Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s new fantasy novel for primary students, Billy and the Epic Escape, features a First Nations character.
As The Guardian reports, it features a “young First Nations girl living in foster care in an Indigenous community near Alice Springs who gets abducted by the novel’s villain”.
The book was published without consultation with any Indigenous individual or community and has been met with condemnation from Indigenous groups. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation says it contributes to the “erasure, trivialisation, and stereotyping of First Nations people’s and experience”.
