Diversity in children's literature

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47883118?ocid=socialflow_twitter&n
Author Sharna Jackson: Bringing diversity into children's books - BBC News


 Diversity in children's literature is essential and there is an increasing awareness of this so it was good to be sent the link from the BBC news in which Sharna Jackson talks about this. I don't know if the above link will work but that's the article on the BBC website.
And of course it made me think about diversity in children's literature here.  I went looking for BAME (black and minority ethnic) background books here. I know there are some because I have occasionally managed to buy suitable picture books for younger children...occasionally. 
When I was a mere kitten we lived for a while in a very remote area. The school house was on the edge of the "town". (The "town" was a big place by local standards. There were seventeen houses in it.) We were surrounded by "the bush". Out there it is mostly low, sparse scrub. The trees are spindly and never grow to more than about four metres in height. It is dry country, very dry. The ochre to red dust which blows in from the desert covers everything. It is as if the very earth itself is on fire.
My siblings and I spent most of our time out of doors. Somehow we avoided being bitten by the highly poisonous black snakes and the equally poisonous spiders. We built "cubbies" in the bush and we were shown how to make the local indigenous equivalent.
We were shown because there was a very old indigenous man who lived alone not far from the school. Even looking back I genuinely remember him as very old. He moved slowly, very slowly. He lived in what is called a "wurlie" in the local indigenous language. It was a construction of bark and wattle and daub, a single room which was nothing more than a shelter from the weather.  He cooked outside. Once a week he went to the hotel and had a shower. The rest of the time he made do with water from the tap at the "oval" on which football and cricket were played.
Of course we children were not supposed to go anywhere near him. Our mother was horrified by the idea.
But we did. He was absolutely harmless. We loved to visit him - at the right times. We knew to wait until he had finished what he needed to do for the day. If he was just sitting there outside the wurlie - on the log that served as his seat - we could approach him. He would chat for a bit and then shoo us off. And sometimes, just sometimes, he would tell us a story.
    "You be quiet now and I'll tell you about the Big Goanna Man..."
or, "You be quiet now and I'll tell you about how that little bird there came to be..."
I don't remember the stories now.  I wish I did. I wish desperately that I'd had the capacity to record them in some way. At the same time I know that this old man would not have welcomed the idea. We were told the stories because we were children. He was teaching us another way of seeing the world, of how the world came to be. He was teaching  us about his version of creation, of fire and wind, sky and earth. He taught all of us to look at the world so that I still see the different patterns of bark on the trees and the way that  the leaves hang as stories. I look on red feathers as drops of blood and quandongs (a sort of tiny wild peach) will always be sour even if they are covered in honey from the wild bees. 
Diversity, and acceptance of diversity, can grow out of that sort of experience. 
I am much less sure about books like Sally Morgan's "My Place". It is a book which has been much lauded. It is a book which has been required reading in many schools but it is a deeply flawed book. Much of what has been written there and has been accepted as fact is not fact but a convenient fiction. The verifiable facts simply don't support it. Morgan has avoided responding to requests to produce evidence to support her story. 
Perhaps that is part of the problem. If people are to write about diversity and the experience of diversity it needs to be the actual experience, not the politically correct experience. I am reminded of a child I once taught. The school had simply shortened his very long Greek surname to something which felt it could be managed - a mere four letters instead of  twenty-four. I used his full name and years later he told me, "I knew then that you were going to treat me as a person, not just part of a person." 
There's a story in that. Morgan has given people something to think about but I think the real experience may lie in small acts of respect and disrespect.  It's time to write about that too.