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1 Chapter 1 Introduction the Books We Read Chapter 1 Introduction The books we read inevitably construct versions of the world and its peoples (McGillis, 1997, p. 12) Many Australians have grown up with “the story that the whole race of the Tasmanian Aborigines had been killed off last century” (Bird, 1998, p. 14). The fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines1 is now so indelibly printed on our historical imagination that it is hardly surprising that the mythology regarding their total destruction persists even now. This attitude prevails in all sorts of literature written by and about Tasmania, but it is particularly disturbing to see this in children’s literature. This thesis examines children’s literature of Tasmania in this particular context. Physically isolated from mainland Australia, Tasmania offers a pristine, unspoilt environment, but it has a complex and dark past involving convict hardships and atrocities carried out by settlers and colonisers against its Indigenous inhabitants. Additionally this study examines how the body of Tasmanian children’s literature considers history in a number of ways, with a particular focus on Indigeneity2. Between 1950 and 2001 a small number of children’s writers used the island as a setting and subject for their novels, most of them women writers who lived on the island. Although each of the selected books explores specific instances of white writers’ representations of Indigeneity, as a body of work they represent a continuing perception which represents Tasmanian Aborigines as forever lost or invisible. Through an overview of children’s literature published over fifty years, this study examines the ways in which Tasmanian Indigeneity is constructed by children’s writers and illustrators. While these writers were all writing in the second half of the twentieth century, most have been slow to respond to and reflect global movements and understandings of decolonisation. The colonialist ideologies engendered by the majority of writers in this study demonstrate a conservative approach to representations through the roles, characterisations and cultural contexts of Tasmanian 1 The Tasmanian Aboriginal community has restored the name “Tasmanian Aborigines” “to reflect their distinctive relationship to their own country and their indigenous rights that flow from it” (Ryan, 2012, p. xxvi). 2 Critics and cultural commentators use the terms “Aboriginal” and “Aboriginality” interchangeably and “Indigenous” and “Indigeneity”. All these terms are used in this thesis. 1 Aborigines and their life experiences. Indeed, the last two decades of the twentieth century continued to produce literature for children from Tasmania which revived colonialist and paternalistic attitudes towards Indigenous subjects. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this thesis will focus on Jane Ada Fletcher’s Little Brown Piccaninnies of Tasmania (1950), Fitzmaurice Hill’s Southward Ho With the Hentys (1952), Nan Chauncy’s Tangara (1960) and Mathinna’s People (1967), Beth Roberts’s, Manganinnie (1979), Pat Peatfield Price’s Hills of the Black Cockatoo (1981), Nora Dugon’s Lonely Summers (1988) and Clare Street (1990), Mary Small’s Night of the Muttonbirds (1981), Elizabeth Stanley’s Night without Darkness (2001), and Gary Crew’s and Peter Gouldthorpe’s The Lost Diamonds of Killiecrankie (1995). Many of these works were recognised through the Australian Children’s Book of the Year Awards established in 1946 which aimed to promote a canon of Australian literature. Consequently, through these awards, particular ideological perspectives on Tasmanian Indigeneity were supported and transmitted. While the works examined are ideologically bound in ways which were intended by their authors, it is valuable to explore perceptions as writers themselves are subject to the ideological constructs of their own writing cultures. Methodology: Framing the Study In the depiction of Tasmanian Aboriginality the island of Tasmania has provided a fertile setting for colonial and postcolonial writings for adults. In contrast, there is a relative dearth of literature written for children which represents Tasmanian Indigeneity through fiction. The books selected for study in this thesis represent the corpus of children’s literature focussing on the characters of Tasmanian Aborigines and their way of life. A search of the catalogues of the State Library of Tasmania showed that these books are not held by that library and offered no additions to this list. Moreover, there is no discrete collection of children’s literature from Tasmania.3 The sample of literature discussed in this thesis is necessarily small, as there are no books by other non-Indigenous writers which represent Tasmanian Aborigines as characters in a sustained narrative. My search did not reveal any works written by 3Nella Pckup, Tasmanian President of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (personal communication, 14 April, 2013). 2 Indigenous writers which represent Tasmanian Aborigines and their way of life in fiction for children. A determining criterion for selection of these works is that they were all published by well-known publishing houses and available to national and international markets. They are all sustained narratives, chapter books, in mostly historical settings. Hence, local and self-published works as well as re-tellings of traditional Tasmanian Aboriginal stories are not included. In this study “children” includes “young people”; the selection therefore comprises literature targeted at readers from age seven to fourteen, whilst the picture books discussed are targeted at the older readers in this audience. Most of these works were promoted to school audiences to enhance or support the evolving primary and lower secondary school curricula in social science and history. All the books discussed have been available (but not necessarily widely used) in school classrooms and libraries since their first publication. Fletcher’s and Hill’s works were acknowledged by The Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards in 1951 and 1953 respectively. From the 1950s, improvements in post-war standards of living enhanced educational opportunities and library services for children stimulated the production of children’s literature, including a boom in non-fiction books such as popular history, natural history and junior encyclopaedias.4 With the exception of New South Wales, Australian school curriculum reform from the 1960s and 1970s began to incorporate history within a social education framework. Tasmania in the 1970s led this move because, “it was argued at the time, the latter was better able to develop more conceptual skills” (Taylor, 2012a, p. 29).5 After the 1950s, Australian fiction for both adults and younger readers began to move away from romanticized versions of national history and “idealistic affirmations about 4 Children’s encyclopaedias from the 1950s and 1960s referred to the romantic notion of “the last Tasmanian” or “Queen Truganinni, reiterating a “Last of the Mohican” sense of tragedy and legend, as in The Australian Junior Encylopaedia” (Barratt, 1959, vol 1, pp. 304-306). 5 However, it should be noted that Indigenous people throughout Australia did not have equal access to education and the evolving social studies curricula (personal communication with Dr Lawrence Bamblett, Research Fellow (Education) at AITSIS 29 May, 2013). Theresa Sainty, Aboriginal Education Services, confirmed that this was certainly the case in Tasmania (personal communication 13 June, 2013). 3 Australia’s future” (Pierce, 1992, p. 307) towards the “expiation of various sources of guilt associated with Australian history” (Stephens, 2003, p. xii). This is certainly a notion evidenced in Nan Chauncy’s works from the 1960s, which are empathetic to the post-World War Two compulsions of children’s literature which stressed building bridges of understanding in the aftermath of race conflict. In this global context, Chauncy’s work is significant in its implications for the “beginnings of our coming to terms with a national guilt in our treatment of the Aboriginals” (Saxby, 2002, p. 77). However, the socialising concerns of this small corpus of children’s literature representing Tasmanian Aboriginality reflect the pervasive ambivalence of several of these non-Indigenous writers as they negotiate the problematic overlap between their own awareness of historical complicity in the colonising processes of dispossession and genocide as experienced in Tasmania. In the last fifty years, discourses of Tasmanian Indigeneity have changed considerably. Whilst some are loath to let go of their colonialist and paternalistic attitudes towards Tasmanian Indigeneity, a few of the texts discussed in this thesis unsettle the dominant discourses on race and history. This thesis examines the representations of Tasmanian Aborigines in children’s literature in the light of their colonial and postcolonial experience. It draws from a body of literature from a range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, ethnography, literary studies, Aboriginal autobiographical writings and cultural commentary. The time frame of the works selected, from 1950 to 2001, reflects an evolving understanding of childhood and child development by children’s writers, from a conscious (and nationalistic) intent to “teach” history or social studies through fiction, to an appreciation of the capacity of children to understand the potential for politicisation that children’s literature can hold for them. My examination of the representation of Indigeneity in children’s literature
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