The Evolution of the Queensland Kid
Changing Literary Representations of Queensland Children in Children's and Adolescent Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600006449Keywords:
Mid-nineteenth century England, fiction aimed at children and adolescents, exoticism, mystique of Queensland, representationAbstract
Since the education explosion in mid-nineteenth century England, when astute publishers began to capitalise upon a newly created and burgeoning market, Australia has always featured prominently in fiction aimed at children and adolescents. Those British children who initially made up the bulk of the reading audience for books set in Australia were eager to read episodic stories set in exciting countries far from home, and an Australian setting offered a glamorous backdrop for tales of high adventure. Moreover, it appears that while the nineteenth-century British reading public perceived Australia as an exotic place, then Queensland was quintessentially so. A disproportionate number of early tales about life in Australia is set in this colony, most often in the outback regions, but also in the vicinity of the coastal tropics. Nineteenth-century Queensland was viewed by the British, as well as by many Australians, as a remote outpost of Great Britain; it was commonly thought of as the least urbanised, the least “civilised”, the least industrialised and perhaps the most remote of all the regions of Australia. It was widely seen as an area of great and diverse (if also mysterious and desolate) natural beauty, of rural innocence as yet unpolluted by dark, satanic mills (even Brisbane was a sleepy, sprawling country town in picturesque contrast to the bustling southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne). Children's novelists capitalised on the mystique of Queensland, archetypal frontier colony, by creating a cluster of tales showing what it was like to be a Queensland kid.
References
See, for instance, Marcie Muir, A Bibliography of Australian Children's Books, Vols 1 and 2 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970); Terence, O'Neill and Frances O'Neill, Australian Children's Books to 1980: A Select Bibliography of the Collection Held in the National Library (Canberra: National Library) for an indication of the numerical superiority of novels dealing with Queensland life.
Niall, Brenda, Australia Through the Looking Glass: Children's Fiction 1830–1980 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1984), p.150.
Niall, Australia Through the Looking Glass, p.43. Guinea Gold by Charles H. Eden was published in London in 1886 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and is a typical product from this publishing company. Set in outback Queensland, New Guinea and on The Great Barrier Reef, it shows how Christian perseverance eventually wins out, especially when the Christians are British as well.
Haverfield, E.L., Queensland Cousins (London: Nelson, 1908), p.197.
See, for instance, such nineteenth-century classics as Henry Lawson's short stories, his “Town and Country” debate with Banjo Paterson and Tom Collins' Such as Life.
Haverfield, Queensland Cousins, pp.22–23. My italics.
Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1976), pp.7–8. Seven Little Australians was first published in 1894, was reprinted ten times in the following nine years, and was translated into several languages. For the first time Australian urban and family life was “presented with conviction and realism to children, presented not as a pale second best to the Bush, nor merely as a reflection of English city life, but as an imaginable way of life with its own peculiar flavour”. Rosemary Wighton, Early Australian Children's Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963), p.30.
Haverfield, Queensland Cousins, p.187.
Frances Campbell, Two Queenslanders and their Friends (London: Alexander Moring, 1904), p.267–268.
Campbell, Two Queenslanders, p.30. 147
See, for instance, Garth's, John “Our Girl”, The Australian Magazine, 11 August 1908, pp.1006–1009; Mary Gaunt, “Women in Australia”, Empire Review 1 (1901): 211–216.
Mary Grant Broce published her Billabong series of children's books from 1910 until 1942 (there are fifteen books in all). Together with Ethel Turner, her great rival, Broce has been credited with the upsurge of interest in Australian children's stories which escalated at the start of this century. Her Billabong books have recently been reissued by Angus and Robertson.
Campbell, Two Queenslanders, p.32.
Campbell, Two Queenslanders, p.267.
Joseph Bowes, The Young Settler: The Story of a New Chum in Queensland (London: Epworth Press, 1927), p.27. Bowes also wrote several other books of this type, including The Young Anzacs, The Aussie Crusaders, Comrades (A Story ofthe Australian Bush), and Pals (young Australians in Sport and Adventure).
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittannica, 1971), p.328.
See Walter McVitty, Authors and Illustrators of Australian Children's Books (Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), p.171.
Mary Elwyn Patchett, Ajax the Warrior (London: Puffin, 1953), p.7.
Moore Raymond, Smiley (London: Sylvan Press, 1945), p.5.
Raymond, Smiley, p.6.
Raymond, Moore, Smiley Gets A Gun (London: Sylvan Press, 1947), p.16.
Lake, Marilyn, “The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the masculinist context”, Australian Historical Studies 22 (1986): 116–131.
Raymond, Smiley, p.83.
Raymond, Smiley, p.183.
Ottley, Reginald, By the Sandhills of Yamboorah (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965), p.170.
Ottley, Reginald, The Bates Family (London: Collins, 1969), p.24.
Ottley, By the Sandhills of Yamboorah, p.25.
Ottley, By the Sandhills of Yamboorah, p.119.
Ottley, By the Sandhills of Yamboorah, p. 150.
See, for instance Gary Crew's The Inner Circle (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1986) and The House of Tomorrow (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1988). It is interesting to note that when The Inner Circle was first published in England (after a highly successful Australian ron) the publishers chose a front cover portraying Joe, the Aboriginal protagonist, with recognisably Jamaican features. Obviously they thought that the novel transposed well into an inner-city British setting. See also Donna Sharp's Blue Days (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1986) for a story of growing up in Coorparoo, coping with the death of a parent, the loss of a best friend, and a first love - marred by a Dolly-type ending.
Krauth, Nigel and Krauth, Caron, I Thought You Kissed With Your Lips (Ringwood: Penguin, 1990), pp.22–23.
Krauth and Krauth, I Thought You Kissed With Your Lips, p.103.
Krauth and Krauth, I Thought You Kissed With Your Lips, pp.28–29.
