Dougal, a teddy bear, is thrown into a garbage bin after being soaked all night by rain. Next day, he is lying amid piles of rubbish at the tip and about to be run over by what he thinks is a dragon but what turns out to be a bulldozer. Luckily, the driver spots Dougal just in time and makes the first of so many rescues that the big boss from the city finally says, ‘This is a dump, not a zoo. They have to go.’ The text is simple, ingenuous and realistic: Matt Dray, the author, was the soft-hearted bulldozer driver. He has illustrated the story with colour photographs, and the whole book has a home-made look. Pre-school children will enjoy the story, while older children will appreciate the photographs stuck to the page with bits of sticky tape, the ‘ring-binder’ appearance of the whole book, and the occasional beer-glass stain.

Bird is an allegorical story about overcoming one’s limitations. A bird with large, duck-like feet and stunted wings, and afraid to fly, meets the narrator, a short, blue-faced boy who ‘is afraid to grow, / Scared of what the world might hold’. They sit glumly beside the sea until a fish swims up and suggests that they both try swimming: ‘After all, what will you lose?’ Finally, they take the plunge and have a wonderful time. When they emerge, the bird soars away into the sky, and the boy discovers that he is ‘no longer scared to be / the person hiding inside me’. I’m wary of didactic stories in ill-constructed verse. The pictures, though full of colour and leaping with birds and fishes, are all much the same, whatever the emotional state of the boy and bird.

Graeme Base’s Jungle Drums is about Ngiri Mdogo, the smallest warthog in Africa. He’s tired of being teased by other warthogs, and the Beautiful Animals that live on the other side of the river. So when wise old Nyumbu, the Wildebeest, offers him some magic drums, Ngiri takes them eagerly and thinks his troubles are over. How wrong he is!

This is vintage Base, with large, detailed coloured pictures: ferns and grasses that one can almost feel against one’s skin, and a rich variety of visual experiences lacking in Base’s previous book. Three times, for instance, Ngiri drums, always in deep violet night – once in the jungle, once on the open savannah and finally on a hilltop. As for the puzzles, this septuagenarian failed abysmally to find animals or to spot differences, but doubtless most seven-year-olds will find it perfectly easy.

In Are We There Yet?, Alison Lester’s family start and finish their journey around Australia just on the South Australian side of the border with Victoria. Generally, they follow the coast, with diversions down the Tanami Track, where they get bogged in sand, to Alice Springs and Uluru, then north again to Darwin and Kakadu, and across the far north by the Barkly Highway to Mount Isa. It is an amazing achievement to compress so much travel into a thirty-two-page book (there are at least four pictures to each double opening). In a note, Lester thanks her editor for sticking with the project that took a decade to reach publication; perhaps it was originally the same length as Gibbons’s Decline and Fall! The result, however, is worth every year spent on it. Both text and pictures are filled with that inimitable Lester warmth and humour. I can think of no more delightful way of learning about Australia.

The text of Kim Michelle Toft’s book is constructed along the same lines as ‘This is the house that Jack built’, a device that helps kids from pre-school upwards to understand the interconnectedness of the environment: ‘This is the river that weaves through the forest that filters the air that circles the world that we want.’ Chop down the mangroves and suddenly the chain is missing a vital link. The glowing double-page pictures have been painted on silk – the same technique that Toft has used in One Less Fish (1997) and Turtle’s Song (2001) – and four pages open out to form a richly coloured, detailed frieze. At the end of the book, she names and briefly details each species illustrated in the nine habitats she describes. If all books were as beautiful and as educational as this one, children might be more eager to learn.