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Lothian

Jump, Baby! by Penny Matthews, illustrated by Dominique Falla & Baby Bear Goes to the Park by Lorette Broekstra

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April 2003, no. 250

Pigs don’t fly, but dragons and kites do, and possums can jump, which is perhaps just as scary if you’re a little one. These four picture books deal with flight, their authors and illustrators using more or less imaginary elements in the process.

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Blyton got rid of them, Dahl demonised or mocked them but adults are definitely central in  the lives of young people in this recent trio of books for the emerging to the retiring adolescent.

The Keeper (Lothian, $12.95 pb, 160 pp) is aimed at the younger end of adolescence, perhaps written with the view that such readers will be willing to suspend disbelief as they will need to in this romantic story of a troubled young boy’s search for a father. Joel is twelve and lives with his grandmother on the Yorke Peninsula, and fishing is his love but fighting his tormentor, Shawn at school, and generally being disruptive, takes up much of his time. However, from the outset we are alerted to Joel’s essential goodness when he defends the meek Mei who will not fight back.

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Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan & Kissed by the Moon by Alison Lester

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December 2013–January 2014, no. 357

Never ruin a perfect plan’ is one of the masterful Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (Lothian, $24.99 hb, 52 pp). On a bone-strewn landscape, four thimbles with legs, tails, and horned heads are caught mid-procession. Two of them carry a knife and fork twice their height. The smallest one has turned its Ned Kelly visor head to salute. In doing so, he has trodden unaware on the tail of the one in the lead, who is carrying a strawberry as big as himself. The tip of the tail lies under his foot, dropped like a skink’s. A crow watches from the shadows. The narrative in this one picture would be enough to keep a reader absorbed for hours. The many colours of summer are textured contrasts.

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So many recent books have been about failure of one sort or another that when I read Michael Zifcak’s My Life in Print, with its eminently successful life story, I was at first inclined to scan it for points of criticism. Such is human nature. There are points, of course – the book is really two quite separate texts. The first, and most compelling, is the account of Michael Zifcak as a boy in rural Slovakia, then a youth and young man of estimable drive and a sharp, organising mind, who sets himself the task of improving his life – rapidly. Through a great deal of self-study and application, he gained his accountancy qualifications and pushed himself into a key position with one of the country’s leading manufacturers (ALPA, an ‘elixir’ with impressively high alcohol content), all this during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the ensuing German occupation of Czechoslovakia, World War II and the postwar Soviet takeover.

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As a middling country far from the centre of major world events, Australia has usually bobbed about in the wake of greater Pacific powers. After being a dependency of Britain for nearly two centuries, the country was accustomed to having its fate decided by distant power brokers. Yet Australian leaders occasionally attempted to strike out on their own in pursuit of what they saw as distinctively Australian interests. Alfred Deakin did it in 1908 when he ignored the usual diplomatic niceties of consulting the British Foreign Office before inviting the American fleet to visit Australia; Billy Hughes did it with his grandstanding at the Versailles peace conference of 1919; and Robert Menzies and John Curtin did it during the desperate days of mid-1941, when they tried to keep Japan out of the war, as British Empire forces struggled to maintain their tenuous hold on the Mediterranean.

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In reading a biography of Frank Hardy, it is almost impossible to separate the man, as subject, from the work for which he is famous, the novel Power Without Glory (1950) based on the life of John Wren. If I did not want to reach for my gun every time I hear the word ‘icon’ these days, I would say that this novel still has iconic status in Australian culture. The title is a pithy reworking of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (1940), about the ethics of a Catholic priest in southern Mexico. Like Greene, Hardy was driven by a quasi-religious commitment, but for him it was a lifelong commitment to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) rather than to Catholicism.

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Here are five reasons why there is a literacy crisis in Australia. It is not about teacher-training; it’s about appallingly conservative publishing choices and the positioning of ‘reading’ as something that needs to be slipped under the radar of children’s attention, rather than celebrating it as one of life’s biggest adventures. What these novels share is a commitment to sport as a structuring narrative principle. Australian Rules, rugby union, netball, athletics, soccer: the sports and titles change, but the overall arc remains the same. In this respect, these books feel market-driven: generic responses to some global marketing division called ‘encouraging reluctant readers’. While this enterprise is not unworthy, the assumption that children who are not reading will be automatically attracted to novels about organised sport seems dubious.

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Young Murphy by Gary Crew, illustrated by Mark Wilson & 101 Great Killer Creatures by Paul Holper and Simon Torok, illustrated by Stephen Axelsen

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November 2005, no. 276

There is an almost overwhelming tide of historical texts for young people being published at the moment. Fictional accounts of actual events are enormously popular, and frequently the diary form is used, as this is felt to be more accessible to young people, and also gives the writer licence to use the historical present tense with impunity.

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Snow Wings by Jutta Goetze & The Rat and The Raven by Kerry Greenwood

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November 2005, no. 276

‘Time will tell’ is an old adage that, in a peculiar way, links and separates these three different tales. While Victor Kelleher’s moving and poetic Dogboy lures readers into the harsh ‘Dry’ of a time that never was and never will be, Jutta Goetze’s story plunges into snow-bound Bavaria, in a time both familiar and strange to contemporary audiences. Kerry Greenwood, on the other hand, situates her futuristic sci-fi in a place and era at once known and yet irrevocably altered; creating an anachronistic story that is both challenging and exciting. All of these writers rely on temporality to both weave and anchor their stories with differing results.

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The Astrolabe by Susan Arnott & Our Enemy, My Friend by Jenny Blackman

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August 2005, no. 273

Reading a handful of primary-school-age historical novels in swift succession underlines the commonality of stratagems for encouraging young readers to engage with the past. First, there is the need to find a credible child role to focus on. Then, since adventure in historical times fell largely to the lot of boys, a female interest has to be introduced, or, with some contrivance and loss of credibility, the main role handed over to a girl in disguise.

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