A Gary Crew – Shaun Tan collaboration which promises a delightful blend of creepy storytelling and rich illustrations. He has been short listed for both the Queensland Premier’s and the Western Australian Premier’s awards for Fiction. We also share a similar sense of humour, and an attraction to dark and disturbing themes, as evidenced by The Viewer, which was published a couple of years later. I was on edge the entire book, the colours and illustrations gave an eerie atmosphere, one that made me very uncomfortable.

Dr Gary Crew, author of novels, short stories and picture books for older children and young adults, began his writing career in 1985, when he was a high school teacher. Gary’s illustrated book, Memorial (with Shaun Tan) was awarded the Children’s Book Council of Australia Honour Book in 2000 and short listed for the Queensland Premier’s Awards. This idea was central to a thesis I wrote as a Fine Arts and English Literature undergraduate in 1995, that our ideas of the world are almost always mediated by machines.During his exploring a junkyard he finds a latched and sealed box, opening it he finds a Viewmaster and three discs. After Tristan finds and picks up the Viewmaster the paragraphs become shorter eventually almost the point of choppy as circumstances change. The discussion we had at the end of the story was so lively because there are so many possible interpretations.

It took me multiple reading to enjoy this as much as I do now and, ultimately, fully interpret what I think the story is sharing with us. One day he comes home with a box full of instruments for looking at things, including a viewfinder toy. Similar ideas can be found in a previous book Gary worked on with South Australian illustrator Steven Woolman, The Watertower; a kind of domestic horror with alien possibilities, an inconclusive ending, symbolic clues and innovative visual design. These conditions of Tristan are, ultimately, what cause his problem at the story's end and, within each viewer, what is illustrated about man's progress in history.

Pupils can then use this grid throughout the unit to help them innovate and create their own stories.