Editor's Introduction: Always Facing the Issues--Preoccupations in Australian Children's Literature

Abstract

The texts which are the focus of this issue of The Lion and the Unicorn are Australian, and it seems appropriate to begin by addressing the rather elusive question of what that means and implies in and for texts produced and disseminated for children in Australia. What we are dealing with is texts which, in various ways, make assumptions about how readers understand and negotiate the Australian societies and cultures incorporated as settings or as themes in those texts. In the second half of the twentieth century, Australia was utterly transformed from a predominantly "Anglo-Celtic" society, with a mentality that perceived Australia as an outpost of Europe, to one of the world's most ethnically diverse societies, gradually coming to terms with its geographical location in the Asia-Pacific region. Insofar as children's texts seek to shape, impact on, or intervene in, culture, it is to be expected that representations of the common themes of children's literature—personal growth and development of a sense of one's place in the world; conflict with family, peers and community—will be nuanced in particularly local ways in response to this changing society.

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