AustLit

'This article engages with the otherwise worlds of Arrernte caterpillar children living in the Aboriginal fringe camps around Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It traces the constitutive relationships between these children’s kinship identities and belongings to country, the materialities of the desert environment in which they live, the adaptive and inclusive past and present Arrernte ‘Caterpillar Dreaming’ stories, Arrernte interspecies relational ethics, and the impact of colonial dispersals and interventions upon Central Australian Aboriginal people’s lives. The author poses the question of what we might learn about children’s postcolonial natureculture relations from these caterpillar children’s otherwise worlds. Picking up on Elizabeth Povinelli’s suggestion that the mutually constituting relationship of geographies (places) and biographies (human lives), or geontologies, function as indigenous survival strategies, the author questions whether or not these adaptive caterpillar geontologies can survive in a world irrevocably changed by colonisation and subject to ongoing neo-colonial assimilatory interventions. To make these tracings and to pose these questions, the author draws upon a combination of personal recollections, traditional Arrernte stories and philosophies, and recountings of colonialist and neo-colonialist historical events.'

Source: Author's abstract.

'The 1998 picture book The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, is an allegory of the colonisation of Australia. The book has been controversial for a number of reasons. While some have read it as too politically correct, others have argued that the portrayal of the Aboriginals is patronising and silencing, and still others have been confounded by its categorisation as children's literature. For the author of this article, the overwhelming message of the book is the destruction of the landscape due to colonialism. In the reading of The Rabbits in this article, the author attempts to bring together the postcolonial and the posthuman ‘contact zone’ perspectives, as theorised by Mary Louise Pratt and Donna Haraway respectively. The author analyses the textual pages of The Rabbits as representative of a troubled contact zone where text and image exist in tension with each other such that two separate but interwoven strands ultimately come together to deliver a poignant message. The author further argues that the book can be read as a deeply transformative text, mainly because of Tan's illustrations which subtly counter Marsden's sharply polarised representation of the coloniser and the colonised.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)