‘Ridiculous’: Australian authors weigh in on debate over language changes

Australian children’s author Gabrielle Wang grew up reading mostly British books and later read Roald Dahl to her children. “I love Roald Dahl books,” says Wang, who last year was named Australian Children’s Laureate, a two-year role to promote the transformational power of reading in the lives of young Australians.

‘When I grew up everything was geared towards the British’: Gabrielle Wang.Credit:Simon Schluter

“But when I grew up everything was geared towards the British. There were no books where an Australian-born Chinese girl like me was the hero of her own story.”

The British publisher of Dahl’s books has recently removed words from them that relate to race, gender, weight and mental health and are today considered offensive.

The “brutal-looking” Terrible Tractors in Fantastic Mr Fox are no longer black. Nor is Miss Spider’s “large murderous-looking head” in James and the Giant Peach. The worm in the same book now has “lovely smooth skin” instead of “lovely pink skin”. In Matilda the lead character now reads Jane Austen instead of Rudyard Kipling, who has been criticised for “racist and imperialist sentiments”. And the Oompa Loompas – who already had a makeover in 1973 when they became rosy-white-skinned residents of Loompaland rather than pygmies from Africa – are now gender-neutral.

Wang thinks the changes are ridiculous. “Yes, there are certain elements in the books that are not PC [politically correct] today,” she says. “But books are written in certain time capsules. This gives people the opportunity to have a discussion about it.”

The bowdlerising of Dahl’s books is the latest contretemps in the debate about how to challenge gender and race stereotypes in popular culture. Rather than rewriting Dahl, Wang believes inclusion and diversity are better championed by promoting the work of contemporary authors.

“Books with diverse protagonists, written by diverse authors, are essential in order to eliminate racism, which we do have in this country unfortunately, and grow empathy.”

Growing up on a diet of Britishness – including English books where “foreigners” were often the bad guys or providers of comic relief – led to Wang rejecting her own cultural identity.

Like Wang, Edith Cowan University senior lecturer Dr Helen Adam believes the latest changes to Dahl’s work were unnecessary. But once again, she says, all the focus is on a “dead white guy”.

“Leave the classic writers alone, their books are classic for a reason,” says Adam, whose research looks at children’s literature and principles of diversity and social justice.

“But if we’re giving the platform to this talk about the importance of children’s books, we need to shift it to the importance of today’s books for today’s children.”

In 2021, Adam was the lead researcher on a study of the children’s book preferences of 82 trainee teachers at a Western Australian university.

The study found the trainee teachers preferred older books published during their own childhood or earlier. Only 4.5 per cent of the 177 books listed portrayed people of colour.

The top 10 books – nominated by at least a third of the trainee teachers – were all at least 25 years old at the time of the survey.

These included Dahl’s Matilda, Possum Magic by Mem Fox, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Dr Seuss books and We’re going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen.

“They are all fantastic, wonderful books, but there is no representation of diversity in those books and the stories are reflecting last century,” Adam says.

“If that’s all teachers and parents are choosing, then we are denying today’s children the chance to see their lives and their worlds reflected in children’s books.”

Adam has no issue with classic children’s books such as Dahl’s being read in homes and schools.

But she would also like to see a focus on contemporary authors such as Maxine Beneba-Clarke, Indigenous author Jasmine Seymour, young adult writer Ambelin Kwaymullina, Scott Stuart, whose books such as My Shadow is Pink explore gender identity, and AFL football player Nic Naitanui.

“The Australian children’s picture book industry is amazing – we have got the most talented writers,” Adam says. “If we can hear the voices of those that are different to ourselves in our stories that’s how we become a more inclusive and just society.”

Chair of the Children’s Book Council of Australia Wendy Rapee argues young readers are discerning and that when a child reads a book “it will either sit right or jar”: they simply won’t continue reading the latter. The titles featured on the CBCA’s just-released Notables list for 2023 reflect contemporary issues including the environment, mental health, family and its complexity. “Those sorts of things are showing up now in the writing for young people today, so that they recognise themselves, and they’re becoming more empathetic.”

Dahl is not the only writer to incur the wrath of the sensitivity writer’s red pen. Numerous changes have been made over the years to the work of English children’s author Enid Blyton, who has been criticised for her racist, sexist and homophobic views.

The golliwogs have been replaced by goblins. Cousins Dick and Fanny from The Magic Faraway Tree have become cousins Rick and Franny. Adults scold rather than threaten to slap and “queer” has become “odd”.

Australian children’s author John Marsden believes this revisionism of texts is all part of the condescending way that we think about young people: “It’s an insulting attitude to believe that children will be so easily brainwashed.”

‘It’s an insulting attitude to believe that children will be so easily brainwashed’: John Marsden.Credit:Simon O’Dwyer

Marsden says that when children read a Blyton book of the 1950s where the village policeman is overweight and idiotic they understand that this is a different world that she’s writing in and writing about. “We don’t recognise that they … read books understanding that there’s a different context for different books,” he says. “It doesn’t automatically follow that everything you read in a book published years ago will then change your thinking and your values.”

In 2021, Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company to “bring some of the world’s most loved stories to current and future fans in creative new ways”. “There is a moment in James and the Giant Peach when the Ladybird says ‘We are now about to visit the most marvellous places and see the most wonderful things!’,” the press release says. “The Centipede replies, ‘there is no knowing what we shall see!’”

Michelle Smith, senior lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University.Credit:Simon Schluter

Some have suggested that what Netflix did see was a need to avoid controversy as it continues to adapt the books for the big screen. (The Guardian reported that the Roald Dahl Story Company said the review of the texts started before the acquisition.)

“Within children’s and young adult literature in the past five or 10 years, there’s been a huge push towards books being more diverse and a lot of this pressure has come from young readers themselves on social media,” says Michelle Smith, a senior lecturer in literary studies at Monash University.

“This movement has led to some books being cancelled or withdrawn from sales.”

Smith says the owners of the copyrights of authors such as Dahl are concerned that kind of phenomenon is going to hit their books. “If they are dealing with works that are signed up in multimillion-dollar deals for adaptation, then of course they are keen to ensure that the Dahl brand is not damaged.”

However, she warns that publisher-led revisions of text will not change outdated values in books, only make it harder to identify them. “One of the arguments from researchers in the children’s literature field is that these changes actually make it harder for children to recognise things that are maybe not appropriate, and it allows the more pernicious messages to go unchecked.”

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example, Augustus Gloop is no longer “fat” but “enormous”.

“Fat might be considered more offensive than enormous, but there’s still two pages of Oompa Loompas singing about how repulsive this child is,” Smith says. “So ultimately, is the message that being larger is bad still there? I think that’s the bigger question of what is achieved by changing isolated words like that.”

All the fulminating about “woke wastrels” from English TV personality Piers Morgan and “absurd censorship” from Salman Rushdie and even British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreeing with the BFG that “we shouldn’t gobblefunk around with words” has done the Roald Dahl Story Company no harm.

Sales of Roald Dahl’s books soared after Australians rushed to buy copies before the revised editions are released – late last month a 16-book box set had risen to number two on Amazon’s Australian bestseller list.

Meanwhile, Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, have announced they will publish a “Classic Collection” of Roald Dahl’s books with unaltered text alongside the new tweaked versions.

Children’s book author Rebecca Lim says that uptick in sales is gold for the publisher.

Author Rebecca Lim, whose book The Tiger Daughter will be released in the United States in August.Credit:Justin McManus

“This may sound cynical, but if the cash cow is still giving, the novels are then looked at every few years to make sure there’s nothing in them that will offend the children of today.”

The Australian market is still very small in comparison to the rest of the English-speaking publishing world and is largely dictated to by trends in North America and Britain. Lim points out there’s only a tiny slice of that global shelf space for Australian authors, and publishers still default to the people who are perceived as the easy-to-sell, big name, big print run authors.

“People who are emerging, First Nations, living with disability or LGBTQI, people who are migrants or refugees, if there is a perceived ‘less saleable’ voice, or more time is needed to bring those voices to market, publishers will not largely take a risk on them,” she says. “We’ve got to de-colonialise the way we think about publishing, selling and writing books in this country. We need to take more ‘risks’ … or we will lose readers who don’t see books as being for or about them to other media.

“To find a publisher, to find a space on the shelves, is hard enough for a non-disadvantaged person. But for a creator who is marginalised, getting published is almost like winning the lottery, it really is.”

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