Children's Non Fiction

As I sat down to write this review, two news stories jostled for prominence on the ABC’s website. One was the unfolding story of two brothers who were trapped on Mt Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain. Only one brother would come back (the other fell 500 metres to his death). Lincoln Hall would understand what the brothers went through. Hall is an Australian mountaineer who was, famously or infamously, left for dead at 8700 metres on Mt Everest. Having made the summit, Hall was heading back down with sherpas when he was struck down by an oedema, a brain malfunction caused by oxygen deprivation. His body gave out. Without a pulse or any sign of life, Hall was abandoned on a rocky ledge. (Ten days earlier, an English climber had been left to die on the mountain as others trekked past him. Hall was luckier, but both these events sparked condemnation, including from Sir Edmund Hillary.)

These days, children’s non-fiction is not as stuffy as it once was. Instead of the encyclopaedic and often boring lists of facts that used to constitute the genre, authors are now encouraged to use fictional techniques in style and voice to produce a collage of ideas; and designers are required to present them as interactively as possible. These three very different books share some of these characteristics.

I was given these books for review just as I was finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Its combination of fictional characters, information about language, architecture and war, and visual images reminded me that reading has so many functions. We read in order to imagine, to learn, to make discoveries. My admiration for Austerlitz also put me in mind of national differences. On the cover is a photograph of a child dressed as a pageboy and holding a feathered hat. His serious gaze and self-conscious posture mark him as a product of a culture where the intellect has precedence over the physical. Pale hair and a gently rounded face indicate his European origins, but otherwise it is almost impossible to relate him to any Australian child.