Global Studies of Childhood

Volume 1 Number 4 2011

www.wwwords.co.uk/GSCH

The Case of Children’s Literature:

colonial or anti-colonial?

CLARE BRADFORD
School of Communication and Creative Arts,
Deakin University, Australia

ABSTRACT Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of
children’s literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and
children’s books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose’s rhetoric of colonisation and its
deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children’s
literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through
colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To
illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children’s texts, the article considers several alphabet
books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very
young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to
English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.

The case of Jacqueline Rose’s influence on children’s literature scholarship is an instructive one,
demonstrating how ideas and language circulate within scholarly fields and how they come to be
regarded as ‘true’. In this article I consider Rose’s references to and deployment of concepts of
colonialism and colonisation in her influential book The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of
Children’s Literature (1984).[1] In my 2001 study Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian children’s
literature, and later in Unsettling Narratives: postcolonial readings of children’s literature (2007), I
grappled with Rose’s influence on discourses of colonisation in children’s literature research. In this
article I build on my earlier work, extending it by considering the ethical questions which arise
when scholars use terms such as ‘colonised’ to apply to non-Indigenous child populations. In the
second section of the article I consider some of the strategies whereby Indigenous author-
illustrators engage in strategies of decolonisation in alphabet books addressed to very young
readers. These strategies, in my view, constitute a powerful counterbalance to the shallow and
unreflective approaches to colonisation which have haunted children’s literature scholarship.
When The Case of Peter Pan was published in 1984 it immediately attracted the attention of
scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States, setting off a flurry of reviews and
responses.[2] During the three decades since its publication, The Case of Peter Pan has frequently
been cited in children’s literature scholarship, to the extent that it would be difficult to find a
discussion of conceptions of childhood or about the field of children’s literature which did not refer
to Rose’s work. The book’s continuing influence is evident in the fact that in 2010 the Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly published a special issue, ‘The (Im)Possibility of Children’s Fiction:
Rose twenty-five years on’. Most citations from The Case of Peter Pan do not engage closely with the
book’s arguments, but assume a priori that a quotation from Rose represents an ineluctable truth.
Thus, Roderick McGillis says: ‘As Jacqueline Rose and others have noted, children are colonial
subjects’ (1999, p. xxvii). The implication here is that it is enough to refer to Rose (and unnamed
others) to justify the contentious claim ‘children are colonial subjects’. Another approach used by
children’s literature scholars is to treat what Rose has said as a rule to which specific texts might be

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Clare Bradford

regarded as exceptions. Thus, Michelle H. Phillips (2009) argues that the children’s magazine St
Nicholas departs from ‘normal’ conditions of textual production for children because, in contrast to
Rose’s view of a model where ‘the adult comes first ... and the child comes after’ (Rose, 1984,
pp. 1-2), the child-adult interplay which characterised the production of St Nicholas was conducted
along democratic and collaborative lines. Rose’s dictum that neither adults nor children occupy the
‘space in between’ (1984, p. 2) is presented as a fact about children’s literature, and the
exceptionalism of St Nicholas as a notable departure from what is normal.
When The Case of Peter Pan was published it represented a sharp break from the models of
critique which had dominated children’s literature up to this time: the close reading approach
espoused by New Criticism, whose formalist approach treated the text as a self-contained object;
empiricist and historicist models which interpret children’s texts in the light of ‘real-world’ events
and phenomena; and reader-response criticism, conventionally forged out of close observation of a
small number of child readers and their responses to texts. Rose’s emphasis on the slipperiness of
children’s literature and its propensity for incorporating imaginings of childhood into its
representational and narrative forms was a useful intervention into children’s literature criticism,
but this alone is not sufficient to explain why The Case of Peter Pan has maintained its influence in
the field of children’s literature in Britain and the United States.
In 1984, Rose’s psychoanalytical and poststructuralist orientation must have struck children’s
literature scholars as a heady, daring intervention in a field of critical work dominated by humanist
assumptions about the stability of identity and the worthiness of children’s literature. I say ‘must
have struck’ because, like most Australian scholars in the field, I have not drawn upon The Case of
Peter Pan as a foundational critical work.[3] This is not because I object to the poststructuralist
orientation of Rose’s discussion or to her argument that children’s literature is imbued with the
preoccupations and desires of adults and their imaginings of childhood. First, I distrust the book’s
propensity for over-generalisation: Rose’s observations about children’s literature are based, in the
main, on the example of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and a small sample of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century novels. Citing these, and referring to a few twentieth-century authors (Maurice Sendak,
Enid Blyton, Alan Garner), Rose generalises about children’s literature as though all texts for
children, in all times and places, are shaped by common motivations on the part of the adults who
produce and disseminate them; and as though all texts for children are British, with the exception
of Where the Wild Things Are. Her use of the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’, particularly in
conjunction with the term ‘culture’, seems to claim universality for what I see as a peculiarly
British set of preoccupations and cultural norms. Thus, when Rose refers to ‘how our culture
constitutes and reproduces its image of the child’ (1984, p. 112), and describes Peter Pan as the
‘cultural emblem of our time’ (1984, p. 144), ‘our’ seems to incorporate vast swathes of western
culture into its enunciation of Britishness.
A second problematic aspect of The Case of Peter Pan is that Rose’s discussions of narratives for
children slide between (and, arguably, confuse) terms in ways which often merge real and implied
children, real and implied authors, narrators and authors. Discussing writers for children, Rose
says:
The demand for better and more cohesive writing in children’s fiction ... carries with it a plea
that certain psychic barriers should go undisturbed, the most important of which is the barrier
between adult and child. When children’s fiction touches on that barrier, it becomes not
experiment ... but molestation. (1984, p. 70, italics in original)
When The Case of Peter Pan was published, the idea that children’s fiction might be regarded as a
kind of molestation, to use Rose’s overheated language, perhaps struck a particular chord with
British and North American readers in the light of the moral panics over child abuse which erupted
in Britain and the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. There exists an extensive scholarly
literature on these moral panics, which, according to Nancy Scheper-Hughes & Howard F. Stein,
are prone to occur at times of economic conservatism such as the years of the Reagan
administration, when health and social welfare services, especially those directed to the poor, were
dismantled or reduced. Scheper-Hughes & Stein (1987) argue that ‘the time of greatest public
outcry against child abuse is also the time of the widespread, official planning of sacrifice of
children in public policy’ (p. 342). A similar argument is made by Harry Hendrick, who notes that
the child abuse cases of the 1980s in Britain ‘exemplified the dilemmas of the state and its

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professionals’ (2003, p. 193) at a time when social services to families and children were cut by
Thatcher’s government. Read literally, Rose’s claim that children’s literature might be regarded as a
form of abuse (‘molestation’) seems, shockingly, to imply that the entire apparatus of children’s
literature and children’s literature criticism is tainted by illicit desires.
Possibly the provocativeness of Rose’s language is enough to explain why she is so often
quoted: citations from The Case of Peter Pan demand attention, often either standing in for authors’
own arguments or providing a launching pad for contrary positions. In their introduction to the
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly anniversary issue, David Rudd & Anthony Pavlik note that
certain quotations from the book have ‘become like mantras, obviating, it would seem, further
engagement’ (2010, p. 225). They list four such quotations, but not the one which most interests
me: ‘Literature for children is ... a way of colonising ... the child’ (Rose, 1984, p. 26). Rose refers
here to J.M. Barrie’s representation of children’s literature in The Little White Bird, not to children’s
literature more generally; later, discussing Rousseau’s Emile and Thomas Day’s The History of
Sandford and Merton, she claims that the depictions of childhood innocence in these texts are
analogous to colonial conceptions of the childlikeness of ‘primitive’ cultures. She takes this
unremarkable analogy further in her analysis of the novels of W.H.G. Kingston, G.A. Henty and
R.L. Stevenson, but she does not exactly say, as McGillis claims, that children are colonial subjects.
When Rose says that children’s literature is a ‘way of colonising ... the child’, her language
again slides between implied and actual child readers. Thus, despite her insistence that she does not
address ‘the child’s own experience of the book’ (1984, p. 9), the meaning she attributes to the
terms ‘the child’ and ‘children’ is ambiguous. The same ambiguity is evident in the work of many
of the scholars who cite Rose, notably Perry Nodelman, whose influential 1992 essay ‘The Other:
orientalism, colonialism, and children’s literature’ argues that children’s literature deals with
childhood and children as Orientalism deals with the Orient. Throughout this essay, Nodelman
draws on Edward Said’s characterisation of Orientalists, using the pronoun ‘we’ much as Rose does
in order to produce a homogenised and hypostatised adult. Thus, ‘we’ adults are said to love gazing
at children and so objectifying them, becoming ‘very angry indeed when [children] dare to gaze
back’ (Nodelman, 1992, p. 30); ‘we’ silence children by speaking for and about them; and ‘we’
dominate children by exerting power over them. Like Rose before him, Nodelman constructs a
unified child and sets this child against adults assumed to possess a common fund of motivations
and desires in regard to children – apart, that is, from Nodelman and Rose, who distance
themselves from those ‘colonising’ adults who produce children’s books and intervene in children’s
lives.
Nodelman bolsters his argument by citing Rose as an authority who ‘works from the premise
that children’s literature is a form of colonisation’ (Nodelman, 1992, p. 29). The phrase ‘a form of’
implies that children’s literature and colonisation occupy the same ontological category; and
Roderick McGilllis’s statement ‘children are colonial subjects’ (1999, p. xxvii) subsumes ‘children’
within the category ‘colonised peoples’, at the same time collapsing the terms ‘colonial’ and
‘colonised’. Dispensing with terms such as ‘metaphorical’ and ‘analogous’, Rose, Nodelman,
McGillis and many others perform a sleight of hand whereby ‘children’ become indistinguishable
from peoples colonised during the many waves of imperialism which have affected vast swathes of
the world’s population. The children of whom Rose and Nodelman write are those who consume
children’s books – that is, the readers to whom mainstream publishers direct their products.
Through analogies presented as fact, this largely middle-class population of children is, bizarrely,
referred to as a colonised and oppressed group.
As I have argued previously, analogies between colonisers and children’s authors, colonised
peoples and child readers are hopelessly unsound:
children’s authors were once themselves children, and so the children for whom they write are
not wholly Other ... . The gulf between colonisers and colonised is of a different order, because
colonial discourses are informed by the assumption that the colonised occupy quite a different
ontological space from the colonisers, and that no matter how assiduously they mimic their
‘betters’, they will never quite measure up to them. Secondly, the comparison between child
readers and colonised peoples breaks down completely when texts are produced by colonial
writers for the children of colonisers, who are inscribed within these texts as young colonisers, as
‘us’ rather than ‘them’. (Bradford, 2001, p. 12)

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I hasten to say that I am by no means the only scholar who has contested the use of metaphors of
colonisation in relation to children and child protagonists. For instance, Caroline Webb argues that
Rose’s treatment of the ‘colonised child’ fails to account for the propensity of Alice, in Alice in
Wonderland, to ‘reflect the imperialist vision’ (Webb, 2010, p. 7) in her attitude to the creatures she
encounters in Wonderland; and Jackie Stallcup takes issue with Nodelman’s propensity to sweep all
child-adult relationships up in the metaphor of colonisation, arguing that ‘we can acknowledge and
address the troubling, asymmetrical power relationships between adults and children and, at the
same time, explore the possibility of sharing power with children in mutually beneficial ways’
(2002, pp. 144-145). It is, however, far more common for scholarly work in children’s literature to
draw upon Rose’s and Nodelman’s arguments unreflectively.
I want to take the argument further by considering the extent to which the ‘children are
colonised’ rhetoric in children’s literature scholarship is problematic in relation not only to logic
but also to ethics. By conflating children with colonised peoples, scholars who use this language
seem to condone a strategic forgetting of the materiality of colonisation, its deleterious effects on
the lives and cultures of colonised people, its repercussions in the present. The gently reared
middle-class children who comprise the bulk of readers implied by mainstream children’s literature
are very far removed from the Indigenous peoples who endured the massacres, dispossessions and
privations of colonisation in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, India, Algeria and
many other nations.[4] To refer to children’s literature as a site of colonisation is, then, to mute, to
downplay, even to trivialise the effects of colonisation on Indigenous peoples.
A more general ethical issue concerns how regimes of power and influence play out in both
children’s literature and the scholarship of children’s literature. As Linda Alcoff has observed, ‘the
practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually
resulted in many cases in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for’ (Alcoff,
1991-92, p. 7). The scholars who write about children’s literature as a field of colonisation and
children as a colonised population do not refer in these passages to actual colonised peoples. But
they lump together colonisation/children’s literature, colonised peoples/children in such a way
that the colonised are merely figures, ‘the colonised’, with whom ‘children’ are compared; and in
this way they treat colonisation as a time or set of circumstances so remote from the present as not
to possess its own particularity in relation to peoples, places and politics. Established scholars are
privileged because their educational achievements and their occupation endow them with prestige
and authority. When they speak about marginalised others (or refer to them as emblems,
metaphors or analogies) they benefit from these less-privileged people, who do not speak for
themselves. And they leave intact the relations of power whereby some people are privileged and
others are not.
Among less-privileged people are the descendents of those colonised populations so glibly
associated by Rose and others with the children who read mainstream children’s literature. Since
the 1960s, several of the Indigenous publishing houses which have emerged in the settler societies
of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States have accorded priority to the production
of children’s texts because of the pressing need to provide Indigenous children with reading
material which proceeds from Indigenous cultures and which treats as normal and usual the values
and practices of these cultures. In contrast, mainstream perspectives of Indigeneity generally
naturalise the values of dominant cultures, either representing Indigenous people and cultures as
marginal and different, or insisting on what bell hooks refers to as ‘the liberal belief in a universal
subjectivity ... the myth of “sameness”’ (1992, p. 167). Indigenous textuality for children, in
contrast, actively works toward processes of decolonisation by foregrounding the diversity and
complexity of Indigenous cultures and by contesting the colonial discourses which persist in
modern, post-colonial cultures. Using the forms and genres of mainstream children’s literature,
Indigenous authors and artists adopt the tactic described by Bill Ashcroft as interpolation, which, he
says, ‘redefines the nature of “resistance” by revealing the diversity of subjective agency within the
dominant territory’ (2001, p. 53).
A striking example of interpolation in Indigenous publishing over the last decade has been the
emergence of Indigenous alphabet and counting books for pre-school children. These texts include
local publications such as the Kaurna Alphabet Book (Gale & Watkins, 2006), produced through
collaboration between the Kaurna elder Cherie Watkins and the non-Indigenous linguist Mary-
Anne Gale, and trialled at the Kaurna Plains School in South Australia in conjunction with a

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program aimed at regenerating Kaurna, an at-risk language. Evelyn Ballantyne’s The Aboriginal
Alphabet for Children (2001), in contrast, takes a pan-Aboriginal approach by drawing on various
Canadian Aboriginal languages and cultures, incorporating Inuktitut terms such as kamiik (snow
boots), the Great Plains word tipi (tent) and various Aboriginal English words such as ‘bannock’,
‘sweat lodge’ and ‘fiddle’. Given that alphabet books introduce young children to language and
cultural concepts, the choice of words in alphabet books is informed by authors’ and illustrators’
judgements as to which objects are likely to be familiar to children, or at least familiar enough for
children to match a word with a picture of the object signified by the word. As Nodelman remarks,
the puzzle-solving dimension of alphabet books – the matching of words to pictures – ‘is an
important means of inserting [young readers] into the shared meanings that define our sense of
what our world means and who we are ourselves’ (2001, p. 247). Nodelman’s ‘our’, however,
overlooks the cultural and ideological strategies whereby alphabet books normalise notions about
who is included and who is excluded from the audiences they imply.
Rather, alphabet books have often reflected and promoted racially charged hierarchies. The
entry ‘I is for Indian’ in North American alphabet books, for instance, frequently evoked
representations of Indians described by Michael Dorris as ‘whooping, silly, one-dimensional
cartoons’ (1998, p. 19) which veered between comic relief, savages bent on the murder of white
people, or stereotypical figures, either saintly or cute. Early Australian alphabet books too ensured
that the white children who were their implied readers were positioned to assent to colonial
discourses. In The Young Australian’s Alphabet (1871), the rhyme accompanying the letter ‘b’ is: ‘B is
the black-fellow/ We can all see,/ Lazily sleeping/ Under a tree’ (in O’Conor, 2009, p. 11). This
entry, which is accompanied by the image of a ragged Aboriginal man sleeping soundly under the
shade of a tree, his boomerang and throwing-stick at his side, conforms with Rose’s observation
about how colonial discourses represent Indigenous people as carefree children of nature.
However, the idea that the white Australian children implied by The Young Australian’s Alphabet
might also be regarded as a colonised population collapses under the weight of the implications of
‘B is the black-fellow’. The supine figure in the illustration is, by implication, the antithesis of the
active, organised white man, whose clothing and actions mark him out as the member of a
superior race. The children implied as readers are positioned, too, to assent to the idea of their
superiority, and of their good fortune in possessing that superiority.
The alphabet books and counting books published by Indigenous authors and artists over the
last decade adopt tactics of interpolation by exploiting the possibilities of a form deeply implicated
in the production and reproduction of the values of dominant cultures, a form directed to the
youngest children, engaged in building repertoires of knowledge, values and affect. These
Indigenous books for the young are, like Indigenous texts for children more generally, directed
toward two audiences: Indigenous children for whom the objects and names introduced in
alphabet books are embedded in cultural systems into which readers are inducted; and non-
Indigenous children who may, even at a very early age, sense that they are to some degree
outsiders to the world of these books. Answering back to the colonising discourses of early
alphabet books, Indigenous texts function as decolonising texts, throwing off the baggage of
colonialism and reclaiming language and identity.
These decolonising agendas are strikingly present in Julie Flett’s Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer:
L’Alfabet di Michif, its title translated as ‘Owls See Clearly at Night: a Michif alphabet’ (2010). The
book’s introduction, intended for adults, alludes to the complex history which produced the Michif
language, the unique combination of French, Cree and Ojibway spoken by the Métis people of the
Canadian and Northern US prairies, and formed when French and Scots newcomers intermingled
with the Cree and Ojibway inhabitants of these territories. Like Kaurna from South Australia,
Michif is an endangered language. Flett’s strategy of placing the Michif words first on the page and
in coloured fonts next to English translations in black foregrounds Michif as the language of the
book, and indicates that English is its translation. To Métis children, who may or may not be
familiar with Michif, the language of the book itself enunciates Métis identity, even before readers
have perused its pages. To non-Indigenous children, the appearance of Michif, its unfamiliar
blending of vowels and consonants, instantiates difference and gestures toward the culture from
which language derives. Because Michif is the primary language of the book, the alphabetic system
subtly disrupts the primacy of English. Thus, the letter ‘e’ features Li Eenikooñs, the ant; ‘h’ stands
for ‘La Haruzh’, the red willow; the letter ‘t’ is for taanshi, ‘hello’; and the letter ‘o’ stands for

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Ohpaho!, for an entire utterance, ‘Fly up! Fly away!’ The effect of these language features is exactly
what Ashcroft means by interpolation, in that they ‘make use of aspects of the colonising culture so
as to generate transformative cultural production’ (2001, p. 47). In Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer the
Michif language and culture is interpolated into a form formerly dominated by the English
language and populated by signifiers valued by the dominant culture. This strategy is not merely
one of resistance, but rather claims power by generating a new kind of alphabet book – a post-
colonial text which asserts the survival and specificity of Métis culture.
The objects, animals and people featuring in Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer signal key aspects
of Métis cultural practices and their relationships to place. Thus, the buffalo, the red willow and the
pheasant signify Métis connections to the land and to pursuits such as hunting; the book’s emphasis
on environmental phenomena (snow, wind, Northern Lights, water) speaks of a culture steeped in
knowledge of the natural world. The letter ‘g’ stands for La Galet, or bannock (flat bread). The
illustration for ‘g’ emphasises that the domestic and the natural world are not separate domains:
rounds of bannock cook on a grate placed over a fireplace in a forest clearing, while a tree stump
serves as a table, set with a white cloth, a red teapot and a round of bannock. Behind a tree a bear
peers out, planning to steal some bannock. This illustration, like those throughout the book, is
deceptively simple, with its limited palette of red, black, greys and browns against a white ground,
but rewards close investigation of its telling details of Métis life. The humour with which the bear’s
stance is depicted, the brightness of the teapot, the spareness of the picture’s elements focus
attention on the interpenetration of the natural world and cultural elements, creating a strong
sense of Métis experience and its relationship to place. When illustrations refer to Métis practices
(jigging and fiddling) and decorative arts (such as the elaborate beading used to make moccasins),
these practices and arts are always placed in outdoor settings where plants and animals function not
merely as background details but as elements integral to human activities.
If Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer valorises local and specific features of Métis life, the
Bundjalung artist Bronwyn Bancroft evokes the dot-painting techniques of the desert peoples of the
centre of Australia while developing her own artistic and stylistic strategies. Bancroft’s alphabet and
number books comprise An Australian 1, 2, 3 of Animals (2007), Possum and Wattle: my first big book of
Australian words (2008b), and W is for Wombat: my first Australian word book (2008a), a board book for
the very young with illustrations selected from Possum and Wattle. In these books Bancroft
constructs an Australia defined by Aboriginality. In W is for Wombat and Possum and Wattle, the
words she has selected often refer to animals, birds and plants (ants, cockatoos, dingoes, emus, flies,
goannas, hawks), depicted in lustrous colours and dot-painted in patterns which echo the shapes of
plants and of design elements in Aboriginal art. Whereas words signify a vast range of possibilities,
illustrations tie them down to particular times and places. Bancroft takes English words such as
‘island’, ‘river’, ‘sun’ and ‘tree’ and renders them Aboriginal. In W is for Wombat, for instance, the
word ‘tree’ is accompanied by an illustration featuring the boab tree, a species of which grows in
the Kimberley region of Western Australia and in the Northern Territory. The boab, a distinctive
bottle-shaped tree, is native to Madagascar, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, but Bancroft’s
depiction, evoking the X-ray techniques and dot painting of Aboriginal desert art, draws attention
to the boab’s peculiar and majestic form, and its prominent place in Aboriginal history and
culture.[5] While readers may have in their minds more conventional images of trees, Bancroft’s
boab painting alludes both to Aboriginal art and also to the cultural practices and belief which are
inseparable from it. Her depiction of the word ‘sun’ is more directly political: her design echoes the
Australian Aboriginal flag, designed in 1971, and which represents the sun, bright yellow, against a
background of black and red, which represents Aboriginal people and the red earth of the desert
regions. The Aboriginal flag has been and remains a powerful sign of Indigenous presence in
Australia and of contemporary Indigenous political action.
Bancroft’s Possum and Wattle (2008b) boldly announces itself as ‘my big book of Australian
words’. The radical story Bancroft tells is that ‘Australia’ can be understood only in relation to the
cultures and practices of its Aboriginal inhabitants. As Sally Morgan explains in her introduction to
the book, before Europeans came to Australia, around 250 Aboriginal languages were spoken
across the continent. Although many of these languages have been lost, a number of them survive
or are now being revived; in addition, many Aboriginal words are used in Australian English;
examples from Bancroft’s book are ‘boomerang’, ‘dingo’, ‘galah’ and ‘numbat’. Other words,
among them ‘didgeridoo’ and ‘possum’, were applied by Europeans to the new phenomena they

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encountered: ‘didgeridoo’ is thought to have been derived from a word heard by settlers and
mistakenly applied to the instrument; and the ‘possum’ was thought to be similar to the North
American opossum. But it is in her treatment of English words – the language of the colonisers –
that Bancroft most forcefully re-appropriates Aboriginal meanings. In her depiction of ‘home’, for
instance, the land itself incorporates home: its trees, waters, groundcover, creatures, sky. The small
bark shelter depicted in the illustration is only one element of the complex of signs which make up
home. Near the shelter a figure is viewed bearing a coolaman, a carrying dish made from the bark
of the red gum trees, the shape of which is evident in two of the trees from which bark has been
carefully cut. Just as the trees provide the coolaman, so ancestral land provides its Aboriginal
inhabitants with sustenance, meaning and identity.
Bancroft’s approach relies on strategies of defamiliarisation, as viewers first think they are
familiar with the meanings of common English words, and then experience them as Aboriginal
terms. The word ‘flames’ may appear to refer to the bushfires which threaten large areas of
Australia during hot summers, but the book’s glossary explains that Bancroft’s depiction of flames
refers to the ancient practices of communication, hunting and land management which Aboriginal
people carried out prior to colonisation. As represented by non-Aboriginal authors and artists,
Aboriginal cultures and practices have commonly appeared as marginal to ‘Australia’, an aesthetic
or decorative add-on to a ‘real’ Australia associated with Britishness. In Bancroft’s Possum and
Wattle, however, Aboriginal ways of seeing are central to how ‘Australia’ is figured, teaching child
readers how to view the land and its creatures. It might perhaps be argued that Bancroft here
engages in a kind of reverse ‘colonisation’ by insisting on the primacy of Aboriginal cultures within
the nation. However, like most claims of ‘reverse colonisation’ or ‘reverse racism’, this argument
founders on its assumptions about the relationships between texts and the discursive contexts in
which they are produced. For, as Alcoff observes, ‘the discursive context is a political arena’
(1991-92, p. 15) underwritten by structures of power and influence. Since European culture
occupies a position of privilege in the Australian nation, and Aboriginal books for children
comprise a small fraction of books overall, there is nothing ‘reverse’ about Bancroft’s approach. As
Alcoff notes, discourse functions as ‘an event, which includes speaker, words, hearers, location,
language, and so on’ (1991-2, p. 26). Conceptualised as an event, Possum and Wattle thus speaks
from the margins, claiming recognition and respect for Aboriginal cultures.
Children’s literature has always engaged in representations of colonisers and colonised
peoples, from the texts of adventure and exploration of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, to the many contemporary texts which address colonial histories and thematise relations
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people (Bradford, 2007). The significance of texts such as
the alphabet books I have discussed is that they undermine the easy assumptions of dominant
cultures by claiming a space for minority languages and by demonstrating that the meanings of
words derive from the ways in which they are used. As the Métis scholar Emma LaRocque
remarks, English is now the language of many Indigenous people, and can serve to ‘decolonize and
so unite Aboriginal peoples’ (1990, p. xxvi). There is, as LaRocque also notes, a degree of poetic
justice about this fact. Given the power of children’s texts to work toward decolonisation, the time
has, I think, passed for scholars to deploy the tired and unstable rhetorics which treat children’s
literature as a form of colonisation. The innovative work of Indigenous authors and artists offers its
own eloquent argument. Far from seeking to colonise children into the values of the dominant
culture, Indigenous alphabet books seek to engage very young readers in actively producing
meaning. It would be fanciful and insulting to claim that the implied readers of these books are
colonised subjects. Whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, the young children implied as readers
are open to difference and alive to the adventure of engaging with Indigenous beliefs and practices.

Notes
[1] I thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their incisive and helpful comments.
[2] The Case of Peter Pan was Rose’s first book and her only publication on children’s literature. She went
on to write on sexuality, feminism and politics from a psychoanalytical perspective, and is best
known for her study of Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991).

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Clare Bradford

[3] The Australian scholar John Stephens says that Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan represents an early
deployment of literary theory in children’s literature scholarship, along with Zohar Shavit’s Poetics of
Children’s Literature, but that although Rose ‘has proved the more quotable in subsequent criticism ...
the contribution of the book to the theoretical conceptualisation of children’s literature is in fact
minimal’ (Stephens, 2000, p. 19).
[4] By ‘Indigenous’ I mean autochthonous peoples and cultures in nations and regions colonised by more
powerful groups. I use the upper case out of respect and to distinguish colonised people and their
descendents from the term ‘indigenous’ as it is used to refer to all people born in a nation or region
regardless of their ancestry. When relevant I use the names of specific Indigenous clans and nations.
[5] Boabs were used for food, water and medicine and to make twine. A particularly large boab tree in
Western Australia was used during the colonial period as a cell to temporarily hold Aboriginal
prisoners who were being transported to the town of Derby for trial and imprisonment.

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CLARE BRADFORD is Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

She has published more than seventy essays and book chapters on children’s literature. Her books
include Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian children’s literature (2001), which won both the
Children’s Literature Association Book Award and the International Research Society for
Children’s Literature Award; Unsettling Narratives: postcolonial readings of children’s literature (2007);
and New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: utopian transformations (2009) (with
Mallan, Stephens & McCallum). In 2009 she was awarded the first International Trudeau
Fellowship. She is President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature.
Correspondence: Clare Bradford, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University,
221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, Victoria 3125, Australia ([email protected]).

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