«Help make the world a better place to live in». Young people as redemptive conscience in Australian books for young adults

The redemptive child has long been a character in literature – both adult’s and children’s – and is widely used, for example, by the Evangelical movement of the nineteenth century. The representation of the redemptive child is an adult construct and books which used such a representation were very much designed to urge the young reader to emulate that construct. In order to discuss the different ways in which the trope has been depicted (e.g. children as the redemptive force of the world and of the corrupted ideology of adults, as the inheritors of the earth, the guardians of the environment, the keepers of ‘true’ values etc.), the Author analyses a range of selected Australian novels for young readers, particularly in the last half of the twentieth century.