Academic literature on the topic 'Children's Book Council of Australia'

This research investigates the portrayal of masculinity in Australian young adult novels published in 2019. The novels were taken from the 2020 Children’s Books Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year for Older Readers Notables List. Established in 1946, these annual awards are considered the most prominent and prestigious in Australian children’s and young adult literature and are likely to be accessible and promoted to young readers in schools and libraries. The three texts studied were Four Dead Queens by Astrid Scholte, The Boy who Steals Houses by C.G. Drews, and This is How We Change the Ending by Vikki Wakefield. Using a Critical Content Analysis methodology (Beach et al., 2009), researchers completed a review of the literature and theories around masculinity and chose to analyse three exemplary texts using the attributes of the Hegemonic Masculinity Schema (HMS) and Sensitive New Man Schema (SNMS) as described by Romøren and Stephens (2002). Attributes from the HMS include traits and behaviours like being violent, physical or verbal bullying, and hostile to difference while attributes from the SNMS include being supportive, affectionate, and considerate and respectful of the space and feelings of others (especially females). In this method, researchers identify examples of the attributes within the main characters and minor characters from each of the three books, recording quotes and noting critical incidents depicting aspects of masculinity. Notable findings of the research include the acknowledgment and portrayal of a particular conception of hegemonic masculinity in the selected novels often informed or shaped by the presence of dominant father figures and the absence of the concept of “the mother.” The characters who aligned to the schema used within this research are often overshadowed by a dominant father figure who conformed to an extreme version of hegemonic masculinity and who shaped their child’s actions even if the fathers were absent from the novel. The research reveals commonly held conceptions of masculinity aligned to those used in the schema and demonstrated that young adult literature, like popular media, can be used as a vehicle for the dissemination of such concepts and reveal contemporary understandings of it. Outputs from this research include the development of a modified and more contemporary schema which could be applied to future research. Significantly, this interdisciplinary research bridges the library, education and literature fields to examine the different ways maleness and masculinity are depicted to young adult readers in prize-nominated Australian young adult novels.

The journal was first established in 1976 with the title Australian Child and Family Welfare (quarterly), and it was known as such for the first 15 years of its existence. It was published by the Children’s Welfare Association of Victoria as the quarterly journal of the Child and Family Welfare Council of Australia. Co-editors were the Rev Denis Oakley and Dr Peter O’Connor. Denis tells us that the funds to get it started came from the Children’s Welfare Foundation. This foundation was an outstanding example of partnership between business and the non-government sector. Not without controversy, Denis performed on television in his clergyman clobber advertising products for Billy Guyatt stores, drawing in funds for the Foundation which were also applied to the establishment of Grassmere, a community-based youth facility, and to some research work into adoption and family law. The book review editor was Mr Cliff Picton, associate editor was Mr Max Liddell, Mr David Thackeray was business manager, Mr Vernon Knight was circulation manager and the committee providing support was Mrs Glenys Craig, Mr John Edwards, Mr Bill Hughes, Canon Neal Malloy OBE and Mrs Patsy Sebastian. It had a group of interstate representatives, Spencer Colliver, Ray Jenkins, Albert Kruipers, Rev Lyn Reilly, George Belchev, Adam Jamrozik, Geoff Aves and editorial consultants Concetta Ben, Prof Peter Boss, Spencer Colliver and Dr Len Tierney. In the editorial in the first issue was the explanation that the journal was being launched as so much was going on in child and family welfare, that there was a need for a forum. Many of the specialist journals failed to appeal to the broad readership in social welfare, whereas this journal would ‘aim for the broad spectrum of people who make up the vast army of workers in the child and family welfare field … Our concern is to open up discussion on policies and practices, to discuss innovations and the raising of standards.’

Children Australia is entering a new and exciting era in its development. After some 35 years as an academic and practice-oriented publication, the Journal is now set to continue this tradition, but also to broaden its scope in response to the increasing complexity of working with children, young people and their families and carers.Over nearly four decades, we have enjoyed the support of a number of organisations, key activists in the field and practitioners. Established in 1976 under the title of Australian Child and Family Welfare, the Journal was published by the Children's Welfare Association in Victoria as the quarterly journal of the Child and Family Welfare Council of Australia and funded by the Children's Welfare Foundation. Publication of the journal coincided with a number of key policy changes through the 1970s, and in 1979, during the International Year of the Child, it addressed a range of themes that were paramount in the minds of academics and practitioners both in Australia and overseas. The 1980s saw new challenges in the sector, computerisation, the amalgamations of a range of children's agencies, and devolution of services from government in to the non-Government sector, together with major economic change. By the late 1980s, Australia was in recession and many in the sector were facing major organisational changes, particularly in Victoria under the Kennett government.

Council of Australian Governments (COAG) proposed, in its discussion paper released in November 1995, that it develop a national framework for children's services in Australia. This is part of its review of intergovernmental responsibilities for the delivery of children's services. The review consists of two steps, the first being intergovernmental agreement on a national framework, and the second, bilateral agreements between the Commonwealth and each State and Territory to implement the national framework. The Australian Early Childhood Association, Inc. (AECA) has prepared a submission which sets out its views on the objectives, outcomes, and features of a national framework for children's services. The Association strongly believes that the interests of children should be the paramount consideration in developing the national framework for a children's services system.

While conducting research intended to explore the underlying thoughts and assumptions held by non-Indigenous teachers and policy makers involved in Aboriginal education I dug out my first book on Australian history which had been given when I was about seven years old. Titled Australia From the Beginning (Pownall, 1980), the book was written for children and was not a scholarly book. It surprised me, then, to find so many of my own understandings and assumptions about Aboriginal affairs and race relations in this book despite four years of what had seemed quite liberal education in Australian history.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IS IMPORTANT because it nurtures emotional, social, creative and cognitive development, and gives children opportunities to appreciate and respond to diversity. In particular, literature that portrays racial and cultural diversity is a powerful means of promoting understanding of others while affirming individual identity. However, the limited number of studies about the nature and use of literature that reflects diversity in early childhood settings prompted this study, which investigates the nature of book collections in five long day care centres in the metropolitan region of Perth, Western Australia, with a specific focus on the extent to which they reflect racial diversity. Qualitative data was drawn from an audit of the children's book collections (2377 books) across each of the five centres. The findings revealed a lack of representation of racial diversity in those collections and where racial diversity was portrayed, non-dominant cultures were commonly misrepresented through stereotypical images often portraying outdated perspectives.

Purpose – There has been virtually no explication of poetry-writing pedagogy in historical accounts of Australian distance education during the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to satisfy this gap in scholarship. Design/methodology/approach – The paper concerns a particular episode in the cultural history of education; an episode upon which print media of the 1930s sheds a distinctive light. The paper therefore draws extensively on 1930s press reports to: contextualise the key educational debates and prime-movers inspiring verse-writing pedagogy in Australian education, particularly distance education, in order to; concentrate specific attention on the creation and popular reception of Brave Young Singers (1938), the first and only anthology of children's poetry written entirely by students of the correspondence classes of Western Australia. Findings – Published under the auspices of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) with funds originating from the Carnegie Corporation, two men in particular proved crucial to the development and culmination of Brave Young Singers. As the end result of a longitudinal study conducted by James Albert Miles with the particular support of Frank Tate, the publication attracted acclaim as a research document promoting ACER's success in educational research investigating the “experiment” of poetry-writing instruction through correspondence schooling. Originality/value – The paper pays due critical attention to a previously overlooked anthology of Australian children's poetry while simultaneously presenting an original account of the emergence and implementation of verse-writing instruction within the Australian correspondence class curriculum of the 1930s.

Geoffrey Malcolm Badger was Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Adelaide from 1955 to 1964 and, after serving briefly as a member of the CSIRO Executive, Vice-Chancellor from 1967 to 1977. Elected to Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science in 1960, he served on the Council and was President of the Academy from 1974 to 1978. He was President of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute in 1965 and Chairman of the Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC) from 1977 to 1982. During the Second World War, while working as a Lieutenant Instructor for the British Navy, he developed an interest in maritime navigation, and especially in Captain James Cook. Later, he edited the book Captain Cook: Navigator and Scientist and, in retirement, he wrote two books, Explorers of the Pacific (1988) and The Explorers of Australia (2001). He was admitted to the order of Australia (AO) in 1975 and knighted in 1979.

This study examines the portrayal of gender in Australian Children’s Book Council award and honour books in the Younger Reader and Older Reader categories over the years 1981-1993. Its purpose is to discover whether the books portray females and males in equally positive ways, which both reflect their changing roles in our society and provide models for gender construction to young readers. This is done by means of a qualitative analysis of the text from selected books, supported by a quantitative analysis in the form of frequency counts of gender representations. Relevant Government policies and feminist ideologies which have influenced them are reviewed, and compared with the study’s findings to ascertain how far the CBC books’ gender portrayals are in line with current education policies and research. The findings suggest a review of CBC judging criteria, and highlight the need for a critical literacy approach in classroom literacy teaching. Recommendations for the broadening of research in literature are made.

The study investigated the nature of the portrayal of aged characters in children's novels which won Children's Book Council of Australia's awards in the period from 1946 to 1985. By means of content analysis, the demographic, personal and behavioural characteristics of aged characters were identified on a thirty-four item checklist. From these characteristics a portrayal score was derived to represent the extent of variation in the depiction of aged characters in the novels examined. Analysis of variance tests indicated that the level of variation in portrayal scores was significantly related to the position of importance of aged characters in novels. The portrayal of aged characters did not vary according either to the approach to story adopted in Australian award-winning novels, or to the period in which the award was granted. It seems that although aged characters taken as a whole in the novels studied display the variety of characteristics attributed to aged people in the literature of gerontology, individually many of these aged characters are depicted in a somewhat limited way. There is evidence to suggest that aged characters in Australian award-winning children's novels do not adequately reflect the demographic characteristics of aged people in the Australian population. In terms of range of social settings in which they are depicted is restricted. So too, is the range of behaviours in which they engage. This rather limited depiction of aged characters means that readers of Australian award-winning children's novels are presented with a restricted and unrealistic view of the aged and of the condition of being aged. If children's novels serve as one of the socialisation agents for young people, then the limited portrayal of aged characters presented in those novels may be a cause for concern, especially as there are few indications that the depiction of aged characters generally in more recent award-winning novels has become more varied and realistic.

This project was funded by the Department for Families and Communities A collaboration between Ibrahim Sefer, newly arrived boys and girls aged between 4 and 14 years from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Backgrounds and the Migrant Health Service (Adelaide Central Community Health Service).

The aim of this study is to examine the tension between 'commerce and culture' in the dynamic development of the Australian children's publishing industry, within the wider context of international children's publishing history. It aims to refute a commonly stated 'truism' - that the conflict between the cultural value of a book and the need to market it threatens the integrity of the authors, publishers and the books themselves. Instead, it demonstrates that the tension between cultural and commercial definitions of the book publisher's role lies at the heart of the dynamism which has fuelled the development of a publishing climate, and created really innovative publishing. Publishing has too often been examined as if the sole motive of the publisher should be to produce books of quality, and though this is certainly the primary objective of the publishers which are the focus in this study, it is imperative to recognize that the dissemination of 'quality' literature and cultural product has always been dependent upon the recognition of commercial strategies which are often naively dismissed as being opportunistic and even extraneous to the publisher's purpose. As this thesis endeavours to show, the pioneering efforts of John Newbery, the Religious Tract Society, E.W. Cole, Ward, Lock & Co., and Australia's first publisher Angus & Robertson and of later publishers such as Penguin, Scholastic, Lothian, Omnibus, Allen & Unwin and others, were founded just as much upon the shrewd recognition of a viable market as they were upon the aim to enrich young readers' lives. In fact it is the symbiotic partnership between these two objectives which has fuelled their successes and their failures. It is where publishers either steer a path paved only with good intentions or one paved entirely with gold that their enterprises generally falter. The study owes a significant debt to the achievements of those who have documented Australian children's publishing 'output' so assiduously - Maurice Saxby's groundbreaking histories (1969, 1971, 1993) and Marcie Muir and Kerry White's comprehensive bibliographical tools (1982, 1992). Contrary to those endeavours, though, this study'goes back-stage' to the area where the publishing 'action' happens. Consequently it does not provide a comprehensive overview of every publication or author; it does not cover every genre and style. Rather it is concerned to document the activities of publishers which have produced books for children in Australia, in brief, and to isolate key examples of publishing enterprises within this coverage which represent 'case studies' of the different types of companies which have played a successful part in publishing development. This work is intended to be of interest not simply to either children's literature or Australian literature theorists, but to book historians, and to media, cultural studies and entertainment industry theorists. It was based on a belief that cultural histories of this nature are valuable in tracking the growth of a society and also in demonstrating that creative endeavours are never simply that. They are the result of a complex interweaving of a variety of factors, and that therefore artists approach creativity 'at their peril' without first understanding something of the world into which they are entrusting their creations. Consequently there were several objectives in the study which were to: 1. contextualize Australian children's publishing within a history of children's publishing internationally, with particular reference to early commercial beginnings in Britain and to British Empire developments, but also with appropriate reference to growth in the USA; 2. contextualize Australian children's publishing within the broader range and expansion of the book publishing industry in Australia, particularly the latter's economic growth and cultural influence since WWII, but also including an overview of foundational developments from the nineteenth century; 3. contextualize Australian children's publishing within social, educational and cultural developments, such as the development of education programs, the expansion of public and school libraries, the changes in government policy related to children and books, shifting social attitudes towards the child, and the impact of entertainment and media industries; 4. examine the roles played by various individuals, especially publishers, managers, editors, marketers, booksellers, librarians, teachers and professional commentators in the development of the Australian children's publishing industry. Their roles will be analysed in the context of various industry-particular questions such as a) the oft-remarked upon tensions that exist in publishing, between for example, 'craft-like' and bureaucratic structures; b) the interplay between 'structure and agency' in the industry; c) the shift from a 'library market' to a 'mass market' under such influences as globalization and media; d) whether publishing is necessarily more 'Australian' if it is done by independent, rather than multinational companies; and e) the influence that the 'internal' structure of publishing has had on its development, e.g. the isolation of children's publishing from the mainstream, the predominance of women as agents in its development, and so on; 5. finally, discuss the implications of globalization since the 1970s, and posit future directions in the production, marketing and consumption of children's properties. This study examines the industry from a critical perspective relying not on the evaluation of quality as opposed to mass market literature, but viewing all forms of trade literature for children as part of a dynamic whole. It therefore traces the origins of publishing in English-language countries briefly first before examining the Australian situation, and shows that from the very beginning, publications for children have been the products of both altruistic and profit-driven objectives. It concentrates on the post-WWII period, on certain key enterprises and trends which have been particularly successful, suggesting that those publishing houses and those individuals within them who 'balance' commerce and culture with the most skill, are those who succeed in making 'good' books readily accessible to those for whom they have been created. This thesis celebrates the fact that children's publishers have always demonstrated an admirable combination of opportunism and idealism, the two characteristics which are essential to a successful publishing company. Australia has been fortunate in rearing several enterprising individuals whose early publishing attempts laid the ground for the currently successful houses. Without E.W. Cole, William Steele at Ward, Lock and Co., Frank Eyre at Oxford University Press, Andrew Fabinyi at Cheshire, Barbara Ker Wilson at Angus & Robertson, Anne Bower Ingram at William Collins, the later successes of key individuals at Penguin Books Australia, Scholastic Australia, Allen & Unwin, Lothian Books and Omnibus Books and countless others may not have been planted in such fertile ground. This study predicts that the future of Australian children's publishing lies in the recognition of the essential role played by commercial instincts in shaping cultural endeavours.

This thesis reports on a study which developed a profile of the reviewers of children's books in Australia. It then compared the profile with one which was developed by Kathleen Craver in 1984 of children's book reviewers in the United States. Five research questions were addressed by this study relating to reviewers and their opinions regarding review aspects, reviewer roles and review practices within the framework of their personal and professional background. Craver surveyed the reviewers from School Library journal because as a group, they provided the greatest potential for statistical significance of all the reviewing journals in the United States. As no Australian journal enjoys either the number of reviewers or the circulation of School Library journal, reviewers from eight journals which are most used by teacher and children's librarians were selected to form the population for this research. These journals are Fiction Focus, LINES, Magpies, Reading Time, Reviewpoin t, Review Bulletin, Scan and Tasmanian Resources Review. The reviewer profile which emerged from this study was very similar to Craver's in that it was not one which could be entirely defined in terms of group characteristics. Selected cross tabulations either with the particular journals, demographic details, or other variables, particularly those relating to reviewer experience failed to produce predictable behaviourial correlations. However, reviewers were united on certain issues which can be attributed to their own professional background.

The Eastern Barred Bandicoot is one of Australia's most threatened species. When their existence came under extreme threat from habitat loss, predators and human development, Eastern Barred Bandicoots found refuge in the most unlikely of places – a rubbish tip. This captivating true story details the plight these small, nocturnal marsupials faced, and the outstanding efforts that ensured their protection. Written by Rohan Cleave and illustrated by Coral Tulloch, Bouncing Back shows that even on the brink of extinction, there is hope for the survival of our most vulnerable species. Rohan Cleave and Coral Tulloch's first book, Phasmid: Saving the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect, won a Whitley Award for Children's Natural History Book and was an Honour Book in the Children's Book Council of Australia Book Awards (Eve Pownall Information Book category). Bouncing Back is perfect for primary aged readers.