Growing up Australian: The National Imaginary in School Readers

During the first half of the twentieth century, School Readers were intended to propagate a national imagination. The symbolic association of the child and the nation is instrumental in this regard. Indeed, such an association is a familiar element in Australian children’s literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Invested in the innocence of the young and the child’s naïve adventurous spirit is the potential of a new nation. The sacredness associated with the figure of the child, in Western thinking more broadly, and in School Readers specifically, circulates around the child figure’s naturalised innocence. This paper considers the Readers’ literary and visual production of the child/nation. These school reading books present C. E. W. Bean’s Anzac prototype in ‘The Youngster’, but also, in performing anxieties about a preferred story of national growth, include stark illustrations of dead, abandoned and lost children. Where the child is read metonymically for the nation; the child is contradictorily asked to embody innocence (and therefore vulnerability) at the same time he or she appears confidently assured about the future.