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The fact is that until the middle '50s, only about 7% of Queenslanders went on to
secondary school. The rule was that you could leave school either at 14, or when you
had 'done the Scholarship', which in the case of clever children could be as early as
12. So one aim of the Readers was to ensure that the 93% of Queenslanders who
would leave school somewhere between 12 and 14 were introduced to the literary
culture in its widest and richest form, to folk and fairy tales from every part of
Europe, to Greek myths, Aesop's Fables, tales from the Arabian Nights and from
Cervantes and Turgenev and Tolstoi and Hans Andersen, to the whole range of
English and American poetry and fiction, and the best of what was local; about onefifth
of the poems and prose pieces were Australian.
...
Added so long after the other six, in a decade, after the First World War, with a
very different ethos and mood, the Seventh Grade Reader is a fascinating indication
of what was thought necessary in the way of reading, but also of attitude, to 13 and
14-year-olds who were going out into a world that was already sliding towards a
second round of war. Shakespeare, Milton's 'L'Allegro', Gray's 'Elegy', 'The Ancient
Mariner', two extended character sketches from 'The Deserted Village', some wellknown
and not so well-known Australian pieces, including Kendall's 'Bellbirds' and
'September in Australia', but also 'The Nation Builders' and 'The Women of the West'
by George Essex Evans, a Queenslander. The long prose extracts are from Bunyan,
Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, 'Lorna Doone, Bulwer Lytton's 'The Last Days of
Pompeii' and Charles Reade's 'The Cloister and the Hearth' – regular Victorian fare -
but include as well several pieces, democratic and even socialist in temper, on the
Dignity of Labour, 'What is War?' the Anzacs at Gallipoli, the League of Nations, the
founding of New England, John Brown, and Emerson on Abraham Lincoln. (Kitson
& Malouf, 1999, n.p.)
A final reason the Readers are included for analysis becomes especially important in the first
era, Prior to and after WWI. Due to the relative scarcity of History textbooks across the range
of years that this era encompasses, and the availability of the Readers, this forms a pragmatic
reason to include them for analysis. Only narratives, poems and illustrations that directly
connect to British heritages within Australian history are included for analysis. For example,
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