This article was downloaded by: [Universite Laval]

On: 07 October 2014, At: 17:24

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Australian Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjau20

New world orders and the dystopian

turn: transforming visions of
territoriality and belonging in recent
Australian children's fiction
a a a
Clare Bradford , Kerry Mallan & John Stephens
a
Deakin University, Queensland University of Technology,
Macquarie University ,
Published online: 06 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Clare Bradford , Kerry Mallan & John Stephens (2008) New world orders and the
dystopian turn: transforming visions of territoriality and belonging in recent Australian children's
fiction, Journal of Australian Studies, 32:3, 349-359, DOI: 10.1080/14443050802294091

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443050802294091

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
 Journal of Australian Studies,
Vol. 32, No. 3, September 2008, 349
359

New world orders and the dystopian turn: transforming visions of territoriality
and belonging in recent Australian children’s fiction
Clare Bradford*, Kerry Mallan and John Stephens

Deakin University, Queensland University of Technology, Macquarie University

Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, Australian children’s literature
responded to a conservative turn epitomised by the Howard government and to new
world order imperatives of democracy, the market economy, globalisation, and the IT
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

revolution. These responses are evidenced in the ways that children’s fiction speaks to
the problematics of representation and cultural identity and to possible outcomes of
devastating historical and recent catastrophes. Consequently, Australian children’s
fiction in recent years has been marked by a dystopian turn. Through an examination
of a selection of Australian children’s fiction published between 1995 and 2003, this
paper interrogates the ways in which hope and warning are reworked in narratives that
address notions of memory and forgetting, place and belonging. We argue that these
tales serve cautionary purposes, opening the way for social critique, and that they
incorporate utopian traces of a transformed vision for a future Australia. The focus texts
for this discussion are: Secrets of Walden Rising (Allan Baillie, 1996), Red Heart (Victor
Kelleher, 2001), Deucalian (Brian Caswell, 1995), and Boys of Blood and Bone (David
Metzenthen, 2003).
Keywords: children’s literature; Australian fiction; utopianism; national identity;
colonialism

This is the new order. The new heartland. It’s here that the future takes hold. Here where a
braver, more lasting world begins.
- Victor Kelleher1

Australian children’s literature since the beginning of the 1990s has responded to social
change with utopian/dystopian visions which address national memory and its repertoire
of narratives about history, identity and citizenship. Toward the end of The Quest for
Postcolonial Utopia, Ralph Pordzik notes that the postcolonial texts he has examined
‘comprise a positive and liberating engagement with colonial history and its conceptual
legacy’.2 Recent Australian children’s literature, produced in the context of conservative
politics, religious and secular apocalyptic scenarios, and technological regimentation, does
not in general manifest such a ‘positive and liberating engagement’ with the past or with
Australian society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather, many texts
are characterised by anxiety and scepticism about the nation and the directions it has
taken, manifested in dystopian visions of environmental decay, social disorder and the
imposition of anarchic or totalitarian regimes.
Of the young adult texts discussed in this article, several fit within the category of the
critical dystopia, described by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan as a form of dystopia

*Corresponding author. Email: clarex@deakin.edu.au

ISSN 1444-3058 print/ISSN 1835-6419 online

# 2008 International Australian Studies Association
DOI: 10.1080/14443050802294091
http://www.informaworld.com
 350 C. Bradford et al.

which ‘with its disasters and representations of worse realities, retains the potential for
change, so that we can discover in our current dark times a scattering of hope and desire
that will arise to aid us in the transformation of society’.3 At the end of Victor Kelleher’s
Red Heart (2001), Allan Baillie’s Secrets of Walden Rising (1996) and Brian Caswell’s
Deucalion (1995), promises of a better society remain largely unrealised; nevertheless, in
their treatments of memory, place, and community these texts propose transformed visions
for a future Australia.4 In contrast, David Metzenthen’s Boys of Blood and Bone (2003)
belongs to the smaller group of texts which invoke memory and place positively to
incorporate what we will call ‘utopian traces’ of an integrated and unified system of values
constituting an ideal Australia.5

Unsettling Australian identity

Directed toward readers who are engaged in processes of identity formation, imaginings of
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

new world orders in Australian texts for children are multifarious and contradictory. In
their preoccupation with the nexus between identity and place, they rehearse a bundle of
concerns which derive from and speak to Australia’s identity as a settler society: place and
landscape; origins and belonging; inclusion and exclusion; memory and language;
repression and resistance. Whereas many historical works for children underplay the
differences between past and present, producing the illusion that ‘all is for the best in
the best of all possible worlds’, during the last decade many children’s texts have been
published which engage in a much more reflexive manner with ethical questions about the
writing of the past, and the significances of the past for the present. In this respect,
children’s literature is something of a latecomer in beginning to ‘write back’ against the
colonial ethos, not doing so in any significant way until the end of the 1980s. The texts
discussed in this article develop and employ strategies and tropes which interrogate
received versions of the colonial past.
The first-published of these texts, Deucalion, was produced in the aftermath of a period
of social progressivism in Australia inspired by ideologies of multiculturalism, the women’s
movement and the Indigenous movement, culminating in the defining moment of Mabo in
1992. When John Howard came to power as prime minister in 1996, children’s literature
responded to the renewed conservatism embodied in his nationalistic rhetoric. In
particular, a number of young adult texts addressed the themes and preoccupations which
characterised Howard’s conduct of the ‘history wars’ regarding European colonisation of
Australia and its impact on Indigenous Australians. In particular, these texts interrogated
Howard’s assault on the ‘black armband’ version of history, and his insistence on the
notion that Australian national identity
the Australian heartland
is founded upon an
essential goodness of character characterised by ‘inclusion rather than exclusion’, with
episodes such as massacres and forced removals of Aboriginal people, and the persecution
of Chinese goldminers during the gold rushes in the nineteenth century regarded as merely
aberrations, strange lapses from the state of grace which ‘normally’ characterises
Australians.6 Howard’s view both of ‘Australia’ and of Australian history was profoundly
anti-utopian because it rejected the cultural critique and the transformative possibilities of
utopian thought.
In promoting the virtues of forgetting, Howard employed a strategy common in settler
societies and described by Leela Gandhi as ‘postcolonial amnesia’, which she says is
‘symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start
to
erase painful memories’ of settler Australians implicated in the displacement and
destruction of Indigenous peoples.7 In the Australian context, reconciliation is still part
 Journal of Australian Studies 351

of the ‘social dreaming’ that Lyman Tower Sargent sees as comprising ‘the dreams and
nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which
usually envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live’.8
Baillie’s Secrets of Walden Rising is one of a number of texts from this period that engages
with the ‘memory war’ over Australia’s violent past and how to accommodate it within
national consciousness.

Then and now: uncovering the past in the present

Secrets of Walden Rising locates its young protagonist in a dystopian setting where place is
imbued with memories of colonisation and human subjects are shaped by those memories.
Baillie uses images of burial to signify memory. In this text the old gold town of Walden is
buried under the waters of a reservoir. As the water level drops during a long drought,
Walden rises into visibility until, by the end of the novel, Brendan, the novel’s focaliser, is
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

able to walk its streets and explore its buildings. Brendan has emigrated from Britain to the
remote outback town of Jacks Marsh with his father, who hopes for a new life and his own
business as a mechanic. Like the first colonisers, Brendan experiences the land through
memories of Britain; unlike them, he is the outsider, ‘the Pom’, ostracised by the other boys
with whom he attends school, and bullied by Bago, their leader.
Belonging involves individuals adopting communal codes and attributes, and sharing
common references, language, or social metanarratives and is infused with utopian desires,
implying inclusion, emotional attachment, and acceptance. It equally evokes its dystopian
other
exclusion, estrangement, and foreignness. David Harvey notes a similar contra-
diction with respect to territorial place-based identity which, he observes ‘is one of the
most pervasive bases for both progressive political mobilization and reactionary
exclusionary politics’.9 Group membership or belonging can be exclusive rather than
inclusive, involving alienation rather than welcoming, and can be traced to the ideological
formations that give structure and narrative coherence to the social organisation of
communities. While the history of western utopianism is largely a white enterprise,
contemporary literary utopias, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992
1996),
typically construct utopian societies as complex, pluralistic political orders bound together
by commitment to a set of shared beliefs.10
Secrets of Walden Rising departs from Sargent’s definition of the critical dystopia as ‘a
non-existent society’ in that Jacks Marsh is reminiscent of any number of Australian
outback towns.11 But Baillie’s description of the town focuses so closely on signs of decay
and depression, and on the townspeople’s desperate hope for rain, that the setting
conforms with another part of Sargent’s definition
that the critical dystopia is ‘located in
a time and place that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as
considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived’.12 The novel’s representa-
tion of a brutal, masculinist ethos and of Brendan’s predicament as the outsider evokes the
genre of Australian horror films, notably Wake in Fright (1971), in which a young English
schoolteacher is stranded in an outback town whose inhabitants play out the violence and
repression of the nation’s history.13
Brendan’s alienation from the social life of Jacks Marsh derives partly from his lack of
access to signifying systems, in that words as they are used in the Australian context often
carry different and unfamiliar meanings; and partly from his consciousness that he is
observed and adversely judged by the other boys. His desire for self-protection drives him
to construct meanings of his own by drawing what he sees, and by finding a secret space
from which he watches the old town’s uncanny emergence from the water. Despite his
 352 C. Bradford et al.

initial (and mistaken) sense that ‘here, in Jacks Marsh, nothing happens. Ghosts cannot
exist’, he gradually pieces together fragments of memory, uncovering stories which,
because of the discomfort they cause the town’s inhabitants, have been strategically
forgotten.14
In her essay on memory and historical reconciliation in Ursula Le Guin’s The Telling,
Raffaella Baccolini draws on the work of Ernst Bloch, who distinguishes ‘anamnesis
(recollection) from anagnorisis (recognition)’, arguing that merely to recollect is to leave the
past intact and static, whereas the act of recognition incorporates memory into the present,
producing a dynamic between past and present which is capable of influencing actions and
ideologies.15 Baccolini notes that this ‘utopian dimension of memory . . . cannot be
separated from its ethical dimension’, and that it finds its specifically utopian orientation
in its capacity to bring to light histories of oppression or dispossession and to address their
consequences in the present.16 Recollection thus effects a ‘political, utopian praxis of
change, action, and empowerment’.17 Thus in Secrets of Walden Rising memory and
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

history work in an uneasy dialogue with the present, producing a strong sense of the messy,
complex relations between past and present.
As Brendan engages with stories of the old town he begins to comprehend how
memories transmitted through generations of family members shape identities and
influence interpersonal relations. Thus, the young boy Tony Lee, descended from a
Chinese goldminer, tells Brendan stories he learned from his grandfather, about how his
great-grandfather Lee Weyun and the other Chinese ‘had to work on land that nobody
wanted. They had to sleep on slopes that people could not walk on. When someone died
they were not lowered into a hole, they were slid into the ground like a filing cabinet’.18
Tony’s family memories are seen to shape his sense of the precariousness of his alliance
with the other boys, who are always liable to turn on him with hostility, as their ancestors
turned on his great-grandfather and the other Chinese prospectors. In this way the
narrative signals the presence of an abiding racism in Jacks Marsh, a lasting paranoia
about fears of a ‘yellow horde’ preparing to engulf the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture. The
reappearance of Walden’s streetscape instantiates old racial hierarchies too in that it reveals
the tiny shop which Lee Weyun established following the goldrush * in Tony’s words,
‘Cheapjack the smallest shop in Walden, maybe in the world!’19 Rendered insignificant in
comparison with the Empire Hotel, the church and the Emporium, it encodes relations of
value still active in the contemporary setting.
Whereas Tony’s family have hung on in Jacks Marsh, where his father runs the Lee
Family Store, no Aboriginal presence survives in the town. When Brendan finds an old
flint, a sign that Aboriginal people lived and hunted near the site of Walden, his discovery
is met with flat denial by Elliott Cardiff, another of the boys of Jacks Marsh: ‘Boongs?
They were never here’.20 The vehemence of Elliott’s statement is a marker of the
importance he attaches to a fiction which he has been told by his family
that the Cardiffs
were the first to live on and own land in the region. A far worse story then emerges,
concerning Charley Cardiff, Elliott’s ancestor, who provided rum to his farm-workers and
sent them out to hunt the Aboriginal people who lived in the hills near the town, until all
were dead or had fled to other areas.
The novel concludes with a kind of treasure-hunt as Brendan and Bago, the boy who
has been his principal tormentor, search through the old town for a bushranger’s hoard,
buried in the town when it was flooded. They find themselves hunted by the town publican
after they witness his murder of Old Harry, who has led him to the treasure, and the
publican himself, caught between the two boys, plunges off the massive rock known as the
Granite, and falls to his death. The treasure turns out to be nothing more than old
 Journal of Australian Studies 353

banknotes which crumble into dust, and a collection of other worthless items. In the end,
what counts as treasure is the tentative friendship forged between Bago and Brendan, boys
from different countries who have been brought together by the uncovering of memories.
The novel does not, however, provide a consolatory ending. The rain that begins to
pour down on the reservoir, once more covering the old town, washes the two boys clean as
they sit on the Granite above the roofs of its buildings. But even as the mud and dust of
their struggle is rinsed away and as the physical signs of the past are once more hidden
from view, the potency of memory has been shown in the stories that the townspeople tell
their children and the capacity of these stories both to shape consciousness and to point to
the contingency of notions of belonging. If belief in the essential goodness of Australians
constructs an innocent nation where, now and then, evil things may have happened
(massacres of Aborigines, persecution of Chinese goldminers), Secrets of Walden Rising
positions its young readers to engage with the ethical questions which are at the heart of
the Australian history wars: what responsibility do citizens have toward the past? What
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

constitutes justice for Indigenous people? How is it that anti-Asian sentiments are so close
to the surface of national consciousness? Secrets of Walden Rising offers readers a response
to Australia’s history not as a sad story best forgotten but as a critical dystopia which, as
described by Baccolini and Moylan, ‘allow[s] both readers and protagonists to hope by
resisting closure’.21 Secrets of Walden Rising thus resists those narrative strategies which so
often sell child readers short by foreclosing on difficult and complex ideas.

New world orders, new belongings

An extended illustration of ways in which Australian children’s fiction dismantles the ties
between representations of territory and belonging is found in Victor Kelleher’s young
adult novel Red Heart. In Red Heart’s implicit and explicit politics of inclusion, the
utopian vision of the Promised Land becomes the vessel for the perpetuation of exclusions
enforced through violent measures to keep ‘otherness’ at bay. The novel belongs to the
corpus of new millennium literature that expresses a certain retrospective and prospective
accounting of a history and a future. That future has occurred, but the dominant social
order of the contemporary world has been intensified and extrapolated into a dystopian
new world order or, in Baccolini’s terms, ‘a negatively deformed future of our own world’.22
Set in a time which has experienced the full onslaught of the ‘Greenhouse effect’ on
ecology, and in a specific location in Australia, the narrative trajectory follows a path from
a dystopian state towards a horizon of hope that leaves open for both protagonist and
readers the possibility of a transformed existence, one that is ‘not yet’ as Bloch would
contend, but possible. The novel’s closure, offering a tentative move towards a new
beginning, presumes a renewed sense of belonging and identification for the protagonist
and secondary characters.
Kelleher’s story follows the narrative structure and thematic concerns of its pre-text,
Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1902/1999) in considering how evil and oppression are
located at the very heart of authoritarian worlds.23 Ostensibly, operating as ‘civilising’
missions, the slave regimes imposed by both Jack Curtis (Red Heart) and the enigmatic
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) assert a territorialising of both place and psyche. Kelleher
transposes Conrad’s setting from the Congo to Australia, and specifically to the Darling
River of inland New South Wales. A map delineating the spatial terrain of the story
combines geographical reality with fictional place names and other narrative markers. The
map encodes a peculiar authority, which falls within the Western cartographic tradition; it
is also a textual device common to utopian/dystopian fiction. While the map’s purpose is to
 354 C. Bradford et al.

lend a certain verisimilitude to the text, its conjunction at the beginning of the book
with the opening section (titled ‘Departure’) foreshadows the journey that is about to take
place yet provides a representation of an already charted territory and expedition. The
inclusion of both recognisable place names (‘Menindee’) and proleptic narrative landmarks
(‘Wrecked Chopper’) recall early European explorers’ maps of Australia where legends that
were both cartographic inscriptions and mythical projections filled in the blank spaces of
Terra Australis Incognita. The map, like its cartographic pretexts, is a symbolic
representation of colonisation and its acts of (re)naming encode the territorialising of a
new world, which elides the indigenous presence. Furthermore, although the story is set in
the near future, the map only shows those places relevant to the story, such that the
selective naming erases the past and reinforces the narrative proposition that a new world
has replaced the old.
The major colonising power in this continent now ‘half covered by water’ is ‘the
Company’
here depicted as a powerful, free-wheeling organisation beyond any
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

government or legislative control that owns half of settled Australia. In the last part of
the twentieth century, as Tom Moylan has observed, ‘the dystopian turn’ involves the
‘tyranny of the corporation’ replacing the ‘power of the authoritarian state’.24 Red Heart
accordingly begins with the protagonist, Nat, leaving ‘home’ and embarking on a journey
in search of his missing uncle, Jack Curtis, to ask for his assistance in saving his family’s
waterlogged farm from being taken over by the Company.
In the post-apocalyptic, dystopian new world that Red Heart describes, the past is
forgotten, for this is a society incapable of the utopian recollection proposed by Bloch. It
is clearly a product of its past in terms of social inequalities and hierarchical power
relations, and the ideological practices that produced past oppressions (slavery, class
divisions, capitalism, corruption, greed, and munitions cartels) continue. This paradoxical
relationship to history is characteristic of critical dystopianism. Red Heart not only revives
past oppressions but also contests the shift to the right and conservative politics that
shaped Australian social, economic, environmental, and immigration policies from the mid
1990s. The conservative turn is most frighteningly developed in the story’s attention to the
traumatic and complex relationships between individuals and groups that play out the neo-
colonialism that is at the heart of the story.
Colonialism takes two forms in the novel. On the one hand is the appropriation of
people’s property by the Company and the material and psychological damage this action
delivers to the victims. This occurs ‘downriver’ below the point where the Murray River
joins the Darling. On the other hand, ‘upriver’ lies the territory colonised by Jack Curtis as
The Promised Land, his New Jerusalem, where he rules as a kind of priest-king over the
Tribe, his dreadlocked, tattooed followers.25 His rhetoric of following the old ways of the
primeval forest and of the river evokes quasi-Aboriginal and quasi-ecotopic spiritual
bonds with the land. As his devoted lover-servant, Lettie, remarks: ‘The spirit of this place
has entered into him . . . He is the heartland. We can’t survive without him’.26
The two colonies are distinguished in terms of progress and regression. The downriver
colony is characterised by the conquest and control of people’s land and goods by the
Company, high technology, legislative health controls, and other indicators of progressi-
vism. By contrast, the colonial practices of the upriver community are characterised by
intimidation, plunder, enslavement, illegal trade, violence, old technologies, rampant
disease and genocide. The H fever
the new AIDS, a fatal tropical disease that causes
internal bleeding and death within days
has gripped the scattered settlements along the
upriver shoreline. However, ambiguity, selective appropriation and revisioning of the past
confuse perceptions of new and old orders held by Curtis and his followers. For them,
 Journal of Australian Studies 355

downriver is the old order, upriver is ‘the new order. The new heartland’, the new beginning

where ‘the future takes hold’.27 However, Curtis’s new order relies on old ways, which are
a hybrid mix of old colonial treacheries and nativism.
Red Heart concludes with a move towards a transformed vision of territoriality and
belonging by retrieving lost agency for a few individuals; that is, Nat and his friends. Their
journey into the heartland changes them and their resistance to the hegemonic social order
results in the narrative’s implicit valorising of a renewed humanism characterised by
forgiveness, resourcefulness, and ethical behaviour. Above all, the new humanist subject is
posited as one who sees the value of friendship and belonging over individualism and
territorial separatism. Despite the torture Nat suffers from Curtis’s trials by ordeal, he
nevertheless attempts to save him from being sacrificed by the Tribe. His attachment to
family also is the tie that sees him forge a future with his real family and his newly-found
friends: the Ferals, Irene and Pete, and the Aboriginal girl, Clarrie. Together they will work
the Darling using the gold gained from Curtis’s tyrannical dealings to set themselves up as
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

new river entrepreneurs.

Kelleher’s Red Heart is therefore a near-future dystopia which leaves open what David
Harvey would call ‘spaces of hope’. At one level, the narrative’s allusions to its pre-text
engages with a certain determinism which sees history repeating itself and resigns itself to
an ongoing colonialism. While a dystopian reading of Kelleher’s text opens out for
consideration the possibility of resistance to oppression of various kinds and the virtue of
human efforts in effecting transformed societies, the transformative potential of such
resistance is left open. One possibility is to view Nat, his family and his new friends as
forging a new belonging; one we are positioned to accept is based on a contrived model of
racial accord in which ‘whiteys’ (descendants of the original white settlers), Feral Nation
(refugees from middle-class life) and First Nation (Indigenous people) form a new,
pluralistic community. This raises the question whether the concept of a utopian
community united in the spirit of humanity, racial hybridity and old capitalism can offer
young readers any new or truly transformed vision that is different from what is a familiar
story. Another more radical utopian possibility is to see Nat and his friends’ decision to
work the river as a way of ensuring that homelessness is an effective strategy of
deterritorialisation. By refusing to locate themselves in either the designated downriver
or upriver territories in favour of the fluidity of movement between these extremes, they
destabilise notions of ‘home’ as the nation’s stable signifier. Such a move seeks to redefine
belonging so that it transcends territorially-bounded spaces and focuses rather on
intersubjective relations based on trust and acceptance of plurality.

Utopian traces and transformative possibilities

Both Secrets of Walden Rising and Red Heart have cautionary functions which enable
social critique. Through entering a world that is a projection of how bad life could be if
current decisions and actions taken by governments and powerful organisations and
individuals continue unquestioned and unabated, readers are challenged to reflect critically
on reality. Whilst adolescent readers may feel powerless to effect any change, the attraction
of novels such as these is that they figure subjective agency in terms of a young protagonist
resisting the prevailing social order and engaging proactively with it. Their informing
structure
a narrative trajectory based on a journey, literal and metaphoric, from
dystopian toward more hopeful states
affirms the possibility of agency. A stronger
affirmation appears in novels which still more overtly thematise settler society history as a
 356 C. Bradford et al.

frame for European inhabitation of Australia and use such journeying and its articulation
in relation to memory and place to embed utopian traces in children’s fiction.
Brian Caswell’s Deucalion (1995) is a science fiction novel which tells of Earth’s
colonisation of other planets, but this has obviously been based on the European
colonisation of Australia. David Metzenthen’s Boys of Blood and Bone (2003) is a double-
stranded narrative which tells, in alternating chapters, the story of Henry Lyon, a
contemporary young adult who is temporarily stranded in a rural town when his car
breaks down, and the story of Andy Lansell, a former native of that rural area who is
transported to the dystopian setting of World War I and the trenches in France, where he
fights and dies. Despite their differences, the books throw light on the relationships
between utopianism and Australian settler society children’s literature. They involve
comparable thematic material: for example, they represent some forms and structures of a
world Australian readers will readily recognise while transporting their principal characters
through space and/or time to a different world. While this move in Deucalion constitutes a
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

search for an alternative society which will be better than the predominantly dystopian
world that has been left behind, Boys of Blood and Bone articulates utopian motifs by
sending Andy away from a countryside his memories continue to reconstruct in utopian
terms, and by depicting Henry as a version of the fictive traveller in a strange land,
discovering in the small town of Strattford a culture which in many ways continues the
culture evoked in the narrative about Andy
a culture which is integrated and which
appears to have a unified system of values, in which readers can perceive traces of a
utopian Australia imagined in the other books (and in past Australian social practice).
Deucalion describes a world in obviously utopian terms, presenting it as a consequence
of a struggle to wrest a better world from a dystopian context. More generally, the
literature confirms Ralph Pordzik’s argument that:
The construction of utopian space in novels addressing postcolonial issues rarely has
much in common with the classical notion of an improved society purged of the
shortcomings of the present and living in perfect adjustment and happiness. Novels written
after this fashion are hardly ever prescriptive in their conception of a ‘better’ society; in
fact, they leave it open to their readers to construe their own image of utopia which is not
and cannot be a fixed and reliable end in itself any longer.28
Hence utopian elements may be present in the novels more or less as traces, as when
Henry ‘could feel his life, and for a moment he knew it to be beautiful, good, and
fortunate’.29 The principle of utopia-as-trace creates a compelling protocol for grasping the
novel’s rendering of how Andy experiences his death. The following scene occurs early in
that sequence, shortly after he sustains his massive injury:
He didn’t so much think of the people who loved him and the people he loved, he experienced
it. It washed through him, the love of the boys, his parents, his sister, his grandparents, Cecelia
and Frances-Jane, and there was the baby, his baby, who brought a wild, primitive, sweeping
love that he could not fathom, but only experience.
He was only emotion now * in thought and memory, of the present and of the past. His life
of doing was over. It would not be added to now, but he did know he had done his duty * but
that was like a second of his life, and that second was gone. It was love he was remembering; he
remembered his people and the land as love, his horses grazing under the gums, his mum and
dad, Emily, all the girls, his mates.30

What the moment depicts is ‘utopia lost’. It is lost because of ‘duty’ laid upon Andy by
Australia’s colonial ties with England, ties which the characters only inchoately question.
The utopian trace is evident in the conjunction of memory and place in which both are
invoked in idyllic terms.
 Journal of Australian Studies 357

Boys of Blood and Bone was published half a century on from two major changes which
began to impact upon Australian society around the middle of the twentieth century: a
sharp rise in migration of people not from or linked with the colonial motherland, and the
accelerating dissolution of most of the empires founded under the impetus of European
capitalism. It retrospectively joins the body of postcolonial narratives which, after the
middle of the century, re-examined and interrogated the history of encounters between
coloniser and colonised. Its particular interest, though, is in the process of interrogation
that addresses not just the dismantling of imperial structures of political and economic
dominance and governance, but also
and over time more significantly
the structures of
social and cultural hegemony shaping thought and feeling. Australia is rapidly approach-
ing the point at which less than half the population will have any historical or ethnic links
with England, but its colonial past still influences the nature of its self-conceptions and its
literature carries on a dialogue with the assumptions, ideologies and practices of the former
coloniser.
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

Brian Caswell’s Deucalion is a rather transparent refashioning of the history of the

settlement of Australia. The map of the continent placed between contents page and
prologue is a squashed version of Australia, complete with the Inland Sea early European
explorers were convinced existed; the indigenous Elokoi represent the Aboriginal peoples,
and the terms of their near genocide are familiar; and the utopian propaganda used to
attract colonists and later settlers reflects that used for over a century to attract people to
Australia. This dream is ironised early in Deucalion, where the lure is expressed as ‘Land of
your own. Full employment in a booming environment. No pollution, no ruling class.
Build a new life with hard work’.31 Instead, settlers drawn from an underclass swiftly find
themselves returned to an underclass. Caswell’s analogy presents a scathing presentation of
Australian history and its underpinning imperialist metanarratives. The alternative is then
expressed most specifically in the genetically-engineered Icarus children, true genetic and
cultural hybrids produced by splicing Elokoi and human genes. One of the principal
characters, Jane, is one of these hybrids, but the other crucial trait attributed to her is
progressive, rapid loss of memory of her life on Earth, a loss induced as a consequence of
cryogenic freezing for the 50 year journey to Deucalion. This strategy enables the character
to be fractured and reconstructed, and thence to perceive with new eyes and to become
acutely aware of the dystopian nature of the colonialist society from which she has
emerged. The fissuring of the character is also an effective aspect of Caswell’s structuring
of the novel as a polyfocalised text
that is, events are presented through the thoughts and
perceptions of nine or ten characters
and this enables Caswell to represent processes of
cultural difference, culture contact and paradigm shift from multiple perspectives (albeit
with a unified outcome in mind).
The driving themes of Deucalion are the pursuit of individual liberty, personal, political
and economic independence, and social justice. One of the main story strands with which
social justice is linked
the struggle of a colonised planet’s indigenous inhabitants to
reoccupy their ancestral land
is patently modelled on and alludes to the situation of
Aboriginal Australians and the quest for land rights. It is cued by the importance of rock
paintings in Elokoi culture, the centrality of the concept of Dream in Elokoi tradition and
everyday life, and the parallel growth of awareness in one of the main characters (Daryl)
that the experience of his Aboriginal Australian ancestors as a colonised people was
similar to the experience of the Elokoi. Characteristically, the economic and territorial
motives of imperialist societies ‘were articulated in cultural, intellectual and moral terms as
philanthropic desires to ‘‘civilize’’ the savage’.32 The extreme form of otherness to be
 358 C. Bradford et al.

combated is depicted in Deucalion’s Elokoi, who represent an indigenous people the West
finds to be prehistoric, primitive, incomprehensible and uncanny.
Australia has been described as a ‘breakaway settler colony that has not undergone
decolonisation’, and this seems to be a view informing Deucalion, which concludes with a
revolution overthrowing the imperial centre and bringing into being probably the most
overtly depicted utopian world in Australian children’s fiction.33 The revolution brings into
being a ‘golden age’ in which the trade economy is archaically grounded on the exchange of
goods, not ‘paper profits’, and where the Elokoi homeland
like many postcolonial
utopias situated, as Pordzik puts it, ‘in the vast and impenetrable interior of a defeated
continent’
is a garden reclaimed from the desert.34 If there is irony in this depiction of
utopia, it is probably that Australia has not achieved the utopian dream envisaged as a
possibility here, and represented as lived experience in Boys of Blood and Bone.

* * *
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

In the contemporary Australian novels discussed here, the possibilities of any new world
order are perceived from the perspective of children or young adults, with the effect that
concern and responsibility are handed over to youth. The earliest novel, Deucalion,
suggests that European Australia continues to fail its Indigenous people, while the novels
from the Howard era suggest that complacency about Australia’s history and future must
be resisted. The implication is clearly that it is the role of the young to engage with and take
responsibility for proposed or emerging new world orders, and to evaluate them in the
context of society’s lost utopian possibilities. These novels speak also to the problematic
nature of history as recalled/recorded memory and to the complicated relationship between
place and belonging. The dystopian turn evident in their plots thus encodes not so much a
rejection as a recognition of the past, so enjoining upon young readers a responsibility to
transform the ideologies of the past to cultivate for the future more utopian forms of
political and material environments.

Notes
This article is a specific application to Australian children’s literature of an ARC-funded project
that culminated in Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum’s New
World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations, London,
Palgrave, 2008. A version of the paper was presented at the Utopian Society conference in
Porto, Portugal.
1. Victor Kelleher, Red Heart, Viking, Melbourne, 2001.
2. Ralph Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian
Novel in the New English Literatures, Peter Lang, New York, 2001, p. 172.
3. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, ‘Conclusion: critical dystopia and possibilities’, in
Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian
Imagination, New York and London, Routledge, 2003, p. 235.
4. Brian Caswell, Deucalion, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1995; Allan Baillie, Secrets
of Walden Rising, Penguin, Melbourne, 1996;
5. David Metzenthen, Boys of Blood and Bone, Penguin, Melbourne, 2003.
6. Quoted in Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking
Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2003, p. 76.
7. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p. 4.
8. Quoted in Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, ‘Introduction: dystopia and histories’ in
Baccolini and Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons, p. 5.
9. David Harvey, ‘From space to place and back again: reflections on the condition of
postmodernity’ in Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, & Lisa Tickner
(eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 4.
 Journal of Australian Studies 359

10. Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1993); Green Mars (1995); Blue Mars (1997). New York:
Spectra.
11. Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The three faces of utopianism revisited’, Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1,
1994, p. 9.
12. Sargent, ‘The three faces’, p. 9.
13. Wake in Fright, NLT Productions and United Artists, 1971.
14. Baillie, Secrets of Walden Rising, p. 22.
15. Raffaella Baccolini, ‘‘‘A useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past’’: memory and
historical reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling’ in Baccolini and Moylan (eds), Dark
Horizons, pp. 118
19.
16. Baccolini, ‘A useful knowledge’, p. 119.
17. Baccolini, ‘A useful knowledge’, p. 119.
18. Baillie, Secrets of Walden Rising, p. 53.
19. Baillie, Secrets of Walden Rising, p. 53.
20. Baillie, Secrets of Walden Rising, p. 67.
21. Baccolini and Moylan, ‘Conclusion’, p. 7.
22. Baccolini, ‘A useful knowledge’, p. 115.
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 17:24 07 October 2014

23. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, Penguin, New York, 1926/1999.
24. Tom Moylan, ‘‘‘The moment is here . . . and it’s important’’: state, agency, and dystopia in Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling’ in Baccolini and Moylan
(eds), Dark Horizons, p. 135.
25. Kelleher, Red Heart, p. 119. Kelleher has The Golden Bough in mind here, clearly evident in the
subsequent attempt of Curtis’s people to sacrifice him.
26. Kelleher, Red Heart, p. 192.
27. Kelleher, Red Heart, p. 199.
28. Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia, pp. 197
8.
29. Metzenthen, Boys of Blood and Bone, p. 254.
30. Metzenthen, Boys of Blood and Bone, p. 277.
31. Caswell, Deucalion, p. 24.
32. Shaobo Xie, ‘Rethinking the Identity of Cultural Otherness: The Discourse of Difference as an
Unfinished Project’, in Roderick McGillis (ed.),Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the
Postcolonial Context, Garland , New York, 1999, p. 7.
33. Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia, p. 22.
34. Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia, p. 20.