Publishing, postage, and prizes : classic Australian children’s literature in the public eye

2012 saw the publication of competing and complementary lines of Australian “classics”: “A&R Australian Classics” (HarperCollins) and “Text Classics” (Text Publishing). While Angus and Robertson were key in establishing a canon of Australian children’s classics in the twentieth century, it was the Text Classics line which included a selection of young people’s titles in their 2013. In turn, Penguin Australia launched a selection of “Australian Children’s Classics”. In so doing, these publishers were drawing on particular literary and visual cultural traditions in Australian children’s literature. Public assertions of a particular selection of children’s books reveals not only contemporary assumptions about desirable childhood experiences but about the operation of nostalgia therein. In encouraging Australian adults to judge books by their covers, such gestures imply that Australian children may be similarly understood. Importantly, the illusion of unity, sameness, and legibility which is promised by circumscribed canons of “classic” children’s literature may well imply a desire for similarly illusory, unified, legible, “classic” childhood. This paper attends to public attempts to materialise (and legitimise) a canon of classic Australian children’s literature. In particular, it considers the ways in which publishing, postage stamps, and book awards make visible a range of children’s books, but do so in order to either fix or efface the content or meaning of the books themselves. Moving between assertions of the best books for children from the 1980s to today, and of the social values circulated within those books, this paper considers the possibilities and problematics of an Australian children’s canon.

Pulping affirmation : Danny Wallace’s Yes Man!

If Danny Wallace is a yes man, I am most certainly a no woman. No, I will not agree to anything and everything in an attempt to make my life “more interesting”. No, I do not believe that on “one fateful day a mystery man on a late night bus” will change my life forever. I hate the bus. In fact, I don’t even catch public transport. Wallace’s recent film tie-in Yes Man reeks of such cheesy optimism. The book’s premise is simple and indeed, even alluring at first. When a stranger on the bus tells Danny to “say yes more” (9), his life takes a dramatic turn on the roundabout of possibility. Sad, single, and staying inside a lot, Danny signs himself up for a year of mishap and misadventure, accepting every request, suggestion and invitation offered to him by both friends and strangers.

The use of headings and marginal notes in interpreting Queensland legislation : appearances can be deceptive

This article considers the rules relating to the use of marginal notes and headings in interpreting Queensland legislation, both in its original form and in reprinted legislation. It also examines the application of the principles of construction as to the use of section headings in the interpretation of provisions of the Criminal Code 1899 (Qld). Finally, it suggests that amendments should be made to the Acts Interpretation Act 1954 (Qld) in order to clarify the position as to the status of marginal notes and headings in statutory interpretation.

Irregular readers : Arthur Conan Doyle’s “six dirty scoundrels”, boyhood and literacy in contemporary Sherlockian children’s literature

Young adult (YA) literature is a socialising genre that encourages young readers to take up particular ways of relating to historical or cultural materials. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a boom in Sherlockian YA fiction using the Conan Doyle canon as a context and vocabulary for stories focused on the Baker Street Irregulars as figures of identification. This paper reads YA fiction’s deployment of Conan Doyle’s fictional universe as a strategy for negotiating anxieties of adolescent masculinity, particularly in relation to literacy and social agency.

LexisNexis Questions and Answers : Medical Law

LexisNexis Questions and Answers: Medical Law is designed to facilitate both continuous review and preparation for assignments and examinations. This book provides a clear and concise revision guide for each of the major topics covered in the typical health law course. It provides an understanding of medical law in each Australian jurisdiction and gives a clear and systematic approach to analysing and answering problem and essay questions. Each chapter commences with an identification of the key issues, including a summary of the relevant cases and legislation. Each question is followed by a suggested answer plan, a sample answer and comments on how the answer might be assessed by an examiner. The author also offers advice on common errors to avoid and practical hints and tips on how to achieve higher marks.

Using social media to create a participatory library service : an Australian study

Public libraries are increasingly using social media in an attempt to meet users in their own spaces. Social media can be useful when used to create a participatory library service – to engage with users. However, there has been little empirical investigation into the success of social media use by public libraries. This article reports on the findings of a research project that explored the use of social media by Australian public libraries. Two organisations participated in case studies that involved interviews, document analysis, and social media observation. To contextualise the use of social media in the case study organisations, a sub study was undertaking involving observation of an additional 24 public libraries across Australia. This article focuses on the findings from the observation sub study. It presents and applies a methodology for classifying social media content to determine whether the sample libraries’ social media use is indicative of a participatory approach to service delivery. This article explores how a range of social media platforms are used by the sample libraries and considers what ‘best practice’ in participatory library service looks like. The two case study organisations’ use of social media is highlighted as exemplary practice.

Requiem for a beast : a case study in controversy

In 2008, Matt Ottley’s Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music was awarded the Book of the Year: Picture Book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA). Ottley’s book is challenging in its form and content: it uses words, illustrations, and music to tell a sustained, multi-layered narrative about one young man’s attempts to reconcile his family’s and his nation’s shameful history of violence against Aboriginal Australians, while also coming to terms with his own attempts to commit suicide. Given the ways in which the CBCA’s annual book awards are used by teachers, librarians, and parents to select the “best” books for young readers, it is unsurprising that the prizing of Requiem for a Beast stirred up controversy. Responses to the book proliferated across professional and popular outlets—it even received coverage on an Australian tabloid television program—and initiated a variety of conversations about what constitutes appropriate reading for young people. Perhaps more significantly, the controversy over Requiem winning picture book of the year forced the CBCA, teacher librarians, and caregivers to examine (and, often, defend) their roles and responsibilities in the circulation and promotion of children’s literature. This paper reads the Requiem controversies as a case study for understanding the complementary and contradictory roles of institutions and individuals in the ethical circulation of children’s literature in contemporary Australia and beyond.

A place to make, hack, and learn: makerspaces in Australian public libraries

Content-creation spaces, or ‘makerspaces’, are an emerging phenomenon in public libraries worldwide. This study investigated the current state of makerspaces in Australian public libraries. Qualitative interviews with three information professionals formed the data collection. Thematic analysis of interviews addressed two research questions: What are the issues and challenges of creating makerspaces within Australian public libraries? How can they be addressed? Findings revealed the substantive benefits of these spaces, including enhanced community engagement, development of a new form of library as ‘third place’, and transforming the library's image from that of a place where works are consumed to that of a place where works are created. Additionally the study highlighted significant challenges to creating these spaces, including budgetary constraints, resistance to change within organisations and proving the relevance of such spaces within a library context. The study provides suggestions for overcoming these obstacles and provides areas for further research in the area, including larger studies across a broader geographic area and further investigation and follow-up into upcoming programs within existing makerspaces.

Diversity or perversity?: Award-winning children's literature and the Australian curriculum

Two of the three cross-curriculum priorities for the national Australian Curriculum prescribed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) are focussed on what might be called diversity education: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture”, and "Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia” (ACARA, “Cross”). One need not be versed in complex rhetorical theory to understand that, laudable and legitimate as such priorities are, their existence implies that mainstream education in Australia has been or is characterised by the marginalisation or erasure of Australia's history—the original Indigenous cultures are not only living and vibrant today, but also have tens of thousands of years’ “head start” on Australia’s settler cultures—and of its geography—Australia is, after all, located in some physical proximity to Asia. Some might even suggest that Australia is in Asia. These temporal and spatial “forgettings” constitute a kind of cultural perversity which the cross-curricular priorities both seek to address and serve to reinscribe. Even as ACARA requires Australian school students to engage with Aboriginal and Asian histories, cultures, societies, they imply that such histories, cultures, and societies are “diverse”, that they are not those of the students in Australian classrooms; producing them as objects of study rather than as lived experience. This should not necessarily be surprising. Michael W. Apple has provocatively argued that: “one of the perverse effects of a national curriculum actually will be to ‘legitimise inequality.’ It may in fact help create the illusion that whatever the massive differences in schools, they all have something in common” (18). In the Australian context, attempts to mitigate such perversity are articulated via the selection of literary texts. As educators move to resource ACARA’s cross-curricular priorities, ACARA notes that “Teachers and schools are best placed to make decisions about the selection of texts in their teaching and learning programs that address the content in the Australian Curriculum while also meeting the needs of the students in their classes” (ACARA, “Advice”). This assertion appears on a webpage called “Advice on selection of literary texts” which is notable first and foremost for its total lack of any literary texts being named, and its list of weblinks pointing to lists of texts compiled elsewhere, by other organisations, and in the main, compiled to serve agendas other than the Australian curriculum. One of the major resources referred to by ACARA for literary text selection is the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA). Of course, the CBCA’s annual book awards do not share ACARA’s educational priorities, but do have a history of being drawn upon by schools as a curriculum resource. In this paper, I consider the literary texts which have been prized by the CBCA in recent years attending to their engagements with Aboriginal cultures.

Feeling a little Blue? : Boofheads, bodies, and beaches

Pat Grant’s graphic novel Blue (2012) tells two stories about the impact of a newly migrant group on a small coastal Australian town. The wider story explores the wholesale effects of a previously unknown population joining an existing, culturally homogenous community. These broad social images are used to contextualise the more immediate story of three youths who are disenfranchised within the pre-existing community, but who can claim social enfranchisement by alienating the new members of the community. That the migrant population is depicted literally as aliens emphasises Blue’s participation in a wider conversation about citizenship and empathy. However, Blue does not necessarily seek to provoke a particular emotional response in its readers. Rather, in following three characters who lack what Nussbaum calls “narrative imagination” in their pursuit of good surfing or visceral entertainment—of beaches or bodies—Blue explores the means and consequences of refusing intersubjective affect. This is most powerfully rendered by the main characters’ ultimate avoidance of, and fictions about, a dead body they have wagged school to see. At the very moment of a person becoming a true object—a corpse—the meaning of objectifying people is revealed; the young protagonists seem to recognise this fact, and thus retreat from the affective scene which nonetheless informs Blue as a whole.