Many of these books have been written and/or workshopped by people whose distinctive voices – the voices of this land – have been historically silenced, or all but totally suppressed, by the processes and forces of colonisation. It is only at this relatively late stage of contact history that these voices are finally beginning to be heard on the national stage.

Eight years in the making, Our Island (Viking, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780670077687), by the children of Gununa (Mornington Island off the coast of northern Queensland), in collaboration with authors-in-residence Alison Lester and Elizabeth Honey, is this year’s standout indigenous children’s book. Allusive and elusive, this beautifully paced, deceptively simple book comprises crayon-drawn artworks by the children of this predominantly Lardil island-community. The young Lardil artists then washed over their drawings with food dyes of the subtlest hues, to marvellously understated effect. We are immersed in the slow pace of daily existence on the children’s island home. We experience the passage of a single day in a quasi-hypnotic trance induced by the delicacy and grace of children’s artwork, which hovers somewhere between the representational and the abstract. The integration of these visual images with the equally unassuming text casts a spell on the reader:

Our island lies beneath a big blue sky,
surrounded by the turquoise sea.
Turtles glide through the clear salt water,
and dugongs graze on banks of seagrass.

 Our Island is written in English; there is a glossary of some key Lardil words at the end of the book. This book is set to become a classic of Australian children’s literature. For their next publication, the authors and publisher might go further, as the Lalaras have done with Yirruwa Yirrilikenuma-langwa, and create a bilingual book.

Kim Scott is the undisputed éminence grise of the contemporary Australian Aboriginal literary scene. In his most recent foray into publishing (in collaboration with the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project comprised of Noongar descendants, and working with linguist John Henderson), Scott has boldly entered the tricky but rewarding terrain of Australian language regeneration and reclamation.

The Wirlomin project involves attempting to breathe new life into old narratives, using a community development model. The group’s approach is that of not only drawing upon but also reworking the Noongar linguistic archive. Recent research indicates the existence of a positive causal relationship between Aboriginal language retention and/or language revitalisation and Aboriginal social and cultural well-being. This factor alone is sufficient justification for the Wirlomin Noongar group’s endeavour. The ultimate clincher is the fact that the knowledge and language conveyed through these unpretentious little books (along with the hope that they enshrine) is now being passed on to new generations of Noongar adults and children.

The Wirlomin series comprises illustrated retellings, perhaps better described as imaginative renewals, of traditional Noongar narratives told by Noongar speakers to the German–American linguist Gerhardt Laves in the early 1930s. It is of utmost significance that these modest paperbacks, the result of Noongar people mining their own linguistic archives, are understood as constituting just one part of a much more ambitious project of Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories reclamation and revitalisation in the south-western coastal corner of Western Australia.

In a laudably uncompromising stance, all books in this series are titled in untranslated Noongar language. Scott and his group’s translations of the original Noongar texts are stronger and more confident now than was the case with the earlier books in this series.

Of the two most recent publications, Yira Boornak Nyininy (UWA Publishing, $24.99 pb, 36 pp, 9781742585123) and Dwoort Baal Kaat (UWA Publishing, $24.99 pb, 36 pp, 9781742585116), the latter is the more successful. Dwoort Baal Kaat (which roughly translates into ‘Dog’s Head’) rehearses themes relating to greed, sorcery, and journeying through ‘country’, while at the same time providing topographical and other environmental information. It examines human behaviour through the lens of the ethology of animal and other non-human species. These elements, underpinned by the trope of death giving rise to new life, and ultimately transformation, closely reflect the structure of many traditional Aboriginal Dreaming narratives.

The greedy dogs that are the true protagonists of this narrative are punished for their indiscriminate gluttony. The pack of ancestral dogs runs coastward until eventually arriving on the rocky shoreline. There, after jumping en masse into the ocean, the dogs undergo transmutation into seals. Akin to other traditional Dreaming stories, this narrative obliquely references the transformation wrought by male initiation, while evincing Aboriginal awareness of evolution, indicating that dogs and seals, both of the order Carnivora, are in fact distantly genetically related. Their kinship is reflected in the Noongar language itself, wherein the word for dog is dwoort, and for seal, dwoortbaalkaat (lit. dog-possessive pronoun-head).

Picture from Dwoort Baal Kaat

Ethology, albeit with a rather anthropocentric spin, also plays a significant role in Karana, the Story of the Father Emu (Scholastic, $15.99 pb, 21 pp, 9781743623138), by Uncle Joe Kirk, with Greer Casey and Sandi Harrold, and illustrated by the latter. While female emus lay the eggs, it is the male that incubates them, guarding them with his life until they become independent. Male emus, which can grow to a height of two metres or more,are fearsome birds when predators pose a threat, although this aggressive trait is underplayed in this feel-good story.

Finally, The Lost Girl (Walker Books, $24.99 hb, 25 pp, 9781921529634), written by Ambelin Kwaymullina and illustrated by Leanne Tobin, is a simply told and modestly illustrated story of a child’s journey through her ancestral country, in which she finds she has never really been lost.

Collectively, these books represent a sea change of considerable magnitude, in that in each one of them Aboriginal people have mostly made the decisive running in terms of authorship and/or artistic involvement. We can certainly be said to have entered a post-Durack era, which, in terms of the diversity of Aboriginal children’s books, is beginning to reflect something of the polyglot, multi-ethnic place that ‘Australia’ was, prior to British colonisation.

While there is little doubt that the publication of these books is beneficial for those individuals and groups directly involved in their making and dissemination, it is hoped that this growing body of literature will give outsiders greater insight into Australian Aboriginal ‘deep history’ and differing ways of being in the world.