Who will save us from the rabbits?: rewriting the past allegorically

  • Brooke Collins-Gearing University of Newcastle
  • Dianne Osland University of Newcastle

Περίληψη

As a product of a colonial past, Australian children’s literature demonstrates a clash of colonial metanarratives of settlement and post-colonial awareness of invasion and dispossession.  Non-Indigenous representations face the dilemma of acknowledging the presence of Indigenous peoples within colonialist frameworks built on the doctrine of terra nullius.  That is, myths of white settlement have been, and continue to be, the basis for ideological, institutional and societal practices and beliefs that centre non-Indigenous cultures and relegate Indigenous cultures to the margins. In this study of John Marsden and Shaun Tan’s 1998 multi-award-winning text The Rabbits, its attempt to enter into and reflect recent national and historical dialogues about the construction of Australia’s history is explored. As this text deals explicitly with colonisation as a form of invasion and dispossession, Australia’s psychological terra nullius in terms of how it tries to create and invoke a collective identity is examined.

##submission.authorBiographies##

##submission.authorWithAffiliation##
Bavid Beagley is Lecturer in Children's Literature and Literacy at La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, Victoria, Australia, where he teaches units in Genres, History, Australian and Post-colonial children's literature. He has previously taught in secondary schools, and has been a school and university librarian.
##submission.authorWithAffiliation##
Dianne Osland lectures in English Literature at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and her publications include work on the problems of identifying and interpreting metaphor in fiction. She is currently engaged in research on reading practices and cultural change.
Τεύχος
Τόμ. 14 Αρ. 2 (2010)
Ενότητα
Alice's Academy
Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.