That's a really interesting question. I think in part it was due to my own tastes (or at least my loyalty as a child to certain authors, who kept coming back to postapocalyptic or dystopian settings).
However, I do also think it was a really popular genre in Australian fiction in the last thirty or so years of the twentieth century. Now, bear in mind, I have never studied children's literature or Australian literature (except insofar as I studied individual Australian novels at various points during primary or secondary school English classes), so my answer is based solely on my own observations, rather than any formal study of the field.
I think in part there was a lot of post-apocalyticism going on in relation to the Cold War, and specifically the threat of nuclear war, and that saw expression in fiction. But this aspect isn't unique to Australia.
I also think that Australia had a particularly acute fear of climate change, far earlier than other Anglophone countries, and so a lot of Australian literature imagines a harsh climate which has been ruined by climate change. This thread is clear as early as the 1970s or 1980s, and you even get it in works of children's fiction — the anxiety about the effects of climate change was clearly in the popular consciousness from an early stage, I suspect due to the fact that Australia already has a pretty extreme climate (compared to e.g. Western Europe).
However, I also think that the popularity of post-apoccalytic and dystopian fiction in Australia is a reflection of the country grappling with its original sin of colonisation and the genocide of the region's original inhabitants. There is a theme in even the earliest of Australian literature of unease in the land, and the idea that people are living in a harsh, scary environment, where the very land itself is hostile, just waiting to violently punish them for the injustice of their presence, and the wrongs of their ancestors. (Obviously, this kind of literature is written by white authors, and assumes a non-Indigenous readership.) The landscape itself is depicted as alive and angry, and its vastness creates a kind of unsettling vertigo and unreality. (Picnic At Hanging Rock, Walkabout, and the Mad Max films all draw from this same wellspring, as do the myriad dystopian and postapocalyptic children's and YA novels I read as a child.)
In my opinion, all these three strands (Cold War political context, fears about climate change, and guilt about colonialism) fed into the popularity of post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction in Australia, but the third strand is what gives Australian fiction of this kind its most devastating power.
no subject
However, I do also think it was a really popular genre in Australian fiction in the last thirty or so years of the twentieth century. Now, bear in mind, I have never studied children's literature or Australian literature (except insofar as I studied individual Australian novels at various points during primary or secondary school English classes), so my answer is based solely on my own observations, rather than any formal study of the field.
I think in part there was a lot of post-apocalyticism going on in relation to the Cold War, and specifically the threat of nuclear war, and that saw expression in fiction. But this aspect isn't unique to Australia.
I also think that Australia had a particularly acute fear of climate change, far earlier than other Anglophone countries, and so a lot of Australian literature imagines a harsh climate which has been ruined by climate change. This thread is clear as early as the 1970s or 1980s, and you even get it in works of children's fiction — the anxiety about the effects of climate change was clearly in the popular consciousness from an early stage, I suspect due to the fact that Australia already has a pretty extreme climate (compared to e.g. Western Europe).
However, I also think that the popularity of post-apoccalytic and dystopian fiction in Australia is a reflection of the country grappling with its original sin of colonisation and the genocide of the region's original inhabitants. There is a theme in even the earliest of Australian literature of unease in the land, and the idea that people are living in a harsh, scary environment, where the very land itself is hostile, just waiting to violently punish them for the injustice of their presence, and the wrongs of their ancestors. (Obviously, this kind of literature is written by white authors, and assumes a non-Indigenous readership.) The landscape itself is depicted as alive and angry, and its vastness creates a kind of unsettling vertigo and unreality. (Picnic At Hanging Rock, Walkabout, and the Mad Max films all draw from this same wellspring, as do the myriad dystopian and postapocalyptic children's and YA novels I read as a child.)
In my opinion, all these three strands (Cold War political context, fears about climate change, and guilt about colonialism) fed into the popularity of post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction in Australia, but the third strand is what gives Australian fiction of this kind its most devastating power.