The
contribution of Olga Dorothea Agnes Ernst (1888–1972), the Melbourne-born
daughter of a German emigrant, to Australian children’s literature was the
establishment of distinctive Australian environs in her fairy tales and
children’s songs. Similarly the backdrop in some of her adult fables locates
them firmly in an Australian setting. Ernst, a bilingual writer, influenced by
her German-Australian heritage offered an Australian identity in her works that
challenged the strong British influence that presented Australia to children
from an British perspective.
Characterisation
and plot reveal the German/Lutheran values of her childhood and the influence
of her vocation of education. Ernst actively promoted an Australian identity
that centred on geographical and botanical settings. By placing Ernst as one of
our early bilingual children’s writers of fairy tales, this thesis will argue
that she challenged the British ideology of earlier Australian fairy tales and
was part of an Australian fairy tale movement that encouraged the development
of an authentic Australian ‘voice’ in fantasy in the late 1880s and early
1900s. Influenced by her relationship with artist William Ricketts and his
personal understanding of Indigenous spirituality, I argue that as Ernst’s
writing evolved, and she matured from girlhood to young academic, teacher and
mother, the German-essence of her first book diminishes. Nevertheless, all her
works advance her championing of a particular Australian identity through a
scientifically accurate, and poetically descriptive portrayal of the Australian
environment.
While this
thesis is not a biography it does, however, examine the relationship between
Ernst’s childhood experiences within the Melbourne-German Community, her
teaching career, church life and community service in order to acknowledge, and
examine their influence on her writing. Poverty and gender did not restrict
Ernst’s ambitions, and she became a Head Teacher—one of the first primary teachers in
Victoria to be appointed to a Higher Elementary School—achieved a Master of Arts degree, and
actively self-published and promoted her last work, reprinting it three times.
A close
analysis of Ernst’s works allows a focus on the fashioning of her stories to
reflect the German cultural, social and linguistic context of her early life,
and a later shaping to create an Australian identity. Ernst’s influence on
Australian children’s literature will be examined in terms of the
contemporaneous response to her work in newspaper reviews and personal
correspondence, and its geographical distribution.
The
central argument of my thesis is that the concept of ‘Australian national
identity’ is presented to readers from Ernst’s perspective as a woman, a
teacher, and a staunch Christian,
who was of German, and Australian, rather than of British heritage. Ernst
constructed a pedagogical fantasy world that instructed its child readers with
an unashamed sense of pride in Australia, and for later writers offered a
bridge between the traditional literary fairy tales of Europe, and the writing
of authentic Australian fantasy. I also contend that Ernst’s later
works reflected the developing concept of
her particular perception of Australian nationhood by presenting the bush as
the ‘authentic’ backdrop for narratives and poetry for Australian children.