Saved by the word: Textuality and colonization in nineteenth-century Australian texts for children

In Australia, as in other settler colonies, colonization was conducted in and through textuality, from the imposition of English as a national language, through the deployment of discursive forms to control those subject to imperial rule (convicts, Aborigines, bushrangers), to literary expressions of colonial experience. In this essay, I consider some nineteenth-century children's texts in which textuality itself is thematized, its involvement in the processes of colonization addressed more or less explicitly. As I consider the ways in which textuality is implicated in imperialism, I want to identify what Spivak calls "the mechanics of the constitution of the Other" (90), the ways in which colonial discoursal strategies speak for and about the subaltern. At the same time, I am interested in the gaps, elisions, and ambiguities in these representations of textuality, following Pierre Macherey's dictum, "What is impOltant in a work is what it does not say" (87), or, more accurately, what it cannot say, given the relationship of the text to what Macherey calls its margins, "an area of incompleteness from which we can observe its birth and its production" (90). Australian colonial texts for children, like other Australian colonial texts, manifest numerous points of tension and ambivalence concerning the imperial project, but in addition they promote the agenda of colonizing their readers, whom they construct as colonial subjects and future colonists. Such a combination of discourses, in which colonial tensions coexist with the imperative of socializing child readers, makes for a peculiarly potent mix of ideologies.