Pamela Freeman is an award-winning author. She has published several books with Walker, including Desert Lake: Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre (a CBCA Notable Book and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards), and now its follow-up, Dry to Dry: The Seasons of Kakadu. This new book is an extraordinary story of the yearly weather cycle and attendant changing wildlife of Kakadu National Park, with stunning illustrations by Liz Anelli.
Today, Pamela is on the blog to talk about the writing of Dry to Dry: The Seasons of Kakadu and the beauty of the Northern Territory. Read on!
Pamela Freeman
Kakadu in season
One of the best parts of being a children’s writer is turning your own experiences into magical books via the genius of illustration (disclosure: I have trouble drawing stick figures, so I’m in awe of illustrators such as Liz Anelli).
Dry to Dry: The Seasons of Kakadu started more than 20 years ago, when I was in Darwin on business and took time to to visit Kakadu. Oh, how I wished I’d had longer! You could stay there for months and never be bored. It was such an extraordinary place. My visit was the middle of the Dry, and our guide was eloquent about how different the Park was during the Wet.
Quite a few years later, I was conducting a workshop (with Anita Heiss) for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, with a group of girls from the Tiwi Islands, who were writing about their home—which is, of course, in the same seasonal pattern as Kakadu. That reignited my interest in the Wet and the Dry.
The idea lodged somewhere, and when I was talking with Walker Books Australia and Liz Anelli about doing a companion book to Desert Lake: The Story of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. It popped up, jumping up and down in my mind, saying, ‘Pick me! Pick me!’
Having been to Kakadu, I had the beginnings of an understanding of the place, but then came the research. There are two layers of research in a book like this: the research that goes into the words (some of which can be done at a distance, although nothing replaces actually going there), and the research that goes into the images (which is done by Liz on the ground, including discussing our approach with the Indigenous custodians of Kakadu).
I read books, looked up websites, checked field guides and studied academic papers (for example, about the life-cycle of the Leichhardt’s grasshopper), and also went back over my own memories, to get the right ‘feel’ for the ‘story’ text. The Nature’s Storybook series, of which this is one, has two levels of text —a lyrical ‘story’ level, which can be read aloud to a child, and a more scientific text, in a different font, which older children can use for research and projects and general interest.
Because Liz is, in my opinion, a genius, I was keen for her to have some flexibility about what she drew, so she went to Kakadu before I finalised the text, and we spent a lovely day looking at her sketches and deciding what would work best – of course, we’d talked over the general approach with our editor first!
It’s quite rare for an author and illustrator to work together in this way. Usually the text is written and edited well before the illustrator gets to see it, although it goes through more changes once it’s put together with the images. Liz and I hadn’t even met before Desert Lake came out! But since then we’ve become friends and we both love doing these books so much, it’s become a delightful part of my working life.
The research is just the beginning. To get from research to text, you have to find the story in the facts. I started with a clear idea that this was, like Desert Lake, a circular story—we would go from Dry to Wet back to Dry again. Why not the other way around? Because the coming of the Wet is such a spectacular part of the story that you don’t want to start in the middle of it!
So, from the research, I looked for variety. We wanted to represent all the major biomes in Kakadu, the important species, and the effect of the seasonal changes on animals, bired, insects and plants, while visually making each page different. Writing picture books, even as a non-artist, means keeping the images in mind. Not exactly what will go in them, because that’s Liz’s job, but making sure that I give her something worth drawing conceptually, and with enough variety to keep kids interested.
With Dry to Dry, that was easy—pretty much every part of Kakadu is worth drawing! But that was the problem. How do you condense this extraordinary, complex, varied environment into a picture book? In the end, it’s a matter of instinct. I have the attention span of an eight-year-old, so usually, what I find interesting personally in the dry facts of the research will work for kids, too (I hope). And if it creates the opportunity for a great image, I know I’m on the right track!
That doesn’t always work. There are always ideas and facts that get edited out—picture books go through many, many drafts—but that’s okay. It just makes the book better.
And there is nothing like that moment when the book finally arrives at your doorstep and you get to hold it in your hands!
—Dry to Dry: The Seasons of Kakadu by Pamela Freeman & Liz Anelli (Walker Books Australia) is out now.
Watch illustrator Liz Anelli’s process for Dry to Dry below!
Dry to Dry
The Seasons of Kakadu
This Nature Storybook follow-up to the award-winning Desert Lake is a stunningly illustrated and extraordinary story of the yearly weather cycle and attendant changing wildlife of Kakadu National Park, from the Dry to the Wet to the Dry again.
In the tropical wetlands and escarpments of Kakadu National Park, the seasons move from dry to wet to dry again. Those seasons...
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