Search

Despite primarily catering to a U.S. audience for whom religion exerts a greater influence than anywhere else in the Western world, children's picture books dealing with the first landing on the moon in 1969 are reticent to conceptualise it in religious terms. Significantly, this is the same approach that NASA adopted when seeking to communicate their understanding of space exploration (Bellah, 1967; Tribbe, 2014; Wilson, 1984). The authors and illustrators of When We Walked on the Moon (Long and Kalda, 2019), Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race (Shetterly and Freeman, 2018), My Little Golden Book About the First Moon Landing (Lovitt and Sims, 2019), One Giant Leap (Burleigh and Wimmer, 2014), The First Men who went to the Moon (Gowler Green and Brundage, 2019) and Where once we Stood (Riley and Impey, 2019) employ the nationalistic "rhetoric and belief and the ritual and symbolism of the American space program" and celebrate the international scientific-technical achievement which enabled its success (Wilson, 1984, p. 210). By positioning their work within the parameters of a civil religion, which by its nature is a fluid belief system, and only implying a religious dimension, the authors and illustrators avoid polarising the reading public. In the U.S. context this is a vital commercial consideration, for research has consistently shown that religious belief is associated with less positive explicit and implicit attitudes to science and lower levels of science knowledge. This has its counterpoint in a greater interest in science on the part of people from non-religious backgrounds. The analysis of these picture books is framed by four of the 'secular' tenets of civil religion identified by Anthony Squiers. The findings reveal that the authors and illustrators have used civil religion as a means of engaging with the moon landing without adopting a solely scientific or religious perspective, a strategy that enables a wide cross section of readers to derive an understanding of the landing consistent with their world view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades children's picture books dealing with the Australian experience during the First World War have sought to balance a number of thematic imperatives. The increasingly sentimentalised construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma, the challenge of providing a moral lesson that reflects both modern ideological assumptions and the historical record, and the traditional use of Australian war literature as an exercise in nation building have all exerted an influence on the literary output of a range of authors and illustrators. The number of publications over this period is proof of the enduring fascination with war as a topic as well as the widespread acceptance that this conflict has been profoundly significant in shaping Australian public and political culture and perceptions about national character and identity (Beaumont, 1995, p. xvii). As MacCallum-Stewart (2007, p. 177) argues, authors and illustrators must therefore balance notions of 'respect' for a national foundation myth with a 'pity of war' approach that reflects modern attitudes to conflict. Whatever their ideological commitment, many authors and illustrators respond to this challenge by adopting an approach that serves to indoctrinate readers into the Anzac tradition (Anzac refers to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps raised for war in 1914. It has become a generic term for Australian and New Zealand soldiers. The Anzac tradition established at Gallipoli, Australia's first major military campaign, has been traditionally viewed as the nation's founding moment.).

This paper analyses the Australian children’s picture books The Gender Fairy, by Jo Hirst and Libby Wirt, and Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship, by Jess Walton and Dougal MacPherson. Both are examples of a rare engagement by Australian children’s authors and illustrators; indeed, Hirst has the distinction of being the first Australian author of a picture book with a trans protagonist. The authors and illustrators engage with trans issues within a socio-political context that continues to problematise gender identity, particularly when it pertains to young children. To circumvent at least some of the controversy their efforts might generate, the authors and illustrators balance the radical potential of their subject matter with the perceived needs of the marketplace and the constraints imposed by the genre. In doing so, they create books that are radical, but not so radical that they generate controversy that obscures their message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]