ABSTRACT
In J. H. Clark’s 1873 Bertie and the Bullfrogs and Ethel Pedley’s 1899 Dot and the Kangaroo, Australian children find themselves lost in native bush environments. The stories use talking animals to familiarize readers with indigenous species and convey early lessons in ecological consciousness. Often seen as derivative of more famous British nineteenth-century children’s books, especially Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley’s 1863 The Water-Babies, these Victorian Australian texts are also well-versed in debates about evolutionary science. Yet Clark and Pedley’s stories are asking questions about developmental time that were specific to a colony and a continent understood respectively as both incredibly young (with British settlements dating only to the late eighteenth century) and unimaginably old (in geological and evolutionary terms). This essay therefore analyzes both texts through Victorian science as well as recent formulations of “deep time,” “hyperobjects,” and shared human-animal temporalities. In Clark’s and Pedley’s stories, the representation of bush life does more than teach ecological awareness: It also contributes to the construction of early Australian identities. “Bush” temporalities—instinctual rhythms, evolutionary development, and even extinction—are also those of a colony and a child readership finding their place.
