Imagining indigenality in romance and fantasy fiction for children

This essay explores how non-Indigenous authors of children’s romance and fantasy narratives have positioned themselves as authorities on Indigenous peoples and the Dreaming, often authorising their own concepts of the Dreaming and of Indigenous history to inform and ‘indigenise’ non-Indigenous child readers. Throughout this discussion I will draw on examples from both romance and fantasy narratives, because since the nineteenth century these genres have operated in similar ways to construct Indigenality for the understanding of non-Indigenous children through the appropriation of Indigenous concepts, images and symbols. Whereas fantasy can be completely separated from the ‘believable’, romance must retain some elements of it. In romance stories the restrictions of the political, economic and historical world are completely removed. They resemble ‘real’ life on the surface but offer solutions that can only be achieved by eliminating the encumbrances of social reality (Jameson pass 1975). Analysis of the connection of fantasy and romance to colonialism is necessary in order to understand how these genres have fostered stereotypes of the Aborigine, including those in contemporary Australian children’s fiction. I will focus on two texts from the late nineteenth century, Arthur Ferres’s My Centennial Gift; or, Australian Stories for Children (1887) and Mary Anne Fitzgerald’s King Bungaree’s Pyalla and Stories Illustrative of Manners and Customs that Prevailed Among Australian Aborigines (1891), and a selection of twentieth-century texts which draw upon the conventions of romance and fantasy: Frank Dalby Davison’s Children of the Dark People (1936); Ann E. Wells’s Arnhem Land trilogy, Tales from Arnhem Land (1959), Rain in Arnhem Land (1961) and Skies of Arnhem Land (1964); and, from the late twentieth century, Poppy Boon’s The Black Crystal (1993).