This is an intriguing book, a story that appears straightforward yet raises many questions. An unnamed family, a boy and his parents migrate to Australia from England. They are part of the 19th century growing settler population trying to make it as farmers in a country very unlike England. The boy is unhappy, he ‘did not like living here’. He is quiet, a scholar and likes to read, something his parents have little patience with. Isolated on the farm the boy’s only solace is a huge gum tree in the paddock which each evening fills with the raucous screeching of large flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos.
Hearing his parents discussing the tree’s removal the boy asks ‘But the birds …. What will happen to the birds?’ Their reply is ‘Birds?... What birds?’ He explains that they come each evening, hundreds of them and settle in the big gum tree and they are sulphur-crested cockatoos or so his book says. At the mention of a book the parents angrily explode demanding to know where he got a book. The boy’s tearful confession that he had taken a ‘ha’penny’ and borrowed it for a week from a travelling salesman. This destruction of self by the boy initiates the immediate destruction of the tree and with it, as the text tells us, the loss of the birds’ habitat and breeding place. ‘Not that the colonists cared’ or understood.
The loss of the tree confuses the birds and they fly about screaming in grief and anger. The parents do not care but the boy is devastated. Gone is the one thing that he had loved that made bearable this strange land. The birds are gone and the next day so is the boy, to where we do not know.
Why did the boy leave? Why did his parents hate books and his reading? What is the significant of the title ‘Finding Home’ when home seems lost both to the birds and the boy. The text raises many questions as do the illustrations. The artwork in coloured pencil and watercolour has a soft, dreamy quality for the boy that contrasts strongly to the harsh images of the parents. The book’s early illustrations may hold clues to the differing attitudes between the boy and his parents particularly their disdain for his love of books and the beauty of nature, a beauty reflected in the swooping images of the white cockatoos against an Australian blue sky on the endpapers or the boy’s description of the birds in the gum tree looking ‘like there’s been snow’. There is much to puzzle the reader in this book including the unusual image on the book’s final double page spread. What is the significance of the halos surrounding the boy and the salesman as they walk away?
White colonists had little understanding or appreciation of flora and fauna of Australia. To people used to a gentler more predictable landscape and animals, the raucous often destructive nature of Australia’s wildlife was not something to be appreciated or even tolerated but rather to be eliminated. In a comparable way the boy’s nature was also neither appreciated or tolerated but seen as something to be eliminated or bent to suit an unnatural version just as the white settlers tried to bend the Australian landscape to suit their vision and ideals.
This is an artfully created book that challenges in its interpretation. There is creative potential for readers to extend the story and create their own versions of the boy’s past and future.
Picture Books for Older Readers
