Christine Nicholls

Making sense of the randomness of human existence, stories present an adult perspective as to how best we can conduct ourselves. Nearly all children’s books carry the message that society must be accommodated and that there is a way of behaving that will allow that to happen. These seven picture books tell a story and supply visual images to reinforce the telling. (Bruce Whatley’s is slightly different, a lesson in natural history that follows a successful hatchling to its adult destination.) In four of them, the pictures are expressionistic revelations of the emotions informing the text. The other three present a more complex visual vocabulary, from the dark painterly scenes of Whatley’s Galapagos to the stark childish representations of the two Dreaming narratives.

A relatively unusual occurrence until recently, the publication of a plethora of new Australian Aboriginal-authored and/or Aboriginal-themed children’s books has begun transforming the Australian publishing landscape. A number of these books, like Rhoda Lalara and Alfred Lalara’s charmingly evocative Yirruwa Yirrilikenuma-langwa (When We Go Walkabout: Allen & Unwin, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781743314562), are rendered bilingually, in the latter case in Anindilyakwa, the mother tongue of the majority of Groote Eylandt residents, as well as in English.