, and un-representable horror" (Trezise 43). Whether it be in the form of genocide, war, persecution or displacement, they tend not to shy away from the atrocities of history when searching for subject matter. However, the balancing of the sanitary with the unimaginable demands a compromise. Authors and illustrators invariably soften, perhaps even distort the horror in their efforts to be morally instructive. In their creation of a "parable of war" (MacCallum-Stewart 177) they explore the underlying humanist principles of the stories they tell, rather than historical perspectives. This approach transforms historical particularities into "universals of human experience" (Stephens 238). Trauma is sometimes directly confronted, but this is the exception rather than the rule (Kertzer, "Anxiety" 208). Kidd contends that at "least some of the children's literature of atrocity turns away from rather than confronts the difficulties of its subject matter, opting for simplistic narratives of character empowerment adapted from self-help literature" (185). For in any battle between hope and trauma, or at least the ones played out in children's literature, the former usually emerges triumphant. As a result, books such as the three analyzed in this article are often very successful in exploring broader issues of personal morality, but they make for dubious history. The critical and commercial success of works that adopt this approach suggests that the book buying public share this preference for morality tales over historical accuracy.

This article will explore how three teams of Australian authors and illustrators position the plight of prisoners of war (POWs) (The Happiness Box: A Wartime Book of Hope, 2018), Indigenous servicemen (Alfred's War, 2018), and refugees (Ziba Came on a Boat, 2007) as a series of individual traumas grounded in specific historical events. Only the first is ostensibly a work of nonfiction, though the latter two make an explicit claim to be truthful to the experience of a marginalized group. In particular, this article will focus on how the authors and illustrators, all of them skilled practitioners, have used historical events and individual trauma as a didactic opportunity. Specific historical details become a secondary consideration to generating an empathetic response from the reader. The books therefore become a barometer of contemporary attitudes and values. Trauma may find a place in the story but like the actual historical event, it is shaped, manipulated, and distorted to serve a didactic purpose.

In the Australian marketplace, the exploration of historical trauma has been aided by a cultural context that characterizes history as a "wound or scar that leaves a trace on a nation's soul" (Twomey, "Anzac Day" par. 17). Yet as historians are only too aware, whether events "find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic . . . depends upon [their] decision to configure them according to the imperatives of one plot structure or mythos rather than another" (White 83). Children's literature is therefore always ideological, for it makes an important contribution to the formation and maintenance of a "national soul" (Hazard 111). In the case of war in the Australian context, this ideology is inherently conservative and pervasively hopeful:

Though war is positioned as a national and personal trauma, it is also revered as a creative force that has shaped our personal and national identity. It is this distinction that allows the authors and illustrators to produce work that is overtly anti-militaristic, indeed almost pacifist in its intent, yet studiously avoids any criticism of the soldiers themselves. War might be futile, but the sacrifice of Australian soldiers is not.

(Kerby et al., "Australians" 310)

Yet any discussion of the place of trauma in Australian history must confront the widespread acceptance of war as the bedrock of national achievement and identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Anzac story was in a "state of terminal decline, anachronistic, patriarchal, militaristic and irrelevant" (Beaumont, "Second...