Robber Girl illustrated by Donna Rawlins,written by Margaret Wild

Beyond the Dusk illustrated by Gregory Rogers, written by Victor Kelleher

Robber Girl

Publisher: Random House Australia
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 009183029X

Beyond the Dusk

Publisher: Random House Australia
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 0091831474

As a young reader, I continued to enjoy illustrated books into late primary and high school. I was well beyond picture books but I still read the long illustrated texts that were quite common in the 60s and 70s. I loved fairy and folk tale collections too, and those (usually "classic") novels with frontispieces, where the illustrations were listed by title and page number as contents as significant as the chapters themselves.
Robber Girl by Margaret Wild and Donna Rawlins, and Victor Kelleher and Gregory Rogers’ Beyond the Dusk remind me of those sorts of books. Robber Girl utilises a conventional picture book format, but Wild’s traditional-style story is longer than is typical for the format, and Rawlins’ paintings are to me richly reminiscent of those wonderful coloured plates that used to grace the pages of children’s novels. Beyond the Dusk is really a short novel, published in a picture book-sized hardback edition, and illustrated in (mostly full-page) black and white half-tone drawings by Rogers.

Robber Girl and Beyond the Dusk both deal with a young girl who is physically and emotionally isolated from her community, and who finds companionship amongst animals. One never reads a book in isolation; having just finished reading Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, I couldn’t shake Pullman’s notion of the animal/dæmon companion as a sort of representation of aspects of the self — which could indeed be the case for the robber girl, with her iconic companions, the wolf, the owl and the bear.

Rawlins’ illustrations place Wild’s tale in the deep winter of a pre-industrial Europe familiar to us through many a traditional tale, and Wild draws on many familiar motifs from this world; the feral child, the missing/stolen child, groups of three (events, animals). The Robber Girl lives in the heart of the forest, apart from the farming families who fear the mystery of who she is, and her "fierce eyes, fierce hair and… fierce knife strapped across her chest". She is, of course, not a robber girl at all — when hunger forces her to steal, she repays the farmers with small treasures she has found in the forest. It is these treasures that bring her together with the smallest child of a farming family, who she cares for when he becomes lost in the forest.

Wild’s language is very much influenced by traditional literature; note the syntax: "But now and again — she did not know why — she was assailed by a feeling of such emptiness, such blackness, that all she could do was roll herself up into a ball, and endure." This elevated tone not only suits the traditional feel of the story, it also creates the wistful, melancholic mood of the story. The girl returns the child to his family, only upon the insistence of the bear, wolf and owl, and he never sees the robber girl again — although she continues to care for him from a distance.

Rawlins illustrations explore the idea of family that is a subtext of the tale; although the robber girl yearns for human companionship, the illustrations showing her in her cave with the animals are rendered in the same warm palette as the scenes of the farmers’ family home. The not-quite-happy ending of the story reminds us to consider the family the robber girl already has, as it also leaves us to consider the possibility of forgiveness and understanding, and the great good that can come from a single selfless, even if reluctant, act.

By contrast, Beyond the Dusk is set in high summer in the Australian bush somewhere in the middle of the20th Century, and the climax of the tale occurs during a raging bushfire — which experience Kelleher creates for the reader without it once feeling like the cliché it can be in less confident hands. Beyond the Dusk is not a traditional tale in the sense that Robber Girl is, but it does draw deeply on the mythology of fear around the Australian bush created by dislocated white settlers. In this instance young Meg, who lives on a small farm with her grandmother and is outcast from her peers because of her propensity for telling tall tales, becomes aware of an animal presence stalking the farm — or more precisely, the creatures who live there.

I wish I had read Beyond the Dusk before I’d read the publisher’s promotional material, which reveals what the creature is. I’d rather not have known that before I read the book; it spoiled the mystery for me, although I still found myself absorbed in the tale and its telling. Meg is a character of much pathos, and one feels very much for her loneliness — this is a child whose only true friends are three milking cows whom she imagines respond to her yarns as a human companion would. There is thus a real sense of vindication when the tallest of her tales is proved more or less true, even though her tormentors from the school and town will never know of it.

Beyond the Dusk is more sparingly illustrated than Robber Girl. Rogers’ illustrations work to realise the very physical world that Kelleher has evoked in his text; he depicts the rough Australian bush and farmland, the foreboding of a starlit country sky, the heat and power of a raging bushfire through the shadings and light of his black and white illustrations.

Either of these books could have been published as a B-format paperback; at nearly 3000 words, Robber Girl is about the length of an Aussie Nibble; Beyond the Dusk at around 20,000 words could easily have been published as an unillustrated novel. It may have something to do with the stature of Wild and Kelleher, Rawlins and Rogers, but I’m really pleased to see the publisher, Random House Australia, taking what many would see as the risk — especially in the case of Beyond the Dusk, conventional wisdom being that black and white illustrated children’s books don’t sell — of publishing these texts in this format. These physically substantial books make a substantial contribution to the literature.