For those keeping up with Australia’s literary scene, you might be interested to know that the winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards will be announced on Thursday. All the usual woke suspects are represented in the shortlisted titles, but it is Children’s Literature which deserves a special mention, not because the choice of works is remarkable but because they are thoroughly unremarkable.
They are unremarkable because four of the five books in the running completely conform to the 2023 woke parameters of acceptability. This means that they are either bogged in the quagmire of identity politics, or they are fixated on Aboriginal Australian culture to the detriment of Western civilisation, or even in some cases, the English language itself.
Take for example, ‘Open your heart to Country’ by primary school teacher Jasimine Seymour. This illustrated story is told in both English and Dharug, an extinct language which was once spoken by a small number of people in the inland area of greater Sydney. The judges who compiled the shortlist, enthuse that Seymour’s work is ‘a lyrical ode to the ancient strength and beauty of Country, told in English and Dharug’ and that the ‘bilingual narrative powerfully engages the reader with First Nations worldviews and language pathways.’ Learning Dharug is not useful in the slightest to anybody but is merely an exercise in virtue signalling at the expense of the child.
Similarly, Randa Abdel-Fattah, who describes herself as a Palestinian Egyptian Muslim, focuses on what it is to be a Muslim in Australia in 11 Words for Love and has decided that this story can only be told to children in Arabic and English. If we are going to go down the bilingual path, why not introduce children to ancient Greek or Latin given that over 60% of all English words have Latin or Greek roots. Surely in this time of plummeting literacy standards, it would be of immense benefit to their development.
Finally, we have ‘The Dunggiirr Brothers and the Caring Song of the Whale’ by Aunty Shaa Smith and Yandarra. The Teachers’ notes which accompany this book inform us that its themes are ‘Aboriginal sovereignty, Country, belonging, history, stories, Indigenous stories, family and community.’ But at its heart, it’s just another political exercise designed to brow beat children into believing that they should feel ashamed to be Australian because they are living on ‘stolen land.’ Teachers are told to emphasise to the children that ‘this always was and always will be Aboriginal Land’ and ‘that when they do their Acknowledgement, ‘the most important thing is to feel it in your heart and be true in what you do’, which of course means absolutely nothing.
These books are simply a reflection of the current culture being fostered by teachers in Australian primary school classrooms, where children are being uneducated and politicised at the same time, which is quite the achievement. Instead of being taught how to read or write, young Australians are being daily indoctrinated with social justice, identity politics, critical race theory and radical gender theory by their teachers who believe their main role is to be agents of change, both in the classroom and beyond.
