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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature Carole Ferrier (bio) Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature. By Clare Bradford. Melbourne: Melbourne P, 2001 In the Summer 2001 issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, John Cohen, in reviewing Heather Scutter's 1999 Displaced Fictions, raised the issue of how many international readers consider "that Australia produces YA literature that deserves reading" (106), with the implication that books about Australian literature should be more celebratory than critical. In the current context of a persistence of public denial in some influential quarters that Aboriginal people were massacred and their children stolen, this argument can become rather ingenuous. Clare Bradford aligns her race-cognisant perspective in Reading Race with the work of Richard Dyer, Anne McClintock, Stephen Slemon, Stephen Muecke, Robert Dixon, and others, but her stance is not counterposed to demonstrating that pleasure is to be gained from these texts—even though much of the engaged teacher's pleasure is likely to come from evaluating the knowledges that can be read in them. The discourses of, and surrounding, "children's literature" have never been innocent activities, and Bradford's central focus on representations of racial difference and race relations in Australian texts provides many striking instances of this. She ranges from analyzing the dominant liberal attitude of earlier periods: "I do not see what can be done for them, except we must [End Page 103] treat them [the indigenous population] kindly and not render their life more miserable than it is. They have no religion and therefore no hope," through to more diverse perspectives in writing by whites and indigenes (69). Many of the former deployed—and some still do"mechanisms of forgetfulness" in relation to what has been called the "black history" of white settlement (29). The mid-nineteenth-century adventure story The Boy in the Bush by Richard Rowe (his pseudonym was Edward Howe—confusing somebody in cover-production who has jumbled the names), provides Bradford's telling cover illustration in which two white boys gaze secretly at the Other, and observe: "The black fellows were in a very savage mood"—as indeed the boys' white relations became when some of their tribe were similarly killed in frontier violence. There are several levels of innocence that might be deconstructed here. Bradford's book finds itself wanting to burst the boundaries of the category of the "children's literature" of her (or perhaps the publisher's?) title and, even, of the associated category of young adult fiction. Some of the texts she discusses were not published as youth fiction at all: for example, the writing of the Nyoongah (Western Australian) Glenys Ward, When You Grow Up (1996) by Connie McDonald, or the novel Lori (1989) by John Wilson, all published by Magabala Books, as well as perhaps Phillip Gwynne's Nukkin Ya (2000). In sometimes moving beyond texts directed towards a youth readership and substantially about youth (if this might be one working definition of children's literature) to include texts that she considers "easily accessible to adolescent readers," Bradford gives her argument a richer field over which to play (73). Given this, and if she is aiming at a comprehensive picture of past practices, there are some odd omissions. These include two ("adult fiction") texts that have had great currency on secondary school syllabi: Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo (1929), long lauded as the first novel to draw a (comparatively) full and credible Aboriginal woman and, more recently, the Koori (South Eastern Australian), and Ruby Langford Ginibi's Don't Take Your Love to Town (1988), an example of Aboriginal autobiographical fiction which, particularly by women, has been a prominent genre in Australian publishing since the 1960s. Bradford's book has a central interest in methodological and political issues, but there are some that might have been engaged with more depth. While able to observe an "internalization of discourses that construct Aborigines as children," Bradford doesn't grapple with the issue of how, for example, self-censorship in much Aboriginal autobiography such as Ward's might make it ostensibly readable by youth (153). Ginibi's Don't Take was innovative in refusing a respectable...