Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards 2002 — Feature article, The Melbourne Age

If this year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards tell us anything about the state of publishing for children in this country it’s this: we’ve pretty much abandoned the gifted reader in the 8-12 years range. Our teenagers are well catered for by authors writing across a range of genres and style, offering mature stories with ingenuity, integrity and frequently, despite the naysayers, humour. Our best picture book practitioners are as good as any you’ll find anywhere in the world, and there’s a solid core of chapter books to support newly emerging readers. Non-fiction remains a small but increasingly impressive and innovative area of Australian children’s publishing.

But you’ll be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of recent Australian novels substantial in length as well as content for readers in the middle years who want more than a disposable bum-and-fart-centric afternoon’s entertainment. Two years ago, when reviewing the CBCA awards for these pages, I commented that "the Younger Readers award reflects the trend away from the literary novel for this age". It would appear that the situation has only worsened. In 2000, the shortlist was consisted of five novels and a chapter book. This year’s shortlist includes only two novels of any length, both selected as Honour Books in this category; Odo Hirsch’s marvellous Have Courage, Hazel Green! and Kerry Greenwood’s A Different Sort of Real: The Diary of Charlotte McKenzie, from Scholastic Australia’s excellent "My Story" series of fictional historical diaries.

The rest of the Younger Readers shortlist is made up of two picture books and two slim chapter books. All of the books shortlisted in this category are fine books in their own right, especially Anna Fienberg and Kim Gamble’s gorgeous Joseph, but where are the challenging, literary novels for this "golden age" of reading? Where are the Australian books that will keep those gifted 12 year old book lovers, who are not yet ready for the mature content of YA literature, enthralled and transported and challenged for longer than an afternoon or two? We know these kids are capable of and wanting substantial books — look at the success Philip Pullman’s "His Dark Materials" trilogy has amongst this readership. So why aren’t Australian publishers making these kinds of books available for these readers? And it’s not the case that these books are there and the awards have ignored them; this year’s judges’ report notes "the listing of only twenty-one notable books out of the one hundred and forty-four entered in the category is indicative of the Judge’s overall disappointment in the standard of books entered." I call it an abrogation of responsibility, to the broader Australian culture as much as to our young readers. (These readers will find a gripping and important read in Anthony Hill’s Soldier Boy: The True Story of Jim Martin, the Youngest ANZAC, an honour book in the Information Book category.)

Having said that, this year’s Book of the Year: Younger Readers is My Dog (text by John Heffernan, illustrations by Andrew McLean) is a moving and timely picture book. Set during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, My Dog follows young Alija as he (with his scrap of a dog) is forced from his home, separated from his family and cast upon the goodwill of strangers. It’s a painful story for the reader who better understands the unlikeliness of a happy ending beyond the close of the book, but it’s also a story full of hope, expressed through the boy’s innocent optimism and McLean’s resonant illustrations. We’re used to seeing McLean’s water colours accompanying more light-hearted texts, yet it’s his very lightness of touch that both expresses Alija’s innocence and underscores, by contrast, the true horror of his circumstances. In a climate where public libraries are forced to remove displays highlighting the plight of children in detention centres because offended clients physically threaten library staff, books like My Dog may be more important than we realise.

My Dog is also an honour book in the Picture Book of the Year Category, along with Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree, which muses on the nature of melancholy. This year’s Picture Book of the Year is An Ordinary Day, a collaboration between Libby Gleeson and Armin Greder that champions the power of the imagination over the mundanity of day to day life. With a minimal text that gives the book its initial impetus, but finishes a third of the way in, the book really belongs to Greder, who takes Jack, our everyboy, on a great leap of imagination — and faith — out of the grey streetscape surrounding him. However, for those who aren’t fond of largely textless picture books, and who mistake seriousness of intent for a lack of humour, An Ordinary Day may prove to be a controversial choice.

The rest of the Picture Book shortlist and the shortlist for the Early Readers category (only four books instead of the possible six were selected this year) demonstrate the diversity and vigour of picture book publishing in this country. There’s the wicked humour of Leigh Hobbs’ Horrible Harriet and the genuinely felt sentiment of Mike Dumbleton and Terry Denton’s Passing On. Urban life is celebrated in In My Backyard and native animals in Baby Bilby, where Do You Sleep? Then there’s the extraordinary achievement of the Papunya School Book of Country and History, shortlisted for Picture Book of the Year, and winner of the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. Papunya School Book demonstrates that some of the most innovative and significant publishing for children in this country comes from Indigenous authors and illustrators — in this instance, the entire Papunya Community School. Papunya School Book is a history of the central desert region of Australia, and tells how the Anangu — the people — of five different language groups came to live and learn together at Papunya. It’s fascinating to read about aspects of our shared history, such as the journeys of Sturt and the establishment of the Overland Telegraph, told from the point of view of the Anangu, through a straight narrative text, oral history transcripts and via the illustrations contributed by various artists, all members of the Papunya community.

There can be little dispute that Bob Graham’s Let’s Get a Pup! is about as perfect a picture book as you can hope to find, and it has rightly won the Early Readers category. The book is pretty much summed up by its title; after the death of their old cat, Kate and her parents decide to get a pup. They find the perfect pup, Dave, at the local Rescue Centre, but none of them can quite get the picture of old Rosy, left behind at the pound, out of their heads… No-one creates family warmth and love quite the way Bob Graham can. I’ve seen grown adults laugh and cry out loud at the same time reading this book. Children love it because it’s so real; the circumstances and the emotion. In a strong field, Let’s Get a Pup! shines and delights.

At the other end of the awards, young adult readers have no shortage of substantial fare to get their teeth into. This year’s Older Reader’s shortlist gives an indication of the diversity of story and technique available to the older reader; there’s the sprawling Medievalesque epic of Odo Hirsch’s Yoss and the animal mythos of perennial CBC favourite Sonya Hartnett’s Forest, winner of Book of the Year: Older Readers. The remaining four realistic novels vary enormously in style and content. Margaret Wild’s verse novel Jinx explores love and loss and the painful journey back towards joy through language every bit as lyrical and moving as that in her significant body of picture book texts. First-time novelist Alyssa Brugman esxplores life after Year 12 in the mostly impressive Finding Grace, in which Rachel, who knows everything, takes on a job as carer for a brain-damaged woman and finds she doesn’t know quite as much as she thought. Brugman is one to watch; this novel has its flaws, but nevertheless leaves quite an impression, mostly due to Rachel’s strongly wrought and sustained voice.

Honour Book awards go to the vastly underrated Joanne Horniman and rising YA light Markus Zusack, who is receiving much favourable attention in the US. Horniman’s Mahalia brings to life with emotional clarity the imperfect world of a young man raising his baby after his girlfriend takes off. The judges describe it as "the love affair between a teenage boy and his baby"; it’s also, for those who know the area, a love song to the Northern Rivers region of NSW. Zusack’s third novel about the working class Wolfe brothers, When Dogs Cry, also explores the balance between the strength and vulnerability of developing masculinity as Cameron falls in love for the first time. It’s also an intriguing look at developing creativity; Cameron discovers the power of words alongside the power of first love, and it’s clear that this brave, loving young man is also going to become a writer of some note.

Book of the Year: Older Readers winner Sonya Hartnett’s novels attract polarised opinion. I confess I haven’t in the past been much enamoured of her Southern Gothic view of humanity, but in Forest I discovered a gentler, warmer Hartnett, and a novel that engaged and moved me from beginning to end. I suppose it helps that I’m a ‘cat person’: Forest is the tale of three domestic cats dumped in the Forest when their benevolent elderly human dies. Hartnett has created a world rich with danger and promise, and she avoids every predictable cliché of the animal fantasy. Her characters — the domestic cats and a chorus of ferals — are robustly drawn and the language with which she creates the cats and their world is inventive and expressive. I found it impossible not to be drawn into the world of Forest, and to care about the fate of all these felines, ferocious and funny as they are, until the very last word.