Here is the wind sheep,
and here is the wave sheep.
Here is the scared sheep.
And here is the brave sheep.
But where is the green sheep?
Author Mem Fox has chosen an animal whose name in the singular and plural are the same – and then has made that word the anchoring rhyme of the book, resulting in a hectic word ride that tiny readers want to go on again and again. These four lines are a delicious double-meaning action verbs and emotions. The kite is controlled by its flyer with a ball of yarn that unwinds as it soars; the improbable surfer attracts attention with an upraised hoof (not drowning?) Scared and Brave demonstrate their emotions in an environment familiar to many preschoolers… An instant hit at storytime!
Fox’s success as a world-renowned picture book writer is in no small part due to inspired partnerships with gifted illustrators.
How would Hush’s invisibility predicament mean so much to us, without Julie Vivas’s delectable watercolours? Helen Oxenbury’s babies bring Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes to wriggling life.
Judy Horacek and Fox famously played off each other’s strengths to create this book collaboratively. Horacek is a gifted artist whose one panel cartoons reward more than one look : there’s always another detail to add meaning for the reader. This was her first picture book.
To pace the story, the late gifted designer Deborah Brash chose to print the repeated question But where is the green sheep? on plain white pages. These effectively allow the reader to simultaneously catch their breath, build suspense and remind them of the core quest, before the action resumes into more multi-coloured mayhem.
The last page is almost an anticlimax : that there is a green sheep after all, and they are the least responsive character, is an open invitation taken up by readers to begin the book all over again.
Big Bob and Ms May were getting past picture books now (if there is such a thing?)
BB entered a city high school as an eleven-year-old, and that entailed enrolling MM in a primary school close to my workplace. There followed several years of driving 120km per day. We all stared wistfully at the (chicken-driven?) train’s progress down the middle of the freeway.
Australia’s national broadcaster recently launched a poll to find the Top 100 Books of the 21st century– a mere twenty five years in ?
Where is the Green Sheep was the only picture book, in fact the only children’s book, that made the list.
Recent sightings of the Green Sheep in the wild confirm its popularity : at a school during Book Week and on the wall of the Parents Room at Geelong’s National Wool Museum.
As Stephanie Owen Reeder observes in Story Stars: favourite characters from Australian picture books, ‘Despite being a sleepyhead, the green sheep has appeared in all sorts of formats – from braille to big books, board books to buggy books, and picture puzzle blocks to a boxed set with a cuddly toy.’
A deserved winner of the CBCA Book of the Year: Early Childhood, the book recently celebrated its 20th year of being in print with a dazzling gold cover and the issue of a commemorative coin featuring ‘the wave sheep’.
Here are two family copies. You can never have too much green sheep.
40 Years of Picture Books 