Parallel times

Ten years ago historical novels were an unwanted rarity in Australian children’s publishing. Instead, there was a vogue for time-slip novels where a contemporary kid went travelling back into the past, as though history would be too hard for younger readers to handle without some sort of tour guide.

At the time I can remember worrying that this represented a kind of ‘dumbing down.’ But I needn’t have worried. History moves in cycles and the historical novel is currently among the most vigorous and varied genres in Australian children’s fiction – sometimes set in Australia, sometimes focusing on children in concentration camps or street kids in fourteenth-century Jerusalem.

One of the most notable turning points in this particular cycle was Garry Disher’s The Bamboo Flute. Disher’s first person, present-tense narrative had an immediacy that whisked the reader across time and space faster than Doctor Who’s Tardis, subtly pointing out the parallels between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the recession of the 1990s.