Painless lessons for kiddies
p. 51 · Read in the full issue
Two new books from Australian publishers offer good value to any one casting around for ideas on gifts for children.
Latest in the series of picture sto ries by photographer Axel Poignant and his writer wife, Roslyn, is Children of Oriporo, set in the village of Fetuna on the island of Raiatea, French Polynesia.
A simple children’s adventure story, it achieves a measure of quite painless instruction concerning a number of features of Polynesian life for example, the im provisation of a fishing net from palm fronds, and the cooking of fish on pre-heated stones.
The pictures, in both colour and black and white, are admirable.
They include a particularly good ac tion shot of a canoe wreck which features in the story.
Olaf Ruhen’s The Day of the Diprotodon sympathetically evokes
the process of extinction of the diprotodon, the huge prehistoric an cestor of such pouched marsupials as the kangaroo. These gentle, her bivorous creatures fed on the lush grasslands which, some 50 million years ago, were to be found in what is now the desert country of South Australia around Lake Callabonna.
They died out because a sudden climatic change brought drought to their home region, destroying the vegetation and drying up the lakes at which they watered.
The veteran Sydney author teams in the book with a young Victorian artist, Peter Pavey, whose sensitive drawings contribute greatly to the
overall effect of the work.
F.L.S.
(CHILDREN OF ORIPORO. By Axel and Roslyn Poig nant. Published by Angus & Robertson. PO Box 177, Cremorne Junction, NSW, 2090. $6.95. THE DAY OF THE DIPROTODON. By Olaf Ruben. Illustreted by Peter Pavey. Published by Hodder & Stoughton (Austrelia), 2 Apollo Place, Lane Cove, NSW, 2066. $4.96.)