1. Fathers
2. Fear
3. Imagery
4. Imagination
5. Marine life
6. Mystery
7. Perspectives
8. Relationships
9. Symbolism

‘First Light’ offers rich psychological, psychoanalytical and reader-response approaches to understanding the deft blending of visual and textual narratives. Boundaries between the domestic and the wild, safe and threatening are blurred to create a sense of meaning as constantly deferred and destabilised. The plot is simple, beginning in a domestic setting with a teenage boy reluctant to join his father on an early morning fishing trip. Tension is created on different levels, as the relationship between father and son is fraught for most of the book: the father’s face is not seen until page 22 and the boy’s name is not articulated until the second last page.

Peter Gouldtorpe’s realistic, colour illustrations add a third narrative to the text, with some illustrations providing further characterisation, such as the posters on the boy’s bedroom wall. All illustrations play with notions of light and understanding, shadow and incomprehensibility. Visceral details as a squid is prepared as bait are confronting and there are hints that perhaps another reason this boy might prefer staying at home in his bedroom is that he does not wish to kill or to fish or disturb creatures that are ‘awful’ beneath the boat. A gull appears on the last page of the book, its height and position on the page suggestive of freedom and spirituality, with visual and textual allusions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.

What lies beneath the waves is never revealed, but the implied terror and appreciation of the power of natural forces breaks the tension between father and son. Perspectives shift throughout the text, with some illustrations from a human gaze looking down into the water, one a bird’s eye view of the two human figures in the small boat, and another illustration looking up to the human figures from below. The focus is almost exclusively anthropocentric, with a shifting appreciation or fear of the nonhuman world always at the surface of visual and written texts.

Winner – 1994 CBCA Picture Book of the Year

1. The Canberra Times review by Belle Alderman, 23 August 1994 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/118264282
2. Gary Crew speaks briefly about the personal background to the story in an interview with school students in 2001; published in Orana, July 2022 https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/8647847/200207763.pdf