Bad history, good intentions and Australia's national apology

Abstract

The main title of this book is all but self-explanatory. A gamut of associations are prompted both by the very specificity of the realities to which the phrase "Antipodean childhoods" refers and by the metaphorical meanings with which it has been charged as a result of its routine application to colonial and postcolonial contexts. Whether employed literally or figuratively, “Antipodean childhoods” is suggestive of a whole range of opposites (beyond those of young and old, small and big, weak and strong, distant and near, peripheral and central, below and above) and eminently productive of ambiguities and contradictions. It may well be for this reason that the idea of Australia and New Zealand growing up or of people growing up in New Zealand and Australia has attracted relatively little scholarly attention so far. Somewhat paradoxically perhaps, whereas the metaphorical application of the notion of childhood to Europe’s colonies at large and to those “down under” in particular has come to be taken for granted, the literal link between the Antipodes and childhood tends to be perceived as an even less likely subject of academic inquiry. At best, it may be said to have inspired some isolated investigations, none of them comprehensive enough, though, to provide a starting point, let alone a framework for the study of childhood in Antipodean cultures.