Opening of the Congress

At the opening of the Congress a Welcome to Country was performed by the Nunukul Yuggera Aboriginal Dancers. When people visit Australia and a particular area of the country, it is custom in Aboriginal culture to welcome people to be part of the tribal land. It is also part of the custom that this welcome be performed by elders or descendents from that part of the country.

Academic Program

Conference theme, Fear and Safety in Children's Literature, was intended to encapsulate how children's literature responds to anxieties, fears, and desires of the past, present, and future. Since the earliest fairy tales, children's writers have given imaginative interpretation to the darker, riskier side of society, while also offering reassurance, hope, and celebration of the human spirit.

Three keynote speakers explored the theme from different perspectives and each gave outstanding papers which stimulated lively discussion and debate.

Professor Gillian Whitlock's paper entitled "The refugee child: From the archive to the page" drew on her research into the archives of asylum seeker letters, photographs, and artifacts sent from Nauru in the course of the Pacific Solution 2002-2007. Gillian considered the images, narratives, and traces of children in detention in Nauru and their ongoing dehumanisation as asylum seekers and objects of fear in the Australian mass media. She then considered how the presence of refugees and associated issues of immigration and displacement are taken up in contemporary Australian children's fiction.

Professor David Buckingham's paper, entitled "Purity and danger: Rethinking discourses of risk in children's media culture," interrogated the discourses of risk that increasingly characterise discussions of children's encounters with media. He argued that recent discourses have taken on a new urgency in relation to aspects such as obesity, sexualisation, and consumerism. He considered how in the current context, these discourses have also been aligned with a much broader view of childhood as somehow threatened or under attack, typified in the UK by the "toxic childhood" argument.

Professor Mavis Reimer's paper, "On location: the home and the street in recent films about street kids," argued that contemporary texts for and about young people challenge the widespread assumption that children belong at home. She suggested that these texts are creating new authorised sites and practices of childhood. The key texts included: Edet Belzberg's 2001 documentary Children Underground, about a group of homeless children in Bucharest, Siddiq Barmak's 2004 narrative film Osama, based on the true story of a young girl disguised as a boy who seeks to support her widowed mother and grandmother in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and Danny Boyle's and Loveleen Tandan's 2008 blockbuster hit Slumdog Millionaire, about a Mumbai street kid who becomes an unlikely game-show winner.