ABSTRACT
We can map Australian children’s fiction, during the second half of the twentieth century, onto a trajectory within Australian society from a society imagined as grounded in the values of a settler culture with British origins to an ideology of multiculturalism. In fiction written in the 1950s, place—as a particular territory inhabited by a particular kind of people—was central to constructions of an Australian identity. By the 1980s, within little more than a quarter of a century, the relationships between place and identity had been redefined, as fictions embracing a multicultural ideology had emerged as a somewhat privileged form (privileged, that is, by book awards and by the demands of school libraries), so that now a multiplicity of ways of being in the world could be imagined. The society thus depicted reflects a hope that Australia is inexorably becoming multiple and diverse in nature or, in other words, is evolving towards social formations constituted as uncentered networks. The literature of multiculturalism for young readers appears characteristically to present a positive and optimistic orientation towards that process of evolution, and the processes of production, publication, and critical reception surrounding it reinforce that impression. But the development of a multicultural Australia has not been without its tensions and fissures, and it is arguable that what many assume children’s fiction presents is a reflection of uninterrogated “official” ideology. Since the early 1970s, multiculturalism has been enunciated as a policy of governments, and a generation of children has been educated within modern critical versions of Australian history that challenge older concepts of nation based on exclusion of cultural and ethnic otherness.
