Those of you with fond memories of the Victorian
Readers from your school days, and others yet to
experience their delights, will welcome this re-
issue of the complete set.
The eight books - one for each of the grades that then comprised the primary school - were first published by the Victorian Education Department between 1928 and
1930. Second editions of all but the First Book, with a few changes in content, appeared some ten years later.
Beginning in the 1950s, new Departmental publica-?a tions gradually replaced the old books with the excep-
tion of the Fifth and Sixth Books, which survived until the late 1960s, when commercially-produced reading material finally took over in schools. Thus these two latter books were in use, virtually unchanged, for some forty years
- long enough for three generations of children to have been exposed to their influence.
And what of their contents? The young readers would have found material that depicted a society of well-defined social and cultural patterns: a country proud of its achievements and optimistic of its future, firmly linked
unashamedly nationalistic - one-quarter of the contents was
required to be Australian - and with a clearly-enunciated morality.
The contributors included most of the major British and Australian writers, together with many American and European authors. Interestingly, the maiority of these were not writing specincally for children, so that the students were inducted early into the wide world of literature. It was material, diverse in style and complex in language, that called for imagina-tive, emotional and intellectual responses of considerable maturity.
Read for yourselves, and become acquainted, or re-acquainted, with the hobyahs, creep creep creeping out from their gloomy gullies - one of many penal stories in the Second Book: with "Clancy gone a-droving down the Cooper", with the elegantly crafted Our New Neighbours. Given material of such calibre, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that those children whose curriculum included the Victorian Readers were indeed fortunate.
Kelvin Edwards