1. Bilingual books
2. Children as artists
3. Children as authors
4. Fitzroy River (WA Kimberley SE51, SE52)
5. Frogs and toads
6. Kadjina Community (WA West Kimberley SE51-12)
7. Walmajarri /​ Walmatjarri people (A66) (WA SE51-16)

Kawupayi Walak, The Cowboy Frog, is pictured as a human figure in a green suit complete with tall hat and pointy-toed boots. The Cowboy Frog sets out from his house, kills and eats a snake and a goanna, before diving into the river to save a barramundi from a crocodile.

‘You are a legend, mate,’ said the barramundi.

‘No worries,’ said the Cowboy Frog.

He did three backflips and one front flip and he bowed to the barramundi.

The exuberant swagger of the Cowboy Frog is hard to resist. Hylton Laurel was born in 1991 and was living in Kadjina Community at the edge of the Great Sandy Desert in WA’s Kimberley region at the time this book was published. This book is what Susan Wright (Professor of Arts Education, University of Melbourne) describes as an authentic child’s narrative: ‘coupled with drawing and action, encapsulates into one compact package, ideas, context and emotion.’

The text is in both Walmajarri and English, two of the languages of the Kadjina Community. The separate languages are in different fonts but on the same page so that neither language is privileged.

1. Further book information supplied by Magabala https://www.magabala.com/products/the-cowboy-frog?_pos=1&_sid=fafd6cd1f&_ss=r
2. Kimberley Society. Book Notes on The Cowboy Frog http://www.kimberleysociety.org/images/kimbsoc---uthahshein.pdf
3. Information about Kadjina community https://www.mww.org.au/kadjina
4. More information about barramundi https://www.fish.wa.gov.au/Species/Barramundi/Pages/default.aspx