Working with the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne, Grace Moore is curating a new exhibition, ‘Reading Adventures', that will open to the public on July 16, 2015 in the Noel Shaw Gallery. 'Reading Adventures' will map the development of the adventure story, celebrating both the rise in adventure plots and the aesthetics of the books themselves.
Image: Hazel Armitage, With Lucinda in London The Public School Collection, Special Collections, University of Melbourne Library.
While each of the University’s three children’s collections has strong holdings when it comes to tales of adventure, the Morgan Collection in particular is underpinned by a great love for the genre. Donated in 1954 by a respected English librarian, Frederick Morgan, and his daughter Penelope (also a librarian), the collection preserved over one thousand rare children’s books (today the collection stands at more than 4000) at a time when such volumes were not considered worthy of serious attention. Morgan wrote with great animation and affection of stories by Ballantyne, Kingston and Marryat in a memoir of his boyhood, remarking, ‘What a great period the 19th Century was for the publication of exciting books… Has anything approaching it happened since?’ Certainly, Morgan was right to identify the nineteenth century as the adventure story’s heyday, with tales of pioneers, outdoor escapades, exploration, and sea-faring gaining popularity at this time. His comments also superbly capture the imaginative appeal that adventure stories of the past continue to hold in the present day.
The growth of the British empire broadened the horizons for adventure writers in terms of their settings, while at the same time offering new markets for readers in settler colonies where cultural ties to the ‘mother country’ remained important. The exhibition will examine the adventure narrative’s appeal to the child and also its nostalgic charm to the adult reader. It will distinguish between the tales of colonial derring-do in which the exploits of real-life figures like General Gordon were transposed into fiction, and stories featuring vulnerable child protagonists. Drawing on works like Ethel C. Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) it will consider how the adventure genre empowers the child. It will also pay attention to conventions like the orphan story (in which young people unencumbered by familial ties venture forth to seek their fortunes) and the ‘lost in the wilderness’ formula, which harks back to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and depicts the child thrown upon her or his own resources.
Combining old favourites like Ballantyne and Henty with comparatively neglected works like T.T. Jeans’s On Foreign Service (1911) and Ellen Bosworth’s Shelley and the Bushfire Mystery (1972), 'Reading Adventures' will showcase the versatility of the adventure story genre, whilst revealing its transformation in the twentieth century. The exhibition will consider how these stories promoted appropriate forms of behaviour. Yet it will also explore the glee with which such stories licensed transgression, through thrilling tales like pirate adventures. The display will range from airborne adventures to exploits in the snow, while taking in tales of travel, exploration and chivalry.
