When the hairy man meets Blinky Bill: the representation of indigenality in Australian children's literature

This thesis studies Australian children's books published during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to examine the representation of Indigenality in narratives written predominantly by non-Indigenous authors. The main concerns of the thesis are how representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures have been created and used; how non-Indigenous authors' cognisance of Indigenous culture has impacted on children's literature; and how the Indigenous child has been excluded from the subject position of reader by books that consistently position non-Indigenality as the "norm". The first chapter consists of three essays which set out the foundation of argument about the production of popular stereotypical representations of Indigenous peoples; the influence of national and imperial ideologies on children's literature and its inclusion of Indigenality; and the late impact that late nineteenth-century representations of Indigenality had on late twentieth-century children's literature. The following three chapters examine representations of Indigenality by loosely dividing Australian children's literature into the categories of ethnographic realism, romance and fantasy genres and historical writing. The concluding chapter discusses the problem of the "decolonizing" Australian children's literature and its conventions for representing Indigenality.