Ten of the Best: Great Australian Children’s/YA Books
Chosen by Judith Ridge.
Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner (1894) Ward, Lock and Bowden
Although not technically the first Australian book published for children, Seven Little Australians can certainly lay claim to being the first to self-consciously address the ‘joyousness and rebellion and mischief’ of the Australian child as distinct from the ‘paragons of virtue’ to be found in England and elsewhere. In print continuously since 1894, it tells the story of the Woolcot family, chafing against the bounds of colonial patriarchy (as embodied by their army captain father), and especially of the Jo March-inspired Judy: ‘Killed Judy to slow music’ Turner wrote unsentimentally in her diary, but generations of little and not-so-little Australian readers have never recovered.
Tangara by Nan Chauncy (1960) Oxford University Press
Although Patricia Wrightson is generally considered to be the progenitor of the distinctively Australian children’s fantasy novel, Chauncy’s remarkable Tangara predates Wrightson’s first forays into the genre by several years. Set against an ancient escarpment in Tasmania, the novel employs time-slip to explore the impact of colonisation on the Palawa/Pakana (the Indigenous people of lutruwita, the traditional name for Tasmania) through the experience of two settler-colonialist children. The passage where the white child, Lexie, witnesses the massacre of a tribe of Palawa is devastating, as is the novel’s closing image of the last surviving child of the tribe, Merrina, ‘alone — alone, and calling to her dead.’ It’s hard to imagine a contemporary children’s novel being so blunt about the horrors of colonisation as the powerfully elegiac Tangara.
Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park (1980) Puffin Books Australia
Another time slip novel, this time set in a contemporary inner city Sydney. Ruth Park first came to attention in the late 1940s with The Harp in the South, a novel that exposed the extreme poverty of Irish Australians and others living in the slums of the inner city. 30-something years later, Park’s ongoing interest in the lives of the working poor is met with the influence of second-wave feminism in the much-beloved Playing Beaty Bow. Distressed by her mother’s submissive forgiveness of her philandering husband, Abigail slips back in time to the late 1800s, where she lives with and witnesses the hardship experienced by the Bow family and experiences romantic love and loss for the first time.
My Place Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins (1988) Collins Dove
Published in the year of the bicentenary of the arrival of the British colonialists in Sydney Cove in 1788, My Place is the unmatched result of detailed research and intense collaboration between its historian author and award-winning illustrator-designer. My Place explores the waves of immigration to Australia through the changing face of a parcel of land in what is now known as the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown. Moving back every ten years in history to the undisturbed pre-colonial days of the Eora people, the double-page spreads of this classic picture book depict the lives of the fictional children of Middle Eastern, Greek, Chinese and British and other immigrant families against the changing fashions, transport, past-times, architecture and landscape.
My Girragundji by Boori Monty Pryor and Meme McDonald (1998) Allen and Unwin
Prior to the 1990s, most Australians were only able to access stories of Aboriginal people through the lens of White authors, or from stories from the Dreaming as ‘collected’ and recorded by White anthropologists. Drawn from stories from Pryor’s own childhood and family, My Girragundji broke new grounds in children’s publishing by presenting an utterly authentic contemporary Aboriginal voice, and by its depiction of a childhood straddling two cultures. The first of a trilogy of stories about the central character over ten years, which complement Pryor’s heart-breaking but hopeful memoir of family and loss, Maybe Tomorrow (also co-written with the late and much-missed Meme McDonald).
Fox by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks (2000) Penguin Books Australia
Less well-known internationally than Graeme Base, Shaun Tan or Mem Fox, Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks are responsible for some of Australia’s finest picture books: I would go so far as to claim Wild as our greatest picture book author of all, and Brooks as one of our most accomplished and versatile illustrators and fine artists. Fox works on many levels: as an allegory of colonisation, as adventure story, as a breath-taking visual depiction of outback Australia, and as a compelling and deeply moving story of friendship, loyalty, temptation and reconciliation.
The Tribe trilogy by Ambelin Kwaymullina (The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013), The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015). Walker Books Australia
Palyku (Western Australia) author, lawyer and activist Kwaymullina’s trilogy draws on and breaks wide open the familiar tropes of dystopia by marrying them with Indigenous Dreaming and an unflinching gaze into the deep abyss of colonialism. It’s also utterly exhilarating storytelling on its own terms. Kwaymullina, along with fellow YA author Rebecca Lim, went on to spearhead the Australian Own Voices movement, which like its international counterparts has been in Australia lead by writers, publishers and advocates for young people, and later taken up by the adult writing community. As with her leadership on Indigenous rights and the law, Kwaymullina is an under-recognised force in progressive action for change through art.
The First Third by Will Kostakis (2013) Penguin Australia
Grief and love work their way through many of Kostakis’s books: the loss of friends through death, of friendship through misunderstanding and fear, and the potential of grief that faces all teenagers as they come to terms with looming adulthood and the changes that will entail. There’s also plenty of love, too, as embodied by The First Third’s Yia Yia, grandmother to protagonist Billy (and based on Kostakis’s own glorious grandmother), who charges him with completing her bucket list and fixing their family. Nascent queer love is there too, which Kostakis explores more fully in his later novels which coincided with his own public coming out. Oh, and it’s funny. Really funny.
One Would Think the Deep by Claire Zorn (2016) University of Queensland Press
Despite our reputation for being a nation of ocean-loving athletes, there are fewer Australian novels for children and teenagers that are set in the world of surf culture than you might expect. Zorn’s 2016 novel sees 17-year-old Sam dislocated after the sudden death of his mother, living with an aunt and cousin he barely knows in a tiny seaside town a world away from the culturally dynamic inner city suburb he grew up in. His cousin Minty is a champion surfer — and champion party boy, and Sam has to navigate this new life, new family and a potential new love (with complications). With brilliant and vivid descriptions of the Australian coast, this book captured the attention of an entire Year 10 class of non-readers.
The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling by Wai Chim (2019) Allen and Unwin
Anna Chiu, the protagonist of Dumpling, is torn between duty to her parents — looking after her siblings when her mum swings between depression and her fierce Tiger Mother persona, while Dad runs a restaurant more than an hour from their Sydney home — and her desire to live the same kind of free and easy teenage life as her White Australian friends. A classic YA tale of identity and agency layered with the particular challenges that comes with being a Third Culture teen, the book is funny, warm and hopeful despite the shadow that hovers over the Chiu family.
Aster’s Good, Right Things by Kate Gordon (2020) Riveted Press
Gordon’s middle-grade novel treads a delicate line in its portrayal of the fragile mental health of its two young protagonists: Aster’s anxiety, which takes the form of a compulsion to do one ‘good, right thing’ every day, and the debilitating depression experienced by Xavier, who she meets in a liminal space between her school and his home, one that connects their lives with a delicate web of growing trust and friendship. More and more books are depicting the experience of neuro-atypical young people, by writers with lived experience — which when done as well as this novel is itself a good, right thing.
Judith Ridge is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney, Australia specialising in literature for children and young adults. She is an English teacher and is currently employed as a Teacher Librarian in a busy multicultural public (state) boys’ high school in Western Sydney. She is the commissioning and contributing editor of The Book That Made Me (Walker Books Australia, 2016) and is currently writing her PhD thesis on Australian children’s and YA fantasy at the University of Newcastle, NSW.
She tweets @msmisrule and her website is misrule.com.au/wordpress. (Misrule is the name given to the home of the Woolcot children in Seven Little Australians. Judith is still grieving the death of Judy Woolcot fifty years after first reading it.)
