Laura’s father brings home a baby lamb destined to be a raffle prize in the school fête. This is his first mistake; the second is to ask her what she will name him. ‘Lollylegs’, decides Laura, and promptly takes over its care and nurturing, falling in love in the process. It takes a realist, her older brother Jason, to point out the raffle prize’s likely destiny. Laura is horrified: no way is Lollylegs going to end up on someone’s barbecue. She determines to corner the market in raffle tickets, but even by doing chores to earn the money she can’t, of course, buy them all. The raffle is drawn (‘Nice bit of lamb on the spit, there,’ says a man in the crowd), and Lollylegs’s fate is decided. Rhian Nest James’s subtle black-and-white illustrations support, without pre-empting, the little surprise at the end when the raffle winner’s name is announced.

Lambs needing rescue are few and far between in the suburbs. Luckily, there are always dogs, and Crusher Kevin (Puffin, $12.95 pb, 72 pp, 9780143305637) is a particularly needy case. Charlie’s new house is being built and Kevin is the big scary builder’s dog that guards the site. Charlie has been promised a dog, and the one he has in mind is nothing like Kevin, or Crusher, as he calls the beast. But when the house is finished and Charlie finds out what end the builder has in mind for his old guard dog, he discovers that sometimes the right dog can be nothing like the one you thought you wanted. Penny Matthews’s simple and economical prose is in large type, divided into nine short chapters for young readers, and Andrew McLean’s distinctive illustrations neatly capture the changing relationship between boy and dog.

So, too, do Beth Norling’s cartoon-like illustrations for Eleanor Nilsson’s Aussie Dog (Omnibus Books, $11.99 pb, 64 pp, 9781862918689), although, in this case, it is girl and dog. Like Charlie, Sophie has her heart set on a particular dog, and, like Charlie, she discovers that sometimes it is best to love the one at hand. Sophie’s dog of choice is a kelpie, an outback dog like the ones she has seen herding sheep. Her suburban parents are naturally not so keen; kelpies need lots of exercise, they tell Sophie. In the meantime, there is old Mrs Kirsch across the road, with her scruffy little dog, Boris. Sophie finds it hard to like Boris; he won’t even run after sticks. One day Mrs Kirsch is taken off to hospital and thence to a nursing home, and Boris comes to stay. You can probably guess the ending.

In a series called ‘Mates’, with an emphasis on Australian content, it is understandable why the story centres around iconic Australian dogs (after a wash, Boris is revealed as an Australian silky terrier, not a foreigner after all), but I was surprised to see Sophie’s nationalism extend to groceries: ‘She had put away the groceries, all of them with Aussie labels.’ How could she tell? And what does a label signify anyway? Vegemite boasts that it is ‘proudly made in Australia’, but we all know that it is owned by Kraft. That small puzzle aside, this is a welcome addition to the excellent Mates series, with its bright, full-colour pages, lively use of fonts, and satisfying conclusion.

In Emily Rodda’s novel, it is not an animal but an entire town that needs rescuing, and you can’t get much more Aussie than one called Bungawitta (Scholastic, $12.99 pb, 128 pp, 9781862918337), where it hasn’t rained for seven years and only twelve people remain. One of them is young Jay, who, observing his little sister making mud goannas in the red dirt, comes up with a bright idea to improve the town’s fortunes. And so the Bungawitta Earth Sculpture Festival is born, and the townspeople throw themselves into promoting and staging it. As the tourists flock in, an unexpected development threatens to sweep away all their hard work.

Who wouldn’t be captivated by characters called Maisie Macduff, Cookie Liu, Greasy Cooper, Aunty Flo, Glory-Alice, and Socko Riley as they pull together to save their dying town? ‘“I’ve done everything I can do to make it rain,” said Aunty Flo. “I’ve left the ute windows open night after night. I’ve put off patching that hole in the kitchen roof. And I put my good feather quilt and every cushion in the house out to air. In the old days, any one of those things would have done the trick.”’ Jay’s younger sister blames the television weatherman because every night he sticks a little picture of a sun over Bungawitta rather than a rain cloud; Aunty Flo is more inclined to trust her bung knee than meteorology. Rodda’s sly wit keeps the humour flowing as the television crew gets lost (‘“Stone the blooming crows,” said Cookie. “I wish those ABC coves would turn up”’), the weatherman gets locked in the lavatory, city-slickers demand double decaf soymilk lattes (‘Aunty Flo said there was only black coffee or white coffee, take your pick’), and catering runs out of scones. Craig Smith is the perfect illustrator for this funny and satirical tale of rural entrepreneurship.

All four eponymous heroines of the new ‘Our Australian Girl’ historical fiction series by Puffin need rescuing, and in these début volumes their various plights are established and each girl is taken to the brink of what may turn out to be a better life. Grace, an impoverished River Thames mudlark, is thrown into Newgate Prison in 1808 for stealing apples, but has her death sentence commuted to transportation. Both the prison and the convict ship that carries her to Sydney Cove actually offer more comforts than Grace ever experienced on the streets of London; it remains to be seen how she will fare when she arrives in the colony. (Meet Grace, by Sophie Laguna, $14.95 pb, 120 pp, 9780143305286) In 1841, young Letty accidentally finds herself on a ship sailing to New South Wales instead of standing on the dock waving goodbye to her free-settler older sister Lavinia. It is a good thing she is aboard: Lavinia contracts typhoid, and only Letty’s intervention saves her life. But their prospects look grim when they arrive in the colony (Meet Letty, by Alison Lloyd, $14.95 pb, 123 pp, 9780143305408). In 1864, Poppy, a child of mixed Chinese-Aboriginal parentage, disguises herself as a boy and runs away from a mission near Echuca on learning that she will be given as a domestic to a ‘good Christian family’. Her older brother Gus has escaped to the goldfields some weeks earlier, and Poppy sets out to follow him, meeting along the way a famous bushranger and a wild dog, both of whom are kinder to her than Mother Hangtree back at the Mission. (Meet Poppy by Gabrielle Wang, $14.95 pb, 124 pp, 9780143305323) Leading a far more privileged life than any of her fellow heroines, Rose, living in 1900 in Melbourne, is still a prisoner of circumstance, at the mercy of a snobbish, upper-class mother intent on keeping her domesticated and strait-laced – literally – and an inept governess who doubles as her mother’s household spy. Salvation is offered in the form of the free-spirited and unconventional suffragette, Aunt Alice, who comes to stay and immediately challenges everything that Rose’s mother believes in. (Meet Rose, by Sherryl Clark, $14.95 pb, 122 pp, 9780143305361)

Each period has been well-researched, but readers are allowed to escape into the fictional world without being blatantly bombarded with the results of that research. I did wonder, however, what ‘bushranger’ Harry Power was doing on the banks of the Murray in 1864 (and how Poppy would know of him), given that he was sentenced in December 1863 for horse stealing and known by his real name, Henry Johnstone, until 1869. His infamy as a bushranger came years later.

The big advantage this series has over the similar ‘My Story’ series launched by Scholastic in 2000 is the use of the third-person viewpoint instead of the restrictive and sometimes unconvincing first-person voice of young protagonists writing diaries. The four authors are fine writers with well-established reputations who seem to have been chosen, in part at least, because they have compatible immigrant backgrounds, which they explain in authors’ notes; Gabrielle Wang’s great-grandfather, for example, came to the Victorian goldfields from China. At this point in our history, it is not a bad thing to remind young readers that, unless we are Indigenous, we all arrived on these shores from somewhere else.