Unusual Angles

Four artists have taken the natural world – its wildlife, its ecology, and its geology – and produced four books with entirely different aims. Kim Michelle Toft describes The World That We Want (UQP, $26.95hb, 32 pp) as ‘one that protects, feeds and shelters everything that lives on it’. Essentially, this is a factual book, but one suffused with a sense of wonder because of Toft’s exquisite pictures. Are We There Yet? (Are We There Yet? A Journey Around Australia, Viking, $24.95hb, 32 pp) is Alison Lester’s bubbling account of a family’s ‘journey around Australia’, with cheerful pictures of boab trees, fairy penguins and everything in between. Again, it is factual; if you want to know what a quokka looks like, just find the right picture. This is not so true of Graeme Base’s Jungle Drums (Viking, $29.95hb, 38 pp); although the leopard, the elephant and the warthogs are clearly recognisable in the early pictures, by the middle of the story they all look strange. Even at the end of the book, they still have eccentricities. Like most of Base’s work, this is much more than just a picture storybook; it is also a puzzle book, where every double-spread illustration offers challenges to the reader. We move even further from the factual in Annette Lodge’s Bird (ABC Books, $25.95hb, 32 pp), a fable about self-discovery that involves a strange bird, a boy, and a fish. And what about Dougal, the Garbage Dump Bear (Penguin, $19.95hb, 32 pp)? Perhaps a garbage dump is the best antithesis to the natural world that one could find. Let’s start at the dump and work up to the pristine beauty of the Barrier Reef.