The six picture books shortlisted for the 2005 Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year Award – Jeannie Baker’s Belonging (2004), Roland Harvey’s At the Beach: Postcards from Crabby Spit (2004), Stephen Michael King’s Mutt Dog! (2004), Alison Lester’s Are We There Yet? (2004), David Miller’s Refugees (2004) and Jan Ormerod’s Lizzie Nonsense (2004) – have been selected as the most outstanding Australian picture books published in the last year. With this endorsement, these books will be more widely stocked by bookshops, bought by parents, and promoted by teachers and librarians. The visual imagery they contain will thus be widely disseminated and, ideally, will present children with a ‘vision splendid’ of the land, people and culture of Australia.

The shortlisted books have much to commend them. They are of a uniformly high quality in terms of design and production values. They cover a range of subject areas and themes: from conservation, homelessness and the plight of refugees to the importance of family. They also incorporate a range of visual styles: from Baker’s intricately constructed collages and Miller’s bold paper sculptures, to King’s and Harvey’s loose-lined cartoons, Lester’s carefully designed panels and Ormerod’s impressionistic portraits.

These picture books also present a variety of perspectives of Australian life. Harvey depicts the delights of Australian beach culture in all its hedonistic abandonment. Lester goes on a journey around an Australia that is dotted with visual stereotypes and icons, but at the same time celebrates how eclectic and varied the land and the people are. Baker creates a cityscape that grows and matures as it accepts the importance of social and ethnic diversity, and the heritage of the land on which it is built. King exposes the sad underside of city life, and shows how compassion and understanding can improve people’s lives. Ormerod travels back in time to early white settlement and the simple pleasures of family life, while Miller explores Australia’s treatment of refugees and presents a poignant and thought-provoking allegory for our times.

In many ways, however, the judges have made safe and somewhat conservative choices. Most of these author– illustrators have been creating picture books for at least the last twenty years and all have won awards before. There are also echoes of previous award-winning books: for example, compare Baker’s Belonging with her companion piece Window (1992), or Lester’s Are We There Yet? with her The Journey Home (1989); or compare King’s Mutt Dog! and Harvey’s At the Beach with Bob Graham’s Buffy (1999) and Greetings from Sandy Beach (1990), respectively. This probably reflects the similarly safe choices made by publishers, who, in a tight market, tend to publish well-known authors and illustrators, familiar styles, traditional designs and tried-and-true narrative constructs that do not stretch the boundaries of the genre.

The visual imagery presented in these picture books is equally conservative and very familiar. Each illustrator has adopted a predominantly Australian palette: yellows, blues, grey-greens and ochres. Iconic animals dot the landscape: from koalas, kookaburras and kangaroos to parrots, possums and sharks. Despite the fact that the majority of Australian children live in the suburbs, the landscapes are predominantly rural or coastal. The ubiquitous weatherboard house is a recurring architectural motif. It is almost as though the illustrators are keen to include visual imagery and cultural icons that mark their work as identifiably Australian.

The illustrators’ presentation of the Australian people and culture is also conservative but reassuring. While most of the main characters are white Anglo-Celtic, there is a multicultural mix amongst the background characters. Baker’s Belonging celebrates this mix, with commentary on the need to embrace diversity, encourage social cohesion and reclaim the native flora and fauna, which, in many cities, have been subsumed by tar and cement, bricks and mortar, and Coca-Cola and Pizza Hut. King similarly explores the fast pace, social dislocation and corporatisation of the city, with its lack of respect for the dignity of human life. Ormerod takes this idea even further, transporting children back to the pioneering family life in the bush in the 1800s and to a child who, without modern means of entertainment, lets her imagination run wild. However, the most telling social commentary is in Miller’s Refugees, with its cover image of two ducks huddling together in a small boat. It tells the story of their dislocation, the horrors they endure, their incarceration and their final liberation.

In their attempt to entertain, inform and emotionally engage the reader, these author–illustrators share a view of Australia that incorporates iconic imagery and visual stereotypes. They explore Australia’s failings and shortcomings, but also its hopes and aspirations for a more tolerant and better future. They both celebrate and question what it is to be Australian. All in all, these picture books present a sometimes visually safe and predictable but often stimulating and thought-provoking picture of what Australia was, what it is and what it should be – a vision splendid, indeed.