Roland Harvey’s In the Bush (Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb, [32] pp) is also a totally irrepressible book. It is a trip into complete mayhem, but one well worth taking. To say that Harvey has a wicked sense of humour is an understatement. When the family, whose acquaintance readers first made in At the Beach (2004), goes on holiday to Wombat Flat, it seems anything can happen: live cows are carried off by eagles, branches fall on caravans, woodchoppers end up with legs missing and axes in their heads, kangaroos are interviewed by policemen for causing accidents – and that is just in the first two pages! Every page is full of characters getting up to all sorts of things as the family sets up camp (twice), goes caving, swimming, canoeing, horse riding, stargazing, exploring, skiing, bush dancing and sitting around a campfire. Harvey’s loose cartoon style and great eye for detail – and for the ridiculous – combine with his watercolour impressions of the Australian landscape to produce a book that will have both adults and children chuckling together for hours.

While Niland and Harvey each have around thirty years’ experience as author–illustrators, Nick Bland and Chris McKimmie are relative newcomers. Readers looking for a different approach to the familiar child–monster theme will be well rewarded with Bland’s funny and thought-provoking A Monster Wrote Me a Letter (Scholastic, $19.95 pb, [32] pp). This story looks at the child–monster dichotomy from both sides. When a letter arrives announcing that a monster is coming to play, a small boy goes out of his way to arrange his house so that the monster will feel at home. Meanwhile, after receiving a reply from the boy, the monster prepares himself to be as presentable and unthreatening as possible. The result is a wonderful meeting of cultures, where each learns from the other and both realise that they can live together amicably. Bland has a craftsman’s approach to both his illustrations and his rhyming text, and a good understanding of the way that text and illustration communicate with each other and with the audience. The illustrations are predominantly soft monochrome pencil sketches, but flashes of colour draw the eye to items not highlighted in the text, thus encouraging the reader to delve deeper. Bland also provides a lot of visual humour through the boy’s younger sister who, while she is mentioned in passing on only one page, appears in most of the illustrations. This is a cheeky picture book with a fresh approach to both monsters and visual storytelling.

An even more innovative approach is taken by Chris McKimmie in the intriguingly named Brian Banana Duck Sunshine Yellow (Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb, [32] pp). Readers expecting another Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge (1984) will be disappointed. This highly original book is miles away from the quiet pathos of Mem Fox and Julie Vivas’s book. Instead, it is sassy, cheeky and inventive, taking the picture-book genre and twisting it in a Brett Whiteley meets Monty Python kind of way. The storyline is simple: Brian Yellow – ‘Banana’ to his Na-na and ‘Duck’ to his Grumpy – stays with his grandparents every weekend. He goes shopping with Na-na, gets lost in the bananas and is found by a Giant Prawn; then he goes to see the Big Cow with Grumpy and brings home a Big Duck. Full of cheeky humour, both visual and textual, and bursting, appropriately enough, with sunny colours and an innovative font that spills the text across the pages, Brian Banana Duck Sunshine Yellow may be an acquired taste, but, with its celebration of difference, acceptance and belonging, it is worth trying.

While large publishing firms such as Allen & Unwin occasionally take risks with emerging authors and illustrators, and innovative approaches such as McKimmie’s, this is more likely to be the area covered by smaller publishers. IrrePRESSible won the ACT Writing and Publishing Award 2005 for The Year of the Mean Queen, by Caroline Ambrus and Graeme Hume (irrePRESSible, $20 hb, [32] pp). This well-produced book, with its computer-aided illustrations and strong design features, tells the cautionary tale of a colony of bees that is ruled by a despotic queen whose hubris, parsimony and gluttony cause the hive to become a depressing place where the bees are overworked and anyone different is driven away – an allegory for our times, perhaps. In keeping with this, Ambrus’s intricate illustrations show the bees dressed in aprons, hats and shoes and, somewhat incongruously, in a human environment of Roman colonnades, suburban streets and castles with honeycombed floors. The formality and symmetry of the layout would perhaps have worked better if the full-page illustrations were on the right-hand side of each double-page spread – a more traditional placement and one that would encourage the eye to linger longer over these sometimes unsettling pictures. While the illustrations provide atmosphere and detail, the narrative is mainly carried by the text, which is in competent verse, albeit with the occasional forced rhyme and clumsy scanning. With its complex language and concepts and its sophisticated illustrations, this picture book should appeal to older readers and adults, who will find much here to engage them.

Max Meets a Monster, by Tracey Hawkins and Chantal Stewart (New Frontier Publishing, $24.95 hb, [32] pp), is aimed at a much younger audience. It is also published by a small independent press and exhibits the same strong production values as The Year of the Mean Queen. However, it tells a more familiar story of a young child coping with his fears. Max, together with his teddy and his torch, goes in search of the monster that is making awful noises in the night when he sleeps over at his grandfather’s house. Stewart’s illustrations contain an interesting mix of textual placement and page layout, with strong colour values that should appeal to young children. My only quibble is where text and illustration do not match – and small children, who have an innate eye for detail, will pick up such discrepancies. That aside, this is a competently told story that deals warmly and reassuringly with familiar childhood fears and that special rapport between children and their grandparents.

Catriona Hoy and Benjamin Johnson make an impressive entrance into the picture-book field with the timely release of My Grandad Marches on Anzac Day (Lothian, $27.95 hb, [32] pp, 0734408455). Hoy keeps the text to the point as she tells of a young girl who goes with her father to the dawn service and then to watch her grandfather in the Anzac Day march, explaining in a straightforward but emotive way why the men march. Johnson is a very promising picture-book illustrator, with a distinctive style. He combines strong saturated colours, texturing and black outlining with sculptural figures that encroach on the reader’s space, as they are constantly shown in the foreground and thus tend to loom larger than life. This adds to the visual impact of the final image, which places the three generations in the middle distance, walking away from the viewer. Johnson also experiments successfully with interesting angles and variations in framing throughout the book. This is a sensitive and unusual approach to Anzac Day, written from the perspective of a young child and her immediate family, and presented in a visually stimulating way.

Benjamin Johnson is not the only illustrator recently to make an impressive début. He is joined by Kevin Burgemeestre, Peter Shaw and Aaron Hill, who have made their entrances hand in hand with three of Australia’s best known and most accomplished picture-book authors – Hazel Edwards, Margaret Wild and Gary Crew, respectively. Edwards has visited the Antarctic and she communicates her passion for the region in the text of Antarctic Dad (Lothian, $27.95 hb, [32] pp), and Burgemeestre shares her enthusiasm. Antarctic Dad deals with the difficult situation of a child separated from his father – in this case, the boy’s father is wintering in the Antarctic. The book explores the ways in which they communicate even though they are far apart. Antarctic Dad is a combination of fact and fiction, interweaving a narrative based on the daily life of a child with facts about Antarctica. Burgemeestre interprets Edwards’s story with illustrations that include flaps like the pages of a photo album, which, unfortunately, sometimes interrupt the flow of the narrative. His style works best in the pictures of the Antarctic, which are striking and evocative, communicating well the sense of cold, space and isolation. The illustrations of home and school are not so successful, especially those of the main character and his family and friends, who are sometimes ill-proportioned. However, the enthusiasm for the message about both family communication and Antarctica itself should compensate for this, particularly for young readers with an interest in this part of the world.

Margaret Wild is a prolific and consummate writer of picture-books texts. She always produces endearing stories with wonderful read-aloud cadences that roll off the tongue. She understands the art of picture-book writing, with its need to tell an engaging story while allowing the pictures to add their own narrative flourishes. With first-time picture book illustrator Peter Shaw, Wild has produced yet another warm and gentle story in Hop, Little Hare! (Little Hare Books, $24.95 hb, [32] pp, 1877003956). Little Hare has a very special relationship with his Grandpa, and they do lots of things together, but both have trouble hopping – Grandpa because of his age and bad joints, and Little Hare because of his youth and the fact that he still likes to bounce on his bottom. This is the story of how, in helping his grandfather, Little Hare learns to hop. Peter Shaw interprets and complements Wild’s text with soft watercolour illustrations that exude warmth. His muted impressionistic paintings perfectly suit the tenor of the story. Shaw’s Little Hare, in his blue waistcoat, pays homage to Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, but develops visually as a character in his own right; and Grandpa, with his white whiskers and uneven gait, is the archetypal grandfather. This is a perfect story for sharing with a special friend.

In stark contrast, Gary Crew’s Automaton (Lothian, $27.95 hb, [32] pp), like many of his other picture books for older readers, is a dark and somewhat depressing tale of mechanisation gone awry. Crew’s text is based on the true story of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph, who designed and manufactured a singularly unprepossessing talking doll. Crew, a master storyteller, relates Edison’s unsuccessful attempt to ‘play God’ through the eyes of Dillon, a young boy working in Edison’s factory. Through Dillon’s descriptions, Crew gradually builds up a picture of both the doll and the desperation and monotony of the lives of the workers. This harrowing tale is more than capably illustrated by Aaron Hill. From the first stark image of a hunched figure struggling across a bleak expanse of dirty snow, Hill shows that he understands how to visually construct a narrative. The crimson scarf blowing out at right angles to the figure suggests his life blood being drained out of him by the mechanised life he is about to embark on. That same crimson also occurs in the picture of a rose representing the young woman Dillon falls for, and again in the drops of blood on his consumptive sister’s pillow. Otherwise, the pictures are fittingly dark and brooding, and often confronting, emphasising the bleakness of the characters’ existence and the unremitting drabness of life in the factory. This is a stunning and complex picture book with much to recommend it for the more sophisticated reader.

These latest books reveal a thriving Australian picture-book industry. The number of new and talented authors and illustrators joining an already impressive list of established practitioners augurs well for the future. The verdict on the state of the art? The picture book genre in Australia is flourishing as it continues to explore new ideas and different ways of communicating visually.