Hunwick’s Egg (Viking, $24.95 hb, 32 pp), by the inimitable Mem Fox, will win many friends. It is an intensely moving story about the spiritual nature of unconditional love. This is a reprisal of the award-winning formula that Fox and illustrator Pamela Lofts used so effectively in Koala Lou (1988). Fox applies her well-honed storytelling skills to the tale of an old bilby called Hunwick and the ‘egg’ that he finds after a storm. However, this is much more than just a story about a lonely animal finding a friend. The poetic cadences of Fox’s text contain a strong emotional core. There are symbolic references to Easter: the bilby, Australia’s answer to the Easter Bunny; the ‘egg’ delivered mysteriously to his door; and Hunwick’s unconditional faith in the egg’s ‘existence’. On yet another level, the story highlights the plight of the bilby. Hunwick’s namesake is a university colleague of Fox’s whose mission is the preservation of this beguiling and endangered species. Thus there is an added poignancy to the bilby’s adoption of such a potent fertility symbol, made more compelling by Fox’s repeated refrain, ‘Neither did it hatch’.

Lofts’s illustrations tap into this emotional vein, with her expressive and almost tactile portraits of the bilby and his concerned neighbours. Lofts also highlights the contrast between the seemingly arid desert and the fecundity of the wildflowers that thrive there. Textual and visual references thus abound to fertility and rebirth. But what lies at the heart of this endearing story is an abiding belief in unconditional love, faith and hope, and the solace that they bring.

Hooray for Horrible Harriet (Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb, 32 pp), by Leigh Hobbs, also deals with friendship, but there the comparison ends. In this irreverent picture book, Hobbs turns on its head the idea of ‘making’ a friend. This is his second book to feature Horrible Harriet, and in it she inadvertently creates, and befriends, a monster: Mr Chicken. Only a sure-handed and inventive cartoonist such as Hobbs could convincingly turn a frozen chicken into a believable character. Hobbs’s spare but expressive illustrations, with their primary colours, black outlines and wicked sense of humour, take the reader on an hilarious journey through Harriet’s day. Mr Chicken, who grows larger and larger as the day progresses, inevitably runs amok in Harriet’s school. There are visual references to well-known monsters, including King Kong, and cutting caricatures: the bumbling, short-sighted Mr Boggle; the dispirited teachers in the staffroom; and the indomitable Harriet herself – a Madeline on steroids! Like the illustrations, Hobbs’s text races along, with good read-aloud rhythms and alliterative flourishes. This is a wonderful romp of a book, in which Hobbs’s cheeky illustrations and gloriously awful main character give a whole new twist to the problem of making and keeping friends.

In Mutt Dog! (Scholastic, $27.95 hb, 32 pp), Stephen Michael King takes a more serious but equally entertaining look at finding a friend. On the surface, this is the tale of a stray dog that finally finds a family to call his own. However, King – who has an excellent understanding of the symbiotic relationship between verbal and visual texts – incorporates social commentary on homelessness into his illustrations. The first double-page spread sets the scene. It is a busy winter’s afternoon in a large city and everybody is rushing to get home, except for a man in patched clothes pushing a shopping trolley containing his worldly possessions, a bag lady rifling through a garbage bin and the forlorn Mutt Dog. The poignancy and sadness of the images in the first half of the book, with their muted colours and subdued body language, are balanced by the saturated colours and exuberant body language in the second, as Mutt Dog finds friendship, love and a place to belong. Through this heart-warming and thought-provoking tale, the endearingly scruffy Mutt Dog is sure to make many more friends.

As Mutt Dog found, when we are isolated and alone, we need a friend, and what better friend to have when a bushfire threatens than the volunteer bushfire brigade. In Where There’s Smoke… (Lothian, $26.95 hb, 32 pp), Robin Lovell writes from the perspective of a young boy watching a bushfire approach his home. At times, the text is a little forced, but David Miller’s stunning paper-sculpture illustrations capture the isolation and vulnerability of the farmhouse, the heat of the day, the growing intensity of the fire, and the angst of the people fighting it. Just how close the house comes to total destruction is graphically depicted in the contour maps on the endpapers, but what could have been a depressing and frightening account is made child-friendly by the boy’s fascination with the many vehicles that go by his window: tip trucks, a low-loader, a bulldozer, fire trucks, police cars, a helicopter and a fire plane. Miller uses the firefighters and their vehicles, with their bright yellows, reds and whites, as visual counterpoints to the browns and greys of the smoke-filled sky. This visually arresting book is beautifully designed, down to the narrative use of typography. It provides a striking child’s eye view of what is a perennial danger in Australia.

In The Man from Snowy River (Scholastic, $27.95 hb, 32 pp), Freya Blackwood also uses book design to good effect, with a studied and charming interpretation of ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s iconic bush ballad of 1895. She sets the scene in the endpapers with a schematic representation of the bark of a gum tree, and then uses aerial ‘shots’ of a winding path, with a lone horseman galloping along it, to entice the reader from the half-title page into the book. Blackwood then employs a variety of viewpoints, perspectives and compositions to keep the visual interest of the reader as the narrative gains momentum and the riders chase the brumbies across the landscape, right down to the bottom ‘of that terrible descent’. Blackwood uses an Australian palette, but there is something very European in her artwork. There are echoes of Degas in her elegant depiction of the horses, while her landscape has elements of art nouveau design, with Japanese influences. It could be said that Paterson’s poem really requires a more dramatic visual presentation that better captures the vigorous nature of the verse. It is interesting that Annette Macarthur-Onslow’s 1977 picture book version of this poem is equally artistic in its interpretation, although her expressionistic paintings, with their Fauvist use of colour and distortion, better capture the sense of movement, excitement and danger of the bushman’s almost suicidal pursuit. However, despite this, there is no doubt that Blackwood has produced a beautiful book which, like the others reviewed here, presents adults with a chance to share a special friend with the children in their lives.