The Use of Images to Explore the Indigenous Experience of Conflict in Australian Children's Picturebooks

• Main Authors: Baguley, Margaret, Kerby, Martin
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: The Johns Hopkins University Press 2023
• Subjects: Children's picture books; Indigenous children's picture books; war; conflict; national identity; Battle of Meewah; First Nations
• Online Access: https://research.usq.edu.au/item/z0w6y/the-use-of-images-to-explore-the-indigenous-experience-of-conflict-in-australian-children-s-picturebooks; https://research.usq.edu.au/download/7b576b5775b3a39ad3f759a59fd82ac2c8130f882064c9439ff3f2e97229d63d/212936/FINAL_2_6_23_Revised_Article_Bookbird_%20%28002%29%20-%20cx%20comments.pdf

Australian children’s picturebook authors and illustrators who choose armed conflict as their subject matter inevitably grapple with the paradox that, while war is a central component of national identity, the experience of Indigenous peoples remains, at best, underrepresented. This article uses the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions developed by Clare Painter et al. to compare how the Indigenous experience of conflict is represented in the Australian children’s picturebooks Alfred’s War (Bin Salleh and Fry) and Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain (Uhr and O’Halloran).