Messages from the Inside?: Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australian Children's Literature

Abstract

It remains to be seen whether the events toward the end of 2001 in Australia and elsewhere will produce a triumphant counterdiscourse of assimilation and/or exclusion, and whether tolerant pluralism of the multicultural society, so comparatively recently nd arduously asserted, is exposed as fragile and illusory. A children's literature reflecting a society intent upon renovating the fading picture of a homogenous Australia really would be a step backward.