ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show how the Aboriginal Australian children’s picture book, Once There Was a Boy by Dub Leffler (2011, Once There Was a Boy. Broome, WA: Magabala Books), dismantles dominant notions of gender binaries through the metaphor of a beating heart. Through representing relationship with place, or Country, the text utilises multimodalities to create an intersubjective dialogue between the male and female characters, between the characters and place and between the text and its readers. By examining the written and visual elements of the picture book, this chapter aims to show how the text immerses young readers in gender expansive subjectivities that are nourished by sharing and reconciliation. The multimodal picture book’s storying of a young male protagonist’s body, subjectivity and agency offers a space for encountering gender and culture that privileges feeling and emotion, as outlined in Feng and O'Halloran’s (2013, The Multimodal Representation of Emotion in Film: Integrating Cognitive and Semiotic Approaches. Semiotica 197: 79–100) work on representing emotion through multimodal constructions. The metaphor of the beating heart dismantles separateness and speaks to Bird Rose’s (1999, Indigenous Ecologies and an Ethic of Connection. In N. Low (ed.). Global Ethics and Environment. London and New York: Routledge, 175–187; 2000, To Dance with Time: A Victoria River Aboriginal Study. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 11 (2): 287–296) notion of ecological connectivity. Such a reading of Leffler’s work results in shifting traditional Western ideas of the family unit, constructs of the child and dominant notion of “boyness”.
