Bob Graham’s books are imbued with understanding and tolerance, along with a soupçon of idiosyncrasy. However, Graham is not merely a man of words and images. When Jethro Byrde won the prestigious CLIP Kate Greenaway Medal (the picture book equivalent of the Man Booker), Graham donated his not inconsiderable cash prize to a number of groups assisting refugees in both Britain and Australia. His wish was that the money be used to buy books, especially for children in Australian detention camps. In his acceptance speech at the British Library in London, Graham directly mentioned his shock at the Australian government’s treatment of the Tampa asylum seekers. He went on to argue that children’s books should celebrate difference as it is through books that children can grow by imagining what it might be like to be in someone else’s shoes. ‘This is surely where empathy starts,’ he said. Graham sent a copy of his speech to Prime Minister John Howard, along with one of his earlier picture books, This is Our House (1996), in which a group of small children of different ethnicities and appearances flirt with discrimination and exclusivity before settling happily for tolerance and sharing. To no one’s surprise, Howard did not acknowledge the gift nor embrace, as is his wont, this particular winner, despite the international kudos of the award.

Fortunately for Australian children’s literature, Graham’s stance is not an isolated one. The Tampa débâcle also inspired Morris Gleitzman – best known for his junior fiction full of somewhat scatological humour – to write the thought-provoking Boy Overboard (2002) and Girl Underground (2005), which deal with two children who escape Afghanistan with their parents, journey in a dilapidated boat to Australia and are incarcerated in an Australian gulag. When questioned about the appropriateness of political issues in children’s books, Gleitzman replied: ‘Refugees are in children’s books because they are in children’s lives.’ Like Graham, he believes that, by exposing children early to the compassion and understanding that comes from reading about the lives of others, we may be able to create a future generation of Australians ‘who are capable of asking questions about the stories they hear’. Rosanne Hawke’s enchanting and powerful Soraya the Storyteller (2004) explores similar settings and themes. Gleitzman and Hawke both emphasise the common humanity and interests which people share, no matter where they are from or what they have experienced.

As Graham so effectively shows in books like Spirit of Hope (1993), pictures can be used to great effect to tell the story of displaced people. In 2002, My Dog (2001), by John Heffernan, poignantly illustrated by Andrew McLean, was the controversial but deserving winner of the Children’s Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers, and it was also an Honour Book in the Picture Book of the Year Award – an unprecedented double. Its subject matter – ethnic cleansing in Kosovo – is not a natural choice for a children’s book, but the way in which both author and illustrator deal with this fraught subject are impeccable, and ultimately full of hope. David Miller also uses animals to deal with the difficult subject of displacement in his picture book Refugees (2003). The cover illustration, with its stark image of two ducks huddling together on the seat of a small wooden boat, clearly links it to the plight of boat people, and it is through such visual metaphors that Miller makes his point.

The Arrival (2006) – a graphic novel, visual essay and imaginative tour de force by the sublime artist Shaun Tan – is a recent addition to the oeuvre of Australian children’s books on the vexed subject of the plight of migrants and refugees. This book defies pigeonholing: it is a story of all ages, for all ages. Without words, Tan tells the story of one man’s departure from his threatened homeland and the family that he loves, his subsequent journey across the ocean, his arrival in a new land and, most importantly, how he copes with living there. Like a child, he must learn how to function in this world. This is the story of Everyman, for we all arrive untutored into a world whose language, customs and landscape we must learn to traverse.

By inventing a distinctly ‘alien’ and fantastic environment, Tan invites the reader to walk as a ‘New Chum’ in this strange land – Graham’s concept of walking in another’s shoes. Along the way Tan’s migrant is often ‘entertained’ by strangers who have made similar journeys. Their stories are also told, each one with its own uniquely designed borders, colour tones and framing, so that they are like the pages of miscellaneous photo albums interleaved into the main protagonist’s travel journal. For his new country, Tan has invented flora and fauna, architecture, transport, utensils, food, companion animals and even a language, all of which have elements of the familiar but are subtly warped in such a way that they are ultimately true only to themselves and to Tan’s prodigious imagination. Tan’s reconstructed alternative reality helps the reader to experience the protagonist’s sense of alienation without seeing it through the prism of their own preconceptions about place, time or people – thus enabling them to take a fresh view of someone else’s experience through what Tan describes as the ‘intuitive resonance of poetry we can enjoy when looking at pictures’. Each and every design element in The Arrival is immaculately crafted. The cover has the antiquated look of an old-fashioned leather-bound journal or photo album, the endpapers contain passport-style images of the haunted faces of migrants, and various sepia and monochromatic tones are used to heighten the visual experience. As in a novel or film, Tan varies the pacing of his storytelling. There are a number of significant double-page spreads which act like descriptive passages. They can set the scene, as when the refugee’s boat arrives in the harbour of the new city, with its buildings and giant statue redolent of early twentieth-century New York; or they may evoke an emotional reaction, as in the shocking image of giant humanoids in boilersuits and masks ‘vacuuming up’ the residents of a foreign city. Interspersed between these pages are single-page images which act as visual resting points, filling in details about the setting, the action or the relationships between people. There are also twelve-panel, single-page images in which Tan uses close-ups of people, usually focusing on a particular part of their body, to sequentially inform the reader what is happening. In this way, Tan masterfully uses body language, facial expressions and gestures to communicate the characters’ reactions and emotions. Tan also uses this sequencing device to show the passing of time, most effectively in the series of cloud images which graphically portray the sixty-day journey from the migrant’s home to his new land. Tan proves again and again that there is no need for words when photorealistic images, painstakingly drawn in graphite pencil on paper, are composed and designed by an artist of his calibre.

Tan thus uses an amalgam of designs, costumes and images from around the world to heighten the sense of the familiar cloaked in the alien, with unusual juxtapositions, which can be unsettling and definitely convey the migrant’s sense of disjunction as he attempts to cope with the ordinary rendered extraordinary. For, like all people, Tan’s protagonist’s main concerns are with the essentials of life – somewhere to sleep, food, a job and, perhaps most importantly, companionship. In searching for these things, he is, like all of us, often dependent on the kindness of strangers. Tan’s visual exploration of the migrant experience speaks louder and more clearly than words, gently extolling readers to feel for, understand and empathise with any strangers who come into their lives. After all, we are all caught up in a perpetual cycle of dispersal and regeneration as we adapt to the vicissitudes of existence. If we can somehow make someone else’s journey and subsequent arrival a little easier, then perhaps, like Tan, Graham and many other Australian children’s illustrators and authors who have chosen to sympathetically explore this subject, we too will have achieved something significant.