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Each year, the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers a number of Book of the Year Awards, including the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The books chosen by the CBCA constitute a contemporary canon of Australian children's literature, and serve to both shape and reflect current educational policies and practices as well as young Australians' sense of themselves and their nation. This paper reads a selection of award-winning Australian non-fiction children's literature in the context of colonialism, curriculum, military myths, and Aboriginal perspectives on national history and identity.
History is always selective-you never hear the whole story-and there are many myths about Gallipoli.
(Davidson Scarecrow 2)
Ghassan Hage asserts that the "core element of Australia's colonial paranoia is a fear of loss of Europeanness or Whiteness and the lifestyle and privileges that are seen to emanate directly from them. This is a combination of the fragility of White European colonial identity in general and the specificity of the Australian situation" (419). This colonial paranoia can be traced through a range of popular cultural formations, including contemporary Australian children's literature. Each year, the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) confers awards and honors-listings to fifteen books for young people across five categories: Older Readers, Younger Readers, Early Childhood, Picture Book, and the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. First awarded in 1946, the CBCA Awards are clearly connected with the conscious forging of a national culture immediately following WWII; and "the symbolism of a new cultural beginning being made with books for children, rather than for adults" (Macleod 3). They do so by identifying the best or most desirable forms of Australia's past, present, and future, and linking such visions with modes of national subjectivity. Using Hage's concept of colonial paranoia, this paper considers the relationship between prize-winning books and educational agendas in the ongoing revision and renewal of national myths for Australia in the early twentyfirst century.
The Eve Pownall Award for Information Books
Although not often included in critical debates, non-fictional texts overtly seek to shape young readers' understandings of their national context and their own location as national subjects. Thus, the books named as winners or recipients of honors of the Eve Pownall Award provide a snapshot of which facts...