Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)

Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds explores cultural and historical aspects of the representation of plants in Australian children’s and young adult literature, encompassing colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous perspectives. While plants tend to be backgrounded as of less narrative interest than animals and humans, this book, in conversation with the field of critical plant studies, approaches them as living beings worthy of attention. Australia is home to over 20,000 species of native plants – from pungent Eucalypts to twisting mangroves, from tiny orchids to spiky, silvery spinifex. Indigenous Australians have lived with, relied upon, and cultivated these plants for many thousands of years. When European explorers and colonists first invaded Australia, unfamiliar species of plants captured their imagination. Vulnerable to bushfires, climate change, and introduced species, plants continue to occupy fraught butvital places in Australian ecologies, texts, and cultures. Discussing writers from Ambelin Kwaymullina and Aunty Joy Murphy to May Gibbs and Ethel Turner, and embracing transnational perspectives from Ukraine, Poland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Storying Plants addresses the stories told about plants but also the stories that plants themselves tell, engaging with the wide-ranging significance of plants in Australian children’s and Young Adult literature. Preface Acknowledgements Contents Notes on Contributors Chapter 1: Introduction: Storying Plants—Roots and Winged Seeds Storying Plants: Plant Inscription, Weaving, and Indigenous Knowings Critical Plant Studies Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature Critical Plant Studies and Children’s and Young Adult Literature Wooden Birds and Winged Seeds References Part I: Plant Temporalities, Roots, and Belonging in Picturebooks Chapter 2: Aboriginal Australian Picturebooks: Ceremonial Listening to Plants References Chapter 3: “We Feel the Roots of This Land Beneath the Soles of Our Bare Feet”: A Diffractive Reading of Plant Representation in Welcome to Country and The Rabbits Approaching Cultural Epistemologies Through Materiality and Dialogue Other-Than-Human Timescales and the Cultural Time of Material Remains Clearing the Filter Welcome to Country: A Visitor’s Journey The Rabbits: From Care to Destruction Deforestation and Habitat Destruction in The Rabbits Colonial Botany The Tree as an Intercultural Figure References Chapter 4: Longing and Belonging in the Green Worlds of Jeannie Baker No Trees That Are Not Kin Time Makes Nothing Happen Learning to Read the Signs Another Kind of Silence Ask How Not What References Part II: Storying Trees Chapter 5: Forever and Ever: The Fig Tree and Its Journey Through Time in Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins’ My Place Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Voices The My Place Fig Tree My Place as a Plant-Centred Narrative The Fig as a “Survivor Tree” and Keeper of Memories Conclusion References Chapter 6: The Voice of the She-oak: Vegetal Poetics and Hope in Kirli Saunders’s Verse Novel Bindi She-oak Trees and Country in Bindi She-oaks in Poetry and Story Bindi’s Vegetal Poetics Poetry in First Languages Fire, Plants, and People References Part III: Gumnuts and Pohutukawa Babies Chapter 7: Gumnuts, Plant-Human Hybridity, and the Issue of Belonging Settler Anxiety of Belonging Versus Indigenous Belonging The Genealogy of the Gumnuts Hybrid Gumnuts Hybrid Bad Banksia Men Hybrid Plant People and Belonging? References Chapter 8: Conservation and the Flower Fairy Tradition in Avis Acres and Maurice Gee The Flower Fairy Tradition Hutu and Kawa: Embodiments of Nature Hutu and Kawa: Model Conservationists Environmental Disruption Maurice Gee: A Fallen World References Part IV: Winged Seeds: Exile, Adventure, and Migration Chapter 9: Seeking Home, Discovering the Bush: The Australian Bush Envisaged in Ukrainian Children’s Books Plants in Ukrainian Culture The Bush as a Colonised Place The Bush as Seen Through the Ukrainian Gaze Aboriginal Relations with the Bush in Ukrainian Australian Writing The Bush as Individual Plants Conclusion References Chapter 10: In Quest of “Green Strangeness” and Freedom: Polish Perspectives on Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Plants in Texts for Young Adult Readers “Green Strangeness” and Human Freedom The Mysteries of the Island of Aotea The Mysteries of the Southern Islands Tomek in the Land of Kangaroos Conclusion References Part V: Visioning and Revisioning Plants in Young Adult Literature Chapter 11: “Something Here Is Completely, Horribly, Unnaturally Wrong”: Uncanny Vegetation in Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Aurora Rising The Uncanny, EcoGothic, and Australian Young Adult Fiction “A Continuous Creeping Spread”: The Ra’haam’s Vegetal Tools “The Nearest Thing to a Human, Without Being One”: Confronting Animal Testing “It’s Inside Me Now”: Cat’s Transformation Conclusion References Chapter 12: Vegetal Memory, Community, and Power in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Tribe Trilogy The Tribe: Plants, Country, and Indigenous Futurism The Firstwood: Trees Are Family Too The Deepwood and the Leafers: Vegetal Agency and Excess Taffa Beans: Transcendent Visions Conclusion References Chapter 13: “Then Something Started Growing in the Emptiness”: Revisiting the Lost Child in the Bush in Australian Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction The Bush and the Lost Girl Seven Little Australians A Little Bush Maid Tomorrow When the War Began Series The Tribe Series Revisiting the Lost Girls References Index