Stories Left Behind: How Australian Children’s Literature Remembers Japanese Wartime Internment
Abstract
Rebecca Hausler’s research examines how Australian children’s literature represents Japanese detainees during WWII, revealing a surprisingly rich but critically overlooked body of work. While stories of child displacement are well established in British and North American traditions, Australian narratives addressing Japanese internment have received limited scholarly attention. These texts offer young readers accessible yet nuanced engagements with Australia and Japan’s shared wartime history, highlighting the experiences of Japanese Australian communities and signalling valuable opportunities for translation, recognition, and remembrance.
About the speaker
Rebecca Hausler works in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Queensland. Her research examines literary representations of the Cowra Breakout and Japanese wartime detainees in Australia. Recent publications include Japan in Australia (2020), Border‑crossing Japanese Literature (2023), and the forthcoming Reading as Cultural Dialogue.
About Studies in Culture, and Translation & Interpreting Research Joint Seminars
Studies in Culture
Through the scholarly analysis of many different kinds of cultural products, texts and phenomena, Studies in Culture brings together researchers who seek to understand how the world is understood differently by people coming from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Researchers in this cluster work on literature, film, music, theatre, the visual arts, intangible heritage, testimonies and historical narratives.
Research in Studies in Culture within the School centres around four broad sub-themes of Heritage, memory and trauma studies; Intellectual and cultural history; Literature; and Film and visual cultures.
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Translation & Interpreting
Translation and Interpreting (T&I) is a rapidly developing multidisciplinary area of research. The school’s translation and interpreting research activities cover two main streams: applied research relating to translation and interpreting practice, pedagogy and the T&I industry, and theoretical approaches to translation in the areas of literature, cultural studies and philosophy.
To view more on the research and interests of the Translation & Interpreting Cluster, please click here.
