Volume 34 Nº 3 - November 1998

Cultural Homogenisation Australian Education

Edel Wignell

Russ MacMath and Maureen Nimon's article, "Translated into American" (Orana November 1997), described some examples of revision when Australian trade fiction for children and young adults is reprinted in the United States. While education publishing is not the main field of interest for Orana readers, I believe that the overall picture of revision and censorship of Australian texts is not fully understood unless it is taken into consideration. Do librarians, teachers and parents know that an increasing number of classroom reader series have been approved in the US before being published in Australia? The practice is an example of cultural homogenisation as descibed by MacMath and Nimon.

As imprint pages do not always indicate that Australian publishers are co-publishing in the US, school buyers may not know that Australian children will be reading a US approved (probably revised) version of an Australian writer's story. Only publishers and individual writers know that some stories were approved in Australia but abandoned because of US lack of approval. ...

Edel Wignell has fifty children's titles in both trade and education. Her most recent education titles are The Ghost Wagon Mystery and The Look-alikes (Macmillian), The Midnight Monster (Era), Hands Up! (Addison Wesley Longman) and The Mighty Sparrow (Waterford, USA)