This post features some books which are distinctively Australian in nature, even though I’ve included books by Australian authors in other posts.
Scrambled Egg by Wendy Binks
There must be a strong local market for books featuring Australian native animals. This series is about emus, named things like ‘Crikey’ and ‘Sheila’. The kangaroo is called ‘Bluey’. The storyline is another children’s book about a baby (echidna) losing its mother, then being reunited with the help of kindly others. Children do seem to like these stories, because separation is a constant fear. At the end of the book there’s a double page spread of ‘Interesting Facts’ about the Australian wildlife contained in the story.
Give Me A Home Among The Gumtrees
The story contains the lyrics to the eponymous song by Wally Johnson, illustrated humorously by Ben Wood. This is part of a series of ‘Omnibus Books’ by Scholastic Australia called ‘Great Aussie Yarns’.
A BUSH CHRISTMAS BY C.J. DENNIS
This is another picture book illustrated for the poetry of a well-known Australian poet from last century. The language feels old-fashioned, but it’s a good poem, about a stinking hot Australian Christmas day, where a family on a ranch lament that British Christmas traditions are inappropriate for the local climate. The illustrations in this edition are typical of Australian picture books (and art) in that the colours are very bright. Perhaps the reference photos had been saturated somewhat. (This would certainly be one thing an artist might do in their workflow if creating Australian art. Then again, the light is so harsh down here that it’s hardly necessary.) The artwork fades to monochrome when the old man relates tales of a traditional Christmas back Home. This seems to be a widely used and effective technique for making a visual distinction between the present story versus imagination or memory. The black and white also serves to give the eye a break from brightly coloured pages.
Billabong Bertie The Bunyip by Josephine Barrymore
A collection of Australian animals go out looking for a bunyip, which hasn’t been seen since 1930. The animals are called names such as Tangles (emu), Kip, Smokey and Buttons (kookaburras). There’s also Kooka and Squawk and Boomer etc. Anyway, they find the bunyip and are so surprised they fall out of their tree, from where they have been searching the landscape with binoculars. They fall into some water, and koalas can’t swim, so something comes to save them in a boat. It’s the bunyip.
They have tea around a campfire that night and yarn. They must leave Bertie the Bunyip and head back home, but they promise to return next year.
There’s a technical problem with some pages of this book: all the text is black, but when overlaid on a dark background the text is hard to read.
And I don’t know what it is – I do not like onomatopoeic, formulaic titles that go something like:
- Suzy the Samurai Sailor
- Tony the Tomboy Tranny
- Willy the Wonky Wag-a-lot
I don’t know why I’m so skeptical of books titled like this; perhaps it’s because these titles are so easy to parody.
A Home For Bilby by Joanne Crawford
With a cast of uniquely Australian wildlife, the bilby has lost his family for some reason, and is looking for a new home. The other animals tell him where they live, but explain that it’s no place for a bilby. Eventually he finds his own spot under a bush and all is well again. Illustrated by Grace Fielding, the art has aboriginal influence.
SILLY GALAH BY JANEEN BRIAN
The galah is an Australian bird with pink feathers and for some reason ‘galah’ is also used as a jovial insult as in, ‘you great galah’ or ‘silly galah’. (I suspect they’re actually very intelligent birds.)
There’s a design problem with this book: Black text on dark, speckled background makes it hard to read at times. The typesetter (or someone) has also decided to weave the words around the borders of pages, which is actually quite a challenge for an accomplished reader, let alone for a young reader whose eyes have not yet adjusted fully to reading from line to line.
This book, like many other Australian books, introduces Australian wildlife. (Echidna, crocodile, magpie, possum…) which is pretty much non-fiction, except their personalities anthropomorphise them somewhat. Even the croc seems a little bit cute.
LOONGIE THE GREEDY CROCODILE by lucy and kiefer dann
I class this as a WTF story. Perhaps something has been lost from the Aboriginal translation, or maybe I’m just hoping for more. A crocodile goes hunting in the mangroves and breaks all his teeth on longbum snails, who have slid back into their very hard shells.
Hmm. Somehow I don’t think that’d ever happen. Do picture books sometimes cutify dangerous animals a little too much? Bears is one thing. Crocs is another.
MY AUSSIE MUM BY YVONNE MORRISON
This is a book which celebrates a family member – Mum, of course – and in this case there is an attempt to depict your typical Aussie mum, which always strikes me as problematic. Why bother, when there’s really no such thing as a typical Australian mother?
The mother in question is a white woman who likes sport (an Aussie battler), eats pies with tomato sauce, watches TV on the couch in her tracky-daks… In other words she’s a bit of a bogan, and any story which makes full use of distinctively Australian phrases is going to come across as overly patriotic and slightly disturbing. To counter the idea that all mothers are the same, at the end of the book we have a line-up of mothers of varying heights, shapes, skin-tones and eye-shapes, to avoid accusations of Anglo-normative ideals.
There are things that Australians like to believe about themselves, and this book reinforces those ideas, regardless of their applicability in the real world.
IN YOUR DREAMS BY SALLY MORGAN
This book is Aboriginal in its feel, with black silhouettes as characters, and illustrations by Bronwyn Bancroft which have been influenced by Aboriginal style. Although dreaming and its significance is writ large in Aboriginal cultures, this story is not specifically an Aboriginal one, in that it could apply to any kid who attends school. It’s about a little girl who dreams of being an artist. She wins a local art prize despite self-doubt, which leads to a message which says you should always follow your dreams because they just might happen.
ADVANCE AUSTRALIA FAIR COMPOSED BY PETER DODDS MCCORMICK
You may be forgiven for thinking that Waltzing Matilda is Australia’s National Anthem, but no, they’ve got an official one which doesn’t involve the theft of livestock and a suicide by drowning. It’s called ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and in this picture book the anthem is accompanied by well-known Australian fine art which have been juxtaposed with appropriate lines, with their significance explained in small text.
This is a picture book, but it’s one of the rare picture books which is probably designed more for an adult audience.
If you’ve never heard the Australian national anthem in your life, you can listen to it here. My favourite bit is when you have to sing the word ‘girt’, which is useful in no other context I can think of. Still, all children should know it, right?
In 2001, Australian Labor Party politician Craig Emerson criticised the archaic word “girt” in the national anthem’s lyrics by saying, “This must rank as one of the worst lines of any national anthem.
- Wikipedia
A GIRAFFE IN THE BATH BY MEM FOX AND OLIVIA RAWSON
This picture book features Australian animals in the illustrations, such as kookaburras and koalas, but isn’t specifically Australian – it also stars a giraffe, for instance.
Although giraffes are native to Africa, I don’t really consider that when I see them in picture books – probably because they’re so well known. I wonder if when non-Australian readers see koalas and kangaroos if they think of a story set specifically in Australia, or if in fact these animals are picture book staples, and evoke no particular setting at all.
Anyway, this book plays with humour specific to a particular age group (K2), in which putting things where they should not be results in much hilarity. The illustrations are humorous; I especially like the roo on the loo.
In the end, the reader is encouraged to go back to the beginning of the book and read again, which feels a bit like a cheat ending to me, though I’m sure a child would love to revisit this one, over and over.
MY GRANDAD MARCHES ON ANZAC DAY BY CATRIONA HOY
I wasn’t expecting to be at all moved by this book, but I was! I’m a bit lazy these days and rarely get up at cock shout to drive into town for the annual ANZAC parade, but I have been to enough commemorations to know the atmosphere and I really feel it emanating out of this story in droves. It’s very well done.
KANGAROO’S CANCAN CAFE BY JULIA JARMAN
This one is also very well done, and is different from most Australian picture books in that it’s not created by an Australian, but rather by a writer who visited Australia.
This book’s illustrator – Lynne Chapman – is also British (I think) and I wonder if she has visited Australia herself, because her brightly coloured pastel drawings seem to reflect that kind of brightness that you only ever get in Australia (and which you only notice after coming back from, say, England!) It’s the kind of brightness where you can’t really be outside without sunglasses on.
The characters in this book are pretty standard for a book set in Australia – you’ve got all the most common Australian animals as cast – but the story is original and could have been about any animals anywhere. Actually, I think that’s a great thing. There are already plenty of books which aim to teach readers about the lifestyle and habitat of Australian wildlife, not to mention the efforts of Bindi Irwin and her mother.
ARE WE THERE YET? BY ALISON LESTER
There’s nothing in this book’s title to suggest it might be a non-fiction sort of account of a camping trip around Australia, but the Aboriginal-inspired artwork on the front cover removes any doubts about that.
After reading this book I wanted to get into a campervan and drive around Australia, and I’m sure children reading this could feel the excitement too.
THE THIRSTY FLOWERS BY TONY WILSON
When I picked up this book I didn’t realise it was Australian, which is refreshing because usually the Aboriginal decoration or pictures of native animals on the front cover give it away. But I worked it out on about the second page, because it’s just so Aussie. Which is a good thing. It feels familiar. The drought feels familiar. The beer chugging character who forgets to water his plants is familiar. The plants themselves are familiar.
This is kind of like Day of the Triffids for the little ones, in that the plants decide to uproot themselves and walk next door on their spindly little roots. Next door, they get watered every day.
I was reminded of the classic Wizard of Oz film when the reader first sees the new garden – that page is decorated with glitter, which would make a young reader pretty impressed.
REDBACK ON THE TOILET SEAT BY SLIM NEWTON
A particularly Australian concern, this one.
This book is a picture representation of the song, which anyone might think (from believing the Internet) had been written and performed by Slim Dusty, the more famous ‘Slim’. Some keener on YouTube has even brought Slim Dusty to life using some sort of 3D animation software, and put it to this song. The result is pretty creepy, though strangely compelling:
But from what I can gather, this song was not written by Slim Dusty at all – this song belongs firmly to Slim Newton, born Ralph Ernest Newton in Perth, 1932. So let’s just get that straight. The phrase ‘one-hit wonder’ springs to mind, but let’s give the man credit where credit’s due!
Oh, and you might check out the Wikipedia entry for ‘Toilet-related Injuries and Deaths‘. Ain’t Wikipedia great?
Not for the faint-hearted.
