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Article Excerpt
The scenes of Christmas tales read by English-speaking children have been for the most part naturally laid amid winter, snow, and leafless landscape. The Yule-log and the holly-berry have been time-honoured "properties." But there are, growing up under the Southern Cross, generations of children, with English speech and English hearts, to whom the Yule-log at Christmas is unmeaning and the snow unknown.
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The author of this assertion was Kate McCosh Clark in her New Zealand children's book A Southern Cross Fairy Tale, published in 1891. It's worth mentioning because it reveals that the search for an adequate New Zealand identity in children's books is over a hundred years old, and because simply declaring that children should find their wider identities affirmed by the stories they read does not necessarily ensure that reflection automatically takes place.
New Zealand is a country looking energetically inward, defining and redefining its own identity, yet simultaneously longing to be recognized by the wider world. So the recent success of the film Whale Rider leads to a curious mood of local self-congratulation. See! We too, just by being who we are, can be up there with the best--a mood that is currently encouraged by curiosity from the outside world. Whale Rider! Amazing! What else is going on in New Zealand?
Whale Rider exemplifies oddities that attend books in general and the New Zealand situation in particular, for before it was a film, Whale Rider was a book (written, in 1987, by Witi Ihimaera), well known and popular in New Zealand but unknown in the world beyond--for the setting that delights people watching the film was rejected by those assessing the possible readership of the book. (Since the film appeared Witi's book has finally been published in the United States, has been translated into German, and is shortly to appear in...
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