Australian Children’s Books

Abstract

Ten years ago the field of Australian children's books excited little interest from librarians, booksellers, collectors or educationalists. Despite the formation of the Children's Book Council of Australia and its Book of the Year awards instituted in 1946, it was virtually impossible for anyone interested in the subject to read about it or to study it at first hand. Both Morris Miller and H. M. Green, in their standard works on Australian literature, dealt with children's books only cursorily and selectively. Serious reviews of children's literature in the press were rare and often only an annual event (during Children's Book Week) at that. No libraries, with the exception of the Mitchell and the National, had made any attempt to form a complete or even representative collection in the field and second-hand bookshops, where they could be persuaded to take the stuff, were piled high with the unwanted literary hand-me-downs of our parents and grandparents.