Sunshine 1981

The blurb says: Everybody gets up sometime in the morning. This is the story of one small girl who one day woke up rather earlier than anyone else.

Artist Jan Ormerod constructed in her silent picturebook a layout of panels, differing in sizes and orientation, to show increments of time as actions. The page above is an example of how this invites the reader to tell the story. Small Girl is on the move, seen in profile, as many picturebook characters are read. The slender centre panel simulates the crack of a door that she is peeping through at the scene on the right but it’s much more than that. She is inviting the reader to venture in with her, assuring us that the story will continue to be told from her point of view, even with these new actors.

In their book Children’s Picturebooks: the art of visual storytelling, Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles assert that wordless picturebooks require assiduous observation to understand what is happening and to get all of the jokes. Ormerod hints in these panels that reading plays a vital part of this family’s routine, and will almost disrupt it.

This book, Ormerod’s first, won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Picture Book of the Year, when there was no distinction between older and younger readers. In this year, too, Molly Bang’s wordless book The Gray Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher was designated an Honor Book in the Caldecott awards.

I’d love to say that I knew how to share this book with children, at the time. But I was still in the phase where all I knew about reading to a group was to hold it up and open, level with my shoulder, facing the kids. Which I did: craning my neck to look at the pictures, lamely narrating, turning the pages unsmoothly, and trying not to notice how much they weren’t enjoying it.

I know better now, almost too late, observing Miss May and Big Bob at work on them, and thanks to IBBY.

Reading The Horn Book, Wilson Library Bulletin and other American library journals for years, devouring Helene Hanff’s Apple of My Eye and the only column in the What’s On columns in The New Yorker all primed me for annual leave. Most of my friends were saving for Kontiki trips to Europe, or had gone to England, on their holidays, but I was determined to go to the Big Apple and in November of this year, I did..

I stayed in a hotel that had fallen on hard times; tried to avoid libraries; and spent too long in attractions that I thought I ought to enjoy. But I also accidentally found the Fourth Avenue secondhand bookstores recently eulogised in documentaries, and spent whole days sitting and reading in them. I discovered the delectable Museum of the City of New York and the waiter at the diner around the corner from my accommodation knew how I liked my eggs without asking after a few days. A wonderful month.

I returned to St Kilda (in time for the school holiday program) determined to go again, for a longer stay, and to read more before I did.

In 1988, I would. But in the meantime, there was a library qualification to finish, new illustrators to admire, and just plain work to be done. Like Small Girl’s mum, I was often running late.