AustLit

'How did turtle get his shell? Why do young koalas cling to their mothers' backs? How was the mighty Murray River created? Ten witty retellings of legends, some of them from the Yorta Yorta people, to delight readers of all ages.' (Publication summary)

This picture book contains stories such as, The Rainbow Serpent and the Story of Creation; How the Kangaroo Got Her Pouch; Why Frogs Can Only Croak; Why Brolgas Dance; Why the Platypus Is Such a Special Creature; The Mountain Rose; The Two Moths and the Flowers of the Mountain; How the Crocodile Got Its Scales; The Lizard-Man and the Creation of Uluru; The Butterflies and the Mystery of Death.

'A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother, Peter, set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an unnamed Aboriginal boy on walkabout. He looks after the two strange white children and shows them how to find food and water in the wilderness, and yet, for all that, Mary is filled with distrust.

'On the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, but darker themes lie beneath. Peter's innocent friendship with the boy met in the desert throws into relief Mary's half-adult anxieties, and the book as a whole raises questions about what is lost—and may be saved—when different worlds meet. And in reading Marshall's extraordinary evocations of the beautiful yet forbidding landscape of the Australian desert, perhaps the most striking presence of all in this small, perfect book, we realize that this tale—a deep yet disturbing story in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica—is also a reckoning with the mysteriously regenerative powers of death' (publisher blurb, NYRB Classics).'