About the Author

Nadia Wheatley is an award-winning author whose books over thirty years reflect a commitment to issues of Reconciliation, social justice, and the conservation of the environment. She has been nominated by IBBY Australia for the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing - the highest international recognition given to a living author whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children's literature.

Ken Searle is best known for the cityscapes that he has exhibited during a forty-year career as an artist. In his illustration and book design, he draws upon the same sense of composition to take the reader on a journey through the landscape of the book. Over the last decade, Nadia Wheatley and Ken Searle have variously written, illustrated, designed or compiled five books that express aspects of the Indigenous principles of education that they experienced while working as consultants at Papunya School (Northern Territory).

Reviews

"In Australian histories there is a particular group whose tales and presence and concerns are rarely narrated. These are the children and adolescents. They are depicted as mute sufferers of the decisions of elders (as were the children of the Depression), helpless victims of policy (the Stolen Generations) and the children of the Second World War (of whom I was one). They appear in most writing of history as mere passive accessories to what adults do. But their stories are our stories too, and their stories are our history, and Nadia Wheatley, that great writer, tells that wide-ranging story in a way so imaginative and colourful that it would attract any young person, and make young readers feel that many of their personal struggles have been faced before, by children of the past and present. Nadia has performed an essential service to history and the young." --Thomas Keneally