1. Animals
2. Art
3. Birds
4. Children as artists
5. Children as authors
6. Environment
7. Glossaries and vocabularies
8. Landscapes
9. Lardil people (G38) (Qld SE54-01)
10. Marine animals
11. Natural history
12. Nature
13. Plants
14. Queensland Gulf country (Qld SE54)

‘Our Island’ is a picture book collaboration by the children of Gununa with authors and illustrators Alison Lester and Elizabeth Honey. The book showcases the unique natural beauty of Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland, which has been occupied by the traditional owners, the Lardil people, for thousands of years. Gununa is a community in the southwest of the island.

The landscape format provides scope for wide background vistas of sky, earth, beach and sea, populated with some of the island’s flora and fauna, including dugongs, brolgas, fruit bats and mangroves. The Morning Glory, the Gulf of Carpentaria’s rare roll-like cloud formation, is also featured. Each gloriously colourful double spread (or two large illustrations side by side) was created by the children using wax crayons and food dye wash.

Text is minimal on each spread but particularly rich in action verbs: turtles glide, sharks patrol and brolgas bow and sway. Adjectives sprinkled throughout the text draw attention to the colours and feel of the landscape. The copyright page contains information about Mornington Island and credits all the children of Gununa by name. A glossary of Lardil words and information about how the book came to be are included in the back matter.

Alison Lester and Elizabeth Honey are both well-known, multi-award-winning Australian authors and illustrators.

1. ‘Our Island’ by the Children of Gununa with Alison Lester and Elizabeth Honey, Penguin Books Australia. (Alison and Elizabeth, against the background of the Mornington Island setting, talk about the inspiration for this book, how they worked with the children and how the story became published.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJu8LKCKx74
2. Mornington Island. https://www.morningtonisland.com.au/about
3. ‘Morning glory brings gliders from far and wide to surf spectacular, rare cloud formation’. ABC North West Qld. . https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/cloud-surfers-ride-morning-glory-in-north-queensland/9010504
4. Picklebums. ‘Crayon resist art’. https://picklebums.com/crayon-resist-art/