GRAHAM, Stacey Garrison (text) Lucy Boulton Smith (illus.) The Bush Jamboree Self Pub, 2013 unpaged $22.95 pbk ISBN 9780987204905
Two brothers, supposed to be tucked up in bed asleep, hear the sound of music ‘cheerful and loud’. They follow it out into the bush where they see Kangaroo calling out to the animals to perform. The striking large illustrations of the jazz duo koalas, followed by a platypus singing at the microphone, lead to another page where an old ring-tail possum is picking a tune on a battered violin (called a fiddle here) and urging the boys to dance. The last scene shows how the boys’ mother is very surprised the next morning to see them still deep asleep, each clutching a waratah flower.
Told in rhyming verse that has an old fashioned ring to it, the text is printed in a font that closely matches the handwriting script children learn at school. The story seems quite derivative from an earlier era that favoured anthropomorphic tales about non human inhabitants of the Australian bush. Nevertheless it carries on the tradition of successfully introducing very young children to the names and appearance of famous Australian animals and their environment. EC
