dolorosa_12 | (Reply)

From:

1980s and 1990s Australian children's/YA literature was really, really disturbing — a lot of it was dystopian or post-apocalyptic, grappling with a theme that runs through a lot of Australian media by non-Indigenous creators: an unease in the land, and a sense that the hostility of the land is punishing people for the monstrous wrong of colonisation. Kelleher's books certainly tap into this, but you find it in children's literature by Jackie French, Isobelle Carmody, Gillian Rubinstein, and more.

My Year 6 teacher in primary school was the first person to introduce me to Kelleher's writing — he read books aloud to us in class, chapter by chapter over the course of a term, and the first book he read was The Red King by Kelleher. This is a secondary-world epic fantasy novel, but it's got a lot going on below the surface, and goes into darker places than you'd expect. I loved this book, and read pretty much every other Kelleher book in our classroom, and in my school and local library. In high school English class we studied Taronga one year, and Kelleher's adult postapocalyptic novel The Beast of Heaven another year. The latter, along with Kelleher's YA novel Del-Del, remain two of the most disturbing things I've ever read.

especially on a basic fine-grained prose level - this tends to be a thing i find frustrating when revisiting YAlit

He's a really good prose stylist, although to be honest I feel this is true for a lot of 1980s and 1990s Australian YA compared to the stuff published today. I don't think the writers were necessarily better, but the publishing industry was much more robust — Australia's children's lit industry in those days was absolutely booming, independent of publishing in the US or UK, and most moderately successful authors were able to earn a comfortable living from their writing alone, without needing to have day jobs, or do their own marketing work (which most current authors have to do themselves), and there was more money to pay for more competent editing etc. (I worked for ten years as a reviewer — mainly of YA literature — for an Australian newspaper, so I watched all this collapse and fall apart in slow motion, in real time.)

Kelleher also grew up in Africa really compounds the feeling that he was grappling with some significant questions re: what it means to Relate to Otherness on stolen land. I don't know how deliberate that was

Oh, it was totally deliberate, and it comes through a lot in his other writing, as per my first paragraph. Taronga is one of the few books of his that I haven't reread in at least fifteen years, so I can't say how successful he is, but his fiction almost universally explores issues of colonialism, and who has the right to land, and to claim the label of humanity. And he really doesn't pull his punches.