Jacinta Daniher & Taylor Hampton (text) and Janelle Burger (illustrator), Our Dance, Lothian Children’s Books, April 2025, 32 pp., RRP $24.99 (hbk), ISBN 9780734423429
Are there restless, wriggly, niggly little people around you? Grab a copy of Our Dance! It offers an open invitation for all to join in a corroboree and celebrate the culture of First Nations people through movement and music, whilst at the same time releasing some energy and learning a few simple facts about the traditional owners of this land.
This picture book is full of fun and energy and demands participation. A simple, rhyming text of couplets maintains a fairly consistent beat. Young children are likely to be up on their feet in no time, joining in as they slither like snakes, bounce like kangaroos, creep and crawl like goannas and soar like eagles.
Double page spreads are vibrant and filled with details, with the yellow, red and black colours of the Australian Aboriginal Flag dominating. On some of the pages, cultural artefacts are embedded but not referenced, such as the coolamon, hunting boomerang and emu caller. It was a missed opportunity not to name and explain these artefacts in an appendix, as the only way to identify them is in the teaching notes.
Detailed teacher resources are available on the Hachette Australia website and include many ideas for how to use this book across quite a few curriculum domains.
Recommended for 3–6-year-olds.
Reviewed by Bronwyn Joseph
Second review
The successful combination of text and illustrations effectively shows the way Indigenous children dance in their corroborees: jumping like a kangaroo, slithering like a snake, dancing like an emu and gliding like an eagle.
Preparations begin with painting their faces and bodies with ochre, then sitting around the fire listening to the rhythmic sounds of Yidaki or didgeridoo before the dancing begins.
With minimal text, the authors convey the joy of such traditional age-old celebrations. Perhaps straight text rather than the sometimes strained rhyming couplets would have made for a perfect picture book.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Douglas
