Ubby’s Underdogs: A Transformative Vision of Australian Community

Authors

  • Clare Bradford Deakin University, Australia
  • Catherine Sly Deakin University, Australia
  • Xu Daozhi University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2016vol24no1art1112

Keywords:

Aboriginal authors of Australia, race in Australia, Magabala Books, graphic novels, Ubby’s Underdogs, carnivalesque, Brenton E McKenna, multi-ethnic characters, polyglot voices

Abstract

In Black Words White Page (2004), his seminal study of Aboriginal cultural production in Australia, Adam Shoemaker notes that ‘when Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s first collection of poetry appeared in print in 1964, a new phase of cultural communication began in Australia’ (2004, p. 5). The ‘new phase’ to which Shoemaker refers pertains to the many plays, collections of poetry and novels by Aboriginal authors published between 1964 and 1988 and directed to Australian and international audiences. Flying under the radar of scholarly attention, Aboriginal authors and artists also produced significant numbers of children’s books during this time, including Wilf Reeves and Olga Miller’s The Legends of Moonie Jarl, published by Jacaranda Press in 1964 (see O’Conor 2007), Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972), and the picture books of Dick Roughsey and many other Aboriginal authors and artists (see Bradford 2001, pp. 159-90).

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Author Biographies

  • Clare Bradford, Deakin University, Australia

    Clare Bradford is Emeritus Professor at Deakin University in Melbourne. Her books include Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (2001), Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2007), New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (2009) (with Mallan, Stephens and McCallum); and The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature (2015). From 2007 to 2011 Clare was President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

  • Catherine Sly, Deakin University, Australia

    Cathy Sly is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University.  Currently she is researching notions of narrativity in graphic novels, with a particular focus on Australian graphic novels for children and young adults.  Her research interests include narratology, visual literacy, and multimodal storytelling.  She has taught English, Drama and History in NSW Department of Education high schools and has worked as a writer, editor and consultant for the School Libraries division of the NSW Department of Education.  Her recent publications include “Empowering 21st century readers:  Integrating graphic novels into primary classrooms” in Picture Books and Beyond (2014) edited by Kerry Mallan.

  • Xu Daozhi, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Xu Daozhi has recently completed her Ph.D.  in English literary studies and is now working as a senior research assistant at Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong.  Her dissertation focuses on postcolonial narratives in Australian children’s literature. Her research interests include children’s literature in English, postcolonial   literary studies, cultural theories, and representations of Aboriginality.

References

Aczel, Richard (2001) ‘Throwing Voices.’ New Literary History 32 (3): 703-5. Allan, Cherie (2012) Playing with Picturebooks: Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Texas: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Balhorn, Mark (1998) ‘Dialect Renderings and linguistic accuracy.’ English Language Notes 35 (4): 48-59.

Bradford, Clare (2001) Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press.

Brewster, Anne (1995) Literary Formations: Post-Colonialism, Nationalism, Globalism. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.

Choo, Christine (1994) ‘The Impact of Asian-Aboriginal Australian Contacts in Northern Australia.’ Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 3 (2-3): 295-310.

Chute, Hillary L. and Marianne DeKoven (2006) ‘Introduction: Graphic Narrative.’ Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4): 767-82.

Curthoys, Ann (2000) ‘An uneasy conversation: the multicultural and the Indigenous.’ In John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (eds) Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, pp. 21- 36.

Hage, Ghassan (1988) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto Press.

Hatfield, Charles (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Ihde, Don (2007) Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ivanič, Roz & David Camps (2001) ‘I am how I sound.’ Journal of Second Language Writing 10, 3-33.

Jaffe, Alexandra & Shana Walton (2000) ‘The voices people read: Orthography and the representation of non-standard speech.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (4, (2000): 561-87.

Jiwani, Yasmin (2006) ‘From Dragon Lady to Action Hero: Race and Gender in Popular Western Television.’ In Sunera Thobani and Tineke Hellwig (eds) Asian Women: Interconnections. Toronto: Women’s Press, pp. 161-82.

McCallum, Robyn (1999) Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity. New York: Garland.

McKenna, Brenton E. (2013) Ubby’ s Underdogs: Heroes Beginnings. Broome: Magabala Books.

McKenna, Brenton E. (2011) Ubby’ s Underdogs: The Legend of the Phoenix Dragon. Broome: Magabala Books.

Nikolajeva, Maria (2010) Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. New York: Routledge.

O’Conor, Juliet (2007) ‘The Legends of Moonie Jarl: Our First Indigenous Children’s Book’. The La Trobe Journal 79: 67-81.

Petersen, Robert S (2009) ‘The Acoustics of Manga.’ In Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (eds) A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 163-72.

Preston, Dennis R. ‘The Li'l Abner Syndrome: Written Representations of Speech.’ American Speech 60 (4): 328-36.

Royal, Derek Parker (2007) ‘Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.’ MELUS 32 (3): 7-22. Shoemaker, Adam (2004) Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988. Canberra: ANU E-Press [1989].

Sly, Cathy (2014) ‘EmPOWering 21st century readers: Integrating graphic novels into primary classrooms.’ In Kerry Mallan (ed) Picture Books and Beyond. Marrickville: Primary English Teaching Association (PETAA), pp. 123-47.

Stallybrass, Peter & Allon White (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Stamou, Anastasia G. (2012) ‘Representations of linguistic variation in children's books: register stylisation as a resource for (critical) language awareness.’ Language Awareness 21 (4): 313-29.

Stephens, John (1992) Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London: Longman.

Stephenson, Peta (2003) ‘New Cultural Scripts: Exploring the Dialogue Between Indigenous and ‘Asian’ Australians’. Journal of Australian Studies 27 (77): 57-68.

Stephenson, Peta (2007) The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Stephenson, Peta (2005) ‘”Where are you from?”: New Imaginings of Identity in Chinese-Australian Writing.’ in Tseen Khoo and Kam Louie (eds) Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp, 107-128.

Yu, Sarah (1999) ‘Broome Creole: Aboriginal and Asian partnerships along the Kimberley coast.’ Queensland Review 6 (2): 58-73.

Downloads

Published

2016-01-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

“Ubby’s Underdogs: A Transformative Vision of Australian Community” (2016) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 24(1), pp. 101–131. doi:10.21153/pecl2016vol24no1art1112.

Similar Articles

1-10 of 173

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.