From the textured title page – with its woodcut image of leaves, feathers, and gumnuts – to the diagrams at the end of the book revealing the camouflaged creatures featured, ‘The Hunt’ totally engages the reader in the minutiae of a night in the life of the fascinating tawny frogmouth.
As Tawny Frogmouth searches for food for her chicks, each double-page spread shows her chasing a specific tasty morsel, as other cleverly camouflaged creatures hide within the images. Unfortunately, each creature evades beak and claw, until she finally snaffles a moth to take back to her nest. But disaster strikes and the hunter becomes the hunted. It’s the frogmouth’s turn to use her camouflage abilities to evade capture and finally feed her hungry chicks.
The pared back, lyrical text allows the detailed illustrations to carry much of the narrative. At the back of the book, black-and-white diagrams reveal the animals cleverly hidden in each double-page spread, along with their common and scientific names and their dimensions. Another double-page spread provides information on the setting of the story, and on how animals use camouflage to hide themselves from predators. A comprehensive bibliography completes this excellent example of a carefully thought-out and presented nonfiction narrative picture book.
Oliver created her meticulously researched images using linocuts hand-coloured with coloured pencils and pastels. The book design is striking. It begins and ends with mauve and white endpapers featuring an image of reeds taken from one of the double-page spreads. And the black-framed nighttime images in greys, blues, greens, and purples are set against golden textured backgrounds that reflect the colour of the Tawny Frogmouth’s eyes. Variations in framing, perspective and zooming add to the visual interest and drama on each page.
This book is perfect to use as a starting point for discussions on book design, artistic techniques, writing minimalist picture book texts, and presenting environmental information, as well as on the use of camouflage in the animal world.
‘The Hunt’ won Narelle Oliver the CBCA Picture Book of the Year Award in 1996. It was also short-listed for the Young Australians Best Book Awards (YABBA) in 1996 and 1997, and it won the Wilderness Society Environment Award for Children's Literature in 1996.
Picture Books for Older Readers
