Five Australian Illustrators

I've been thinking about illustrators of children's books. I blame my work. One of the perks of my job at the National Library of Australia is that I have an opportunity to meet and listen to the greats of Australian writing, publishing and research. Recently, it was illustrator Robert Ingpen AM who, in 1986, received the Hans Christian Anderson Award for Illustration for his 'lasting contribution to children's literature'.

Over the past decade, Robert's work has focused on creating new illustrations for a collection of Children's Classics, published by Palazzo Editions. He has created new images for Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, A Christmas Carol, The Jungle Book, and The Secret Garden. The National Library has published a new book, Wonderlands: The Illustration Art of Robert Ingpen, which celebrates this work. During the conversation, though, Robert was asked why new illustrations were needed. Surely, the questioner asked, if new words weren't needed, the original images would be fine too?

It's Robert's reply that has kept me thinking. In a world full of colour, where children live on screens, the old line drawings of earlier days don't cut the mustard (I'm paraphrasing). And perhaps more importantly, he described his job as finding spaces in his illustrations for children's imaginations to occupy. Isn't that perfect? He isn't looking to supply the imaginative world of the book so much as to inspire the imaginative worlds of young readers.

This idea of illustrators creating doorways into the imagination has kept me thinking. I've been thinking about the illustrators whose work I love to look at and whose work I love reading aloud. So I thought I'd share with you five books b y Australian illustrators who have inspired reading and imagination in my house.

Jeannie Baker

Jeannie Baker's Belonging, published in 2004, is a book without words. It tells the story of an inner city suburb, transformed by it's community from an industrial wasteland into a vibrant environment. And it tells the story of a little girl who grows into adulthood in this urban space. Lacking words, the readers are free to follow whatever storytelling path they choose. Sometimes we followed the girl's story. Others, we looked at the changes happening outside the window that frames each illustration. And the illustrations are something to behold, each an elaborate, detailed collage. They provide another way to engage with the book, working out what materials were used to create the hammock, the pond or the paving stones.

Graeme Base

Another illustrator who creates wonderfully intricate images is Graeme Base. This image is from his counting book, The Waterhole (published 2001). More than a counting book, The Waterhole is a book about animals, environment and climate. Like Belonging, there is more going on here than the words on the page suggest. Graeme Base's books are like that. As an author-illustrator, he has created puzzle books that have defied my puzzle-solving abilities. But even when I can't solve the puzzle, I love the illustrations. My photograph doesn't do justice to his work but it gives you a hint of Graeme's sense of humour. Can you spot the anthropomorphised frogs in a work that is otherwise highly accurate? Those frogs travel around the world with you. Maybe they are you?

Freya Blackwood

Here's a fun fact - Freya Blackwood worked on special effects for The Lord of the Rings trilogy! Her illustrations are a long way, though, from the world of the Hobbits. They are gorgeous evocations of childhood, sometimes in what looks like watercolours, sometimes pastels. Freya Blackwood has created the images for some of our best writers of children's books, including Margaret Wild and Jan Ormerod, but she seems to have formed a beautiful partnership with Libby Gleeson. This illustration is from Amy and Louis (published in 2006), a beautiful story about friendship and losing a friend. It tackles a very common experience - what happens when your best friend moves away - but I think it is also a perfect book for starting to talk to a small person about death. Freya has also illustrated Libby's Clancy and Millie and the Very Fine House, which will make you want to build a box city.

Nick Bland

How I love Nick Bland's The Wrong Book (2009). I love Nicholas Ickle who desperately wants to tell us a story but whose storytelling is constantly interrupted by a parade of characters that young readers may recognise from other books. There's a dinosaur, a queen, a marionette puppet who looks remarkably like Pinocchio, and rats ... lots of rats. Bland is an author/illustrator who lives in Darwin but his books don't (yet) reflect that part of the world. He's perhaps most loved for The Very Cranky Bear, a character who seems to have taken on a life of his own and who now appears in a number of Bland's books. But Nicholas Ickle is my favourite. Who can resist that little face, his frustration, his dejection? It's a wonderful book to read aloud - especially as young listeners will try to beat you to the punchline.

Judy Horacek

If I'd been planning my blogs, I might have only talked about illustrators whose last names began with 'B', saving the letter 'H' for a later post. But I chose on the basis of love and Judy Horacek's classic, with text by Mem Fox, is dear to my heart. Where is the Green Sheep? was published in the same year my boy was born and we began reading it almost immediately. The story goes that Mem was inspired by Judy's drawing of a sheep. Until that time, Judy was known as a cartoonist. Where is the Green Sheep? has lead to a new career in children's books, as an author and as an illustrator, and as a collaborator with Mem Fox. This is my favourite image from Where is the Green Sheep? It reminds me of Singin' in the Rain, a movie that is also very dear to me. And that's the beauty of this book: as carefully chosen as the words are, Judy's illustrations give you so much to explore and share with your little one. There's a reason why it is much-loved and in print 12 years after publication.

Revisiting Little Women

Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott
Angus & Robertson Ltd, Sydney, 1934

Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott was the book of my early childhood. I can't remember a time when it was not part of my life. Before I started school, my older sister had read the story to me and I'm sure we all watched the MGM movie starring June Allyson as Jo and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy on many a Sunday afternoon.

Part of my fascination was no doubt due to being one of four sisters (like Louisa Alcott herself) - and having a brother coincidentally named Laurie. In my imagining, I was Amy. Jo was too boyish, Beth far too sickly and good, and Meg was boring. Who wouldn't want to be Amy with her golden curls and pretty nose that she helped to shape with the use of a peg? Looking back now there was another similarity too, one that I doubt I was conscious of. A couple of months before my 4th birthday, my father died suddenly. Like the March girls, I was growing up in a fatherless household.

The inscription by Ina Reynolds

But Little Women goes back further in my family story. In 1934, my mother was a pretty child with long ringlets created by curling her hair around rags each night. And, despite being a minister's daughter, she was desperate to go on the stage. She begged and begged her parents to allow her to take lessons and, although the country was in the grip of a depression and her father's income as a Church of Christ minister was meagre, somehow they found the money to allow her to follow her dream. So each week, little Joy walked up Frederick Street, Bexley to the top of the hill. She carried two shillings in her hand, payment for her elocution teacher, Ina Reynolds. When Mum was not quite 10-years-old, she was given a copy of Little Women by her elocution teacher. The gift, presented on 19 April 1934, was inscribed 'with many thanks for the help of both mother and yourself in Concert work ...'.

I'm the custodian of this family treasure. Published in early 1934 by Angus and Robertson, the blue cloth-covered edition features stills from the 1933 RKO Radio Pictures movie starring Katherine Hepburn as Jo and Joan Bennett as Amy. How I coveted this book! What a treat it was to be allowed to gently open it and look at the photographs.

Over the past week or so, I've done more than look at the photographs. It must be close to 40 years since I read the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy - although it is so embedded in my memory that I can still score 89% on the New York Public Library quiz, Little Women: Which March Sister Said It?

And here's the thing - for the first few chapters, I regretted ever going back to it. Those girls, at the start of book anyway, are such whiners: we're so poor; it's not fair; why did father have to lose all his money?

'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.'

They drove me crazy. No wonder they were given copies of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to inspire them to be better! I nearly stop reading to avoid having damage done to my childhood memory. But it is Marmee, Mrs March who turns the book around for me. Marmee, who was completely forgettable in all my earlier readings. She was barely a presence and, when she was, she was mostly offering a lesson in how to behave. But listen to her speaking to Jo:

You think your temper is the worst in the world; but mine used to be just like it ... I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.

Katharine Hepburn as Jo and
Joan Bennett as Amy - a still from the
RKO Radio Pictures movie

Marmee angry? Nearly every day of her life? Suddenly, I am aware of all the anger that sits beneath the surface of this seemingly gentle book for girls. Time and time again, Marmee leaves the room with her lips tightly compressed. It is wild fury that leads Amy to burn Jo's manuscript, and it is Jo's anger that almost leads to Amy drowning. Aunt March is cranky with the world - although perhaps she has a right to be, having buried a daughter and a husband. Old Mr Laurence's anger with his dead son, who ran away to play music in Italy, leads him to be tough with young Laurie. And what of Marmee? Wouldn't you be angry too if your husband's poor business decisions meant you were flung with four daughters into the world of the genteel poor and then he ran off to minister to the soldiers fighting in the Civil War?

In 1868, when the book was first published, Marmee is angry and a feminist, reflecting the views of the author herself. Although she wants to see her daughters 'well and wisely married', she also advises them:

better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands.

In a world where marriage seems to be the only option, Little Women offers it's readers alternatives. While Meg begins to yearn for marriage and her own home, Jo and Amy are planning on making their own way in the world, earning their fortune through writing and art. And the family newspaper, The Pickwick Chronicles, includes an advertisement for 'Miss Oranthy Bluggage, the accomplished Strong-Minded Lecturer', who is delivering a lecture on 'WOMAN AND HER POSITION'.

It's not until the sequel, Good Wives, published in 1869, that we see how Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy's lives play out. Somewhere I have my own, large-format illustrated copy. And yes, I'm going to read it. Not to see if Professor Bhaer is as lovely as I remember (although I hope he still is) but to discover whether Marmee manages her anger and continues to advise her little women to imagine alternative lives.

All quotes and images are from Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott, published by Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934

Winne-the-Pooh: The Complete Collection of Stories and Poems - A. A. Milne

On the first day of the school term, Miles came home from school with a temperature. Tucked up in bed far earlier than usual, he lay pathetically, not quite sick enough to sleep, but not well enough to occupy himself. So I reached for Winnie-the-Pooh and began to read:

Chapter One - In which we are introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and some Bees, and the stories begin.

In the days since, in between reading the nightly reader, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Harry and His Bucketful of Dinosaurs on various adventures, and the obligatory books about superheroes, we have read all of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

Our copy of Pooh was given to Miles by his nanna when he was only 12 days old. When he was tiny, I'd sit him in his bouncer and read the poems that make up the second half of the book. Vespers, Disobedience, Lines and Squares, Hoppity. They are poems that echoed through my childhood. Recited at night, rehearsed in elocution lessons, enjoyed for their rhythm and rhyme. I think I probably used them to learn how to talk to my tiny baby, to begin what I hope will be a very long conversation.

This time, we concentrated on the first half of the book and read about Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Roo, Kanga, Rabbit, Eeyore and, of course, Christopher Robin.

So, now I have to confess that this is the first time I have read the original Pooh the entire way through. I remember trying to read the books when I was about nine. But stories about animals, particularly talking animals, didn't do it for me. I was an Anne of Green Gables/Little Women kind of girl. Talking animals - pass. This time around, I finally fell in love with A. A. Milne's creation, his 'bear of little brain', and shucked off the influences of Disney.

And guess what? In E.H. Shepherd's original illustrations, Pooh isn't wearing a red t-shirt (although when he walks through the snow 'tiddley-pom', he's wearing a red vest). And Piglet isn't all pink. As Miles spotted first, Piglet is actually green around his middle.

And although you are likely to love Pooh best when you are about the same age as Christopher Robin, A. A. Milne's word games are for grown-ups. Perhaps this isn't surprising. Milne described his first collection of children's poems as 'a curious collection: some for children, some about children, some by, with or from children'. A similar statement can be made for the Pooh stories: some are for children, some are about children, some are inspired by children (or his only child, Christopher Robin).

Milne published four books for children between 1924 and 1927. And that was it. I guess Christopher grew up and his dad didn't have anything more to say to small folk. Instead, he wrote plays, adult fiction and was a regular contributor to Punch magazine. Today, it's the children's books we love him for.

Reading with Miles enabled us both to discover the Hundred Acre Wood. Stories I thought I knew - care of Disney - have been rediscovered. Tigger still bounces. Pooh tries to float like a small black cloud to trick the bees. Eeyore has a birthday and mopes. But the playfulness of the language brings the characters we think we know so well to life in a new way. And we discover that Pooh doesn't have such a small brain after all.

The greatest discoveries for me, though, were the dedications. Both Pooh books are dedicated to Milne's wife, Christopher's mother. They are loving offerings to the woman who inspired the writer. Listen to the first:

To Her

Hand in hand we come

Christopher Robin and I

To lay this book in your lap.

Say you're surprised?

Say you like it?

Say it's just what you wanted?

Because it's yours -

Because we love you.

Beautiful. Like the stories of Pooh.

Looking for a copy? Try The Book Depository.

See also: Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter: Portraits of Children's Writers by Julia Eccleshare, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2002.