Rules of Summer (2013) is a large-format picture book about a friendship between two boys tested by challenging situations. It's a story with no particular narrative, just a list of mysterious rules such as 'Never step on a snail', 'Never argue with an umpire' or 'Never leave a red sock on the clothesline.’ As each rule is broken – not always by accident – surprising consequences ensue. Readers are invited to decide for themselves what is really happening, and why. Silent crows look on as transgressions accrue, building toward an ominous climax.

While at first this might seem a book for children, I'm more broadly interested in the universal themes governing any intimate relationship regardless of age, gender or background, from siblings to best friends, co-workers and partners. The private universe of imagination and conflict that can exist here so often defies explanation and is, I think, best represented as a kind of shared dream.

This project has been developed as a book initially published by Lothian/Hachette, and was also developed as an app for iPad that I worked on as a creative director, in collaboration with Sxip Shirey, and experimental sound artist and musician from NYC and the company We Are Wheelbarrow. For technical reasons the app is unfortunately no longer available, although it won awards and was well reviewed (inquiries welcome from any company interested in acquiring assets.) You can read an account of its development here.

 For more information about the book, including some video commentary and teacher's notes, visit Hachette's Rules of Summer Site.

Comments on RULES OF SUMMER

September 2013

I tend to refer to the central characters in Rules of Summer as brothers, even though we know little about their relationship in the book. It’s a story about any kind of partnership, able to be read on a metaphorical level, and earlier versions of the story involved teenage or adult characters, as well as male and female characters. ‘Brothers’ was a helpful way to describe the characters of my own imagination, since I grew up with a close relationship to one older brother and there are some autobiographical elements, drawing upon childhood memories of growing up together in suburban Perth.

Like many of my picture books, Rules of Summer had a long gestation over several years, and changed forms a number times. One version was quite comic-book like, telling a very specific story over some 80 pages. Another broke off into several narratives, eventually evolving into Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008), which explains why that anthology contains some stories narrated by two brothers. The final book, completed in 2013, reverts to one of my earliest concepts, a short sequence of pictures showing two people in odd situations, without any explanation. It begins with  a huge, menacing red rabbit and the line ‘Never leave a red sock on the clothesline’ as one initiating concept.

Each picture might be seen as the chapter of an unwritten tale that can only be elaborated in the reader’s imagination, something that suits the picture book medium very well. The simple word-and-picture format roughly follows another book of mine without a clear storyline, The Red Tree, and in some ways the two might be considered companion volumes: where The Red Tree is about the strangeness of an individual’s inner life, Rules of Summer is (for me at least) about the strangeness of any intimate partnership – it cannot be adequately explained to the third party. But we can all imagine our own versions, our own meanings, conflicts and resolutions.

In the notes below, I’ve commented on individual pictures, attempting to explain the ideas behind each one, both initial inspirations and some more reflective thoughts after completing a picture. It’s important to note that I don’t often understand what a work ‘means’ until quite late in a creative process, and don’t track my inspirations consciously either.  I’m mainly guided by the feeling that something is just very interesting on an emotional level, more so than an intellectual one. It can be very interesting for me to then think about them a little more, some time after everything has been painted and written.

Cover Illustration: Grassland

This image that came to me very quickly and intuitively, partly in response to my editor, Helen, suggesting I should paint something that gives the feeling of ‘high summer’. I spent a lot of long, very hot childhood summers wandering with my brother and friends through West Australian landscapes, either on holiday in the country or at home in our still mostly undeveloped coastal suburb. It felt like a very static and eternal place and, in hindsight, even a bit primeval or mythological. We were always finding bits of junk and playing with them, as people often dumped cars, busted white goods and TVs in bushy fields or dunes, so that memory partly informs the image of junk lying in grass, out of which something unexpected might be constructed or played with (not recommended, like many childhood experiences of that time!)

The distant crow or raven appearing throughout this book, which also appears in a lot of my other paintings and stories, was a common sight within this landscape. The Australian Raven has a particularly long and drawn-out call, often quite unnerving, like an animal dying of thirst or experiencing an existential crisis; ‘waaaaaaah!’ I’ve always been fascinated by these birds, gliding and hopping about electrical wires like omnipresent observers of all human folly.

The factory in the distance is an interesting element too, suggesting a kind of industrial world operating at the margins. I think it relates to having grown up in a world where nature is always compromised, it’s not a ‘pure’ landscape, but there’s still beauty in all these things, and the residual junk it leaves behind. I realised much later that this image might have been partly influenced by the well-known Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World of a lonely girl lying in a field, looking away to a distant house (which also helped inspire Terrence Malick’s film Days of Heaven, the atmosphere of which appeals to me). Wyeth’s image feels like one moment in an unknown narrative: simple, unsettling and hard to explain. Those are qualities that to which I often aspire with my own images.

The mechanical creatures here appear later in the painting ‘Never be late for a parade’. I imagine this scene as a bit of a prelude. The older brother has made his first mechanical companion while the younger brother is still playing with found parts, either because of a shorter attention span, a lack of expertise, or that he just doesn’t understand the peculiar rules, whatever they might be in this instance. He has yet to figure out his place in the world, and is for the moment little more than a bemused, innocent eye. He looks directly at the reader, the only time this happens in the book, inviting us to make sense of something fundamentally irrational. The debossing (indentation) of the eye’s pupil on the hardback cover is a way of drawing some attention to the viewpoint of the unseen younger brother. 

Never leave a red sock on the clothesline

This was one of the first images conceived for the book, before I knew what it might be about. I originally sketched children cowering behind a fence, hunted by a big black dog, but the familiarity of fairytale wolves felt too ‘loaded’, so I transformed the antagonist into a big rabbit. This actually feels more unsettling to me than a wolf – a soft herbivore miscoloured, and turned predator.

An earlier version of this image was published as the cover for a comics collection Flinch, published by Gestalt in Perth, set in a leafy suburb. The landscape later evolved into something more industrial, not unlike the inner Melbourne suburbs where I currently live. The red sock adds a mysterious narrative to the picture and offering a natural (if inexplicable) title; and when it came to colouring the rabbit, a deep crimson felt right. It’s not necessarily a demonic rabbit, but might be part of a local mythology known only to these boys. All you know is that it’s probably not a good thing.

The water tank and building are compositional details that suggest a fairly dry and bleak backyard (reminiscent of my Australian grandparents’ vast yard in the suburb of Myaree), and I think there is a sense of drought when looking at this picture. The light illuminates the space but also seems to trap the figures, pinning them down like insects to a board: nobody can move. It’s like some kind of terrible deadlock, punctuated by restrained breaths and heartbeats, each waiting for the other to make a move. The biggest risk is that the younger boy can’t keep his mouth shut. I think this general feeling of domestic strife is open to all manner of interpretation.

Never eat the last olive at a party

This is a scene I’ve been sketching for some years, and probably has something to do with a personal anxiety about formal parties. I was particularly moved to paint it after attending the Oscars in 2011, the year our short film ‘The Lost Thing’ received an award. In LA I frequently had the strong feeling of being completely out of place and worrying about social mistakes, even though the environment was fascinating and exciting. The atmosphere in this painting is inviting too, but it’s also intensely claustrophobic, and the stillness of the falcons – like the rabbit – suggests the possibility of sudden violence. Like most of the pictures in the book there are these internal tensions between things that are pleasurable and painful, bright and dark, funny and sombre, and these opposites typically guide all of my image development.

The brightness of the table and plates is inviting, and I wanted to paint them to look ‘delicious’ even though they are empty. I also spent a lot of time trying to get the background lighting right, a kind of smoky, sparkling recession into a possibly infinite ballroom. The eyes of the falcons are the blackest parts, reflecting the lights of the room with a crystalline sharpness. I did not want to anthropomorphize the falcons too much (an earlier sketch had them holding wine glasses which I later removed), I like the way these birds naturally look, not particularly evil or calculating. As with many animals, it’s just impossible to know what they are thinking, a mystery I find always alluring. They remind me of barristers in a courtroom (from my one experience of jury duty) silently passing judgement, enjoying a certain superiority and contemplating when best to strike; a little inspiration here also came from 19th century French artist Honore Daumier’s satirical paintings of lawyers and other contemporaries in high office.

Never drop your jar

The ‘fishing scene is another I’ve been playing with for years in sketchbooks, originally just as scenes of people fishing the sky, often at night. It’s based partly on childhood memories of catching migrating prawns from under a traffic bridge in the regional town of Mandurah, WA. My parents loved catching all kinds of fish, mussels, octopus, squid, crabs, and almost all of our family holidays were fishing trips. The prawn catching was particularly strange and meditative, scanning a black river for telltale pinpricks of light (prawn eyes) and occasionally catching other small iridescent fish by accident, a quiet world interrupted only by trucks rumbling overhead. The inversion of this feeling into a daylight ‘ocean’ accessible from precarious urban structures – here water tanks from New York City, which I loved photographing on the occasions I’ve visited – feels like a natural transition.

Most outings with my brother involved local rock fishing, and he was always the better angler. I was often snagging my line, dropping fish or jamming my reel, and Paul would have to stop and help me, which could be particularly inconvenient when the fish were suddenly schooling. In the painting, the older brother has the wisdom to tether his jar. His less competent brother is left to his own problems and regrets. He should have been more careful! The separation of tanks suggests a kind of distant intimacy that many brothers might recognize: you can be completely together in your separateness by sharing a common activity.

The creatures in the sky were inspired by kite festivals held on wide beaches. They make me think of sea animals that have taken to the air to enjoy a fleeting, almost immaterial existence. I imagine these creatures swimming on tides of air more delicately than butterflies, dangerous and difficult to catch and preserve. As with other pictures, I tend to imagine this scene as a hot summer afternoon; you might hear the popping of iron sheets and baking concrete, snarling peak-hour traffic below. But the things migrating across a bottomless blue sky are cool and languid, swimming far above it all, and just out of reach.

Never leave the backdoor open overnight

I always love images of external nature intruding into domestic spaces, there’s something very interesting in a psychological way about this rupture in the order of things. Think of the bedroom jungle in Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ or Van Allsburg’s ‘Jumanji’. I often wonder when I go to bed if I remembered to lock the back door, so it’s fun to imagine the most absurd consequences of not doing so.

Why the prehistoric plants and animals? I’m not entirely sure. In part it’s taken from pictures in books about fossils that my brother kept in his room – he loved paleontology, and was only interested in the most ancient crustaceans and shellfish. The way paleontological book illustrations and museum dioramas are traditionally presented look slightly religious to me, as if they are modern creation stories. So in the painting, the open door seems to have triggered a genesis of sorts – life forms have only started to evolve, the door having been open for just one night after all, as if nature is colonizing the lounge-room from scratch. Things are growing, metamorphosing, creeping, crawling, spawning, and lounging about, all quite at home in this sheltered little Eden. It’s either wonderful life or a big mess, depending on how you look at it.

The annoyance of the older brother suggests that it’s the little brother’s fault: more so for having been previously warned to check the door. And somebody has to clean it all up. Originally the younger brother held a mop and bucket, but I realised a shovel might be more effective as the embankment of material enlarged over subsequent sketches.

Never step on a snail

At first glance, I think the picture ‘Never step on a snail’ is simply amusing, a bit like a cartoon with a caption. But the concept of an irrational world governed by arbitrary rules is one that children especially can appreciate. Reality is so full of surprising inconsistencies, and this might explain a human vulnerability to superstition, such as the fear of stepping on a pavement cracks or breaking a mirror. Within such warped notions of causality is a deeper awareness of one’s own basic ignorance, of never really knowing how the world works. Even for an adult, there are often disproportionate consequences following innocent actions, from social gaffes to car accidents. Ideas of fault, blame and guilt follow, but it’s hard to absolve regret about something that’s actually blameless, or deal with the frustration of a law that’s either unknown, entirely illogical or both, like a snail-avenging tornado.

I spent a lot of time with this painting adjusting the colour of the sky, originally it was dark and brooding as would be normal with an approaching twister, but there was something appealing about the cheerful blue behind the black tornado that emphasizes the absurd quality of the event (and this sometimes happens in real life storms, the surrounding weather can seem perfectly fine). Looking also at the trees, it’s as if everything in the landscape is very still, quiet and sunny, the funnel all the more supernatural, selectively destroying a particular house. There’s some suggestion that the drama of a tornado is not entirely unwelcome in this place of repetitive lawns and architecture. And a thrill in knowing that a small action can so easily trigger a disaster. The transgression, the crushed snail, may not have been accidental.

As for the relationship between the snail and the tornado, it rests only on similarity and contrast. They both have a spiral forms, but moving in completely different time universes: a slow and gentle uncoiling versus high-speed carnage. And of course playing with scale shifts between big and small things, as with many other pictures in this book, is always fun. A wily crow looks on from the sidelines, only interested in the next mistake. As with many paintings in this book, I’m interested in how words and pictures can build an interesting context for each other: the text refers to an invisible snail, the picture is dominated by an unmentioned tornado. Neither word nor image actually explain one another, yet they are inseparable parts of the same idea.

Never be late for a parade

While the younger brother works away at his ‘robot’ companion, the eldest is always far more advanced when it comes to this kind of alchemical engineering. This image is a leftover from an earlier version of ‘Summer’ which was more of a comic-book story about two kids competing to create ‘better’ friends. I wondered: if kids had the ability to construct lively beings out of junk, how quickly might it dissolve into power games, jealousy and corruption? I think this image could also be read in a number of other ways – the main element being that the older brother refuses to wait for the younger one, and, more deeply, the idea that fun and the anxiety of missing out on fun so often exist side by side.

The nature of these creatures and their ‘parade’ is open to imagination. I based them on my study of old tin-toys; clattering, rigid and a little awkward, but full of weird character. I wanted them to look more like wind-up puppets than robots – more shell than substance. Two of the machines / animals are waving to each other, so there is a sense of kinship, maybe achieving some independent thought or feeling. Each creature is meant to look as if it has a very specific personality.

The suburban setting is very important, though I’m not sure why – it could just be that it looks like a place from some childhood memory. A peaceful, uneventful place. I was very interested in the brightness of the lime-yellow hill upon which the younger brother is working, and the strange darkness of the sky (almost approaching night), which adds a surreal effect, an ominous discord to an otherwise whimsical afternoon.

Never ruin a perfect plan

The composition of this painting is a rough reversal of the previous one, ‘Never be late for a parade’, and also shifts from day to night for visual contrast. In the previous painting, the boys are on their way somewhere, and in this one they are hoping to leave as quickly and quietly as possible.

The image of a giant strawberry is one I’ve often played with in sketches and paintings. It has a kind of elemental joy that appeals to all senses – better than any gold or holy grail because you can eat it. But the circumstances of the painting are intentionally mysterious. I don’t know what the creatures are, what exactly the boys are doing, nor their reasons, except that it likely involves some kind of theft (or rescue?) using home-made disguises. For me what this picture is really about is the younger brother making a mistake as a result of trying too hard. This trope would be familiar to many, repeated in adventure stories from The Wizard of Oz (sneaking into a castle as a witch’s guard, but with a tail poking out), Star Wars (sneaking into the Death Star as a stormtrooper, but the wrong height), Lord of the Rings (sneaking into Mordor as an orc, very awkwardly, being a hobbit). One’s cover is always broken or sacrificed at a critical moment. The same idea appears in so many fables, trickster tales and myths. It’s also a broader a metaphor for many situations in life where we must pretend to be someone other than we truly are, either for altruistic or selfish reasons, or simply not knowing what else to do. In this case, for the purpose of getting your hands on a once-in-a-lifetime giant strawberry.

As an illustration, it’s most effective in implying drama outside of its own moment. We can speculate that a lot of things may have happened up to this point, and a lot more are likely to follow as the duo make their escape. Here is just one snapshot of a much larger adventure, as implied by the steps and path leading in and out of the picture. It’s up to the reader, as usual, to tell the larger story in their own imaginations.

Details to point out: the scattering of bones on the ground add a sense of real peril that felt missing from earlier sketches. The guarding creatures brandish a knife and fork, so maybe they belong to a dark culinary empire (which happens to have the best, freshest ingredients – a ‘forbidden fruit’ idea familiar to many tales, from the Bible to Hansel and Gretel). The stone steps descending without rails seem to be part of a larger building from which a warm light is cast, probably a vaguely religious temple, and the avenue of cypresses in the distance might adds to this impression. Careful framing gives us minimal information, just enough to pique speculation. The autumnal landscape contrasts with the vibrancy of the strawberry, and grey moonlight always gives me the impression of an alternate, surreal world, the flipside of daytime reality.

Never give your keys to a stranger

What originally began as the novelty of making an unusual new friend took a sinister turn once the younger brother was sketched outside the loungeroom, watching TV through a window, which is for some reason a very evocative concept for me, that hard division of inside and outside worlds. The big cat-person, wearing a suit and relaxing as if at the end of an ordinary working day, is very open to interpretation. It may have been inspired by the fact that most of my youth spent on a couch has involved a cat nearby, although more recently this has been a parrot and a budgie (drawings of rooms with big parrots or budgies recur in my sketchbooks too) and now a boston terrier. In any case, like other animals in the book, you can never know what a cat is thinking, they are nothing if not enigmatic.

Clearly the new guest has displaced the younger brother, either casually or aggressively, we can’t say where the fault lies exactly. That’s further complicated by the sentence ‘never give your keys to a stranger’, so it’s quite possible that the cat-person was originally invited by the younger boy. The older one does not appear to mind one way or the other, which may be the most significant failing, either an accidental or deliberate obliviousness. I also like the impression that the older brother may be mesmerized in some way by the television (the programming of which is another mystery – a special cat show?) but the fact that the boy’s shadow has become catlike might suggests a slightly sinister psychological immersion. Whether that is voluntary or not remains also unknown; for me these ‘blanks’ are the most interesting part of any narrative image; they feel familiar to me without offering any explanation.

Never argue with an umpire

The guiding concept for this illustration is the way older siblings often enjoy controlling gameplay: both the choice of a game and its rules, which can be easily modified ad hoc and subject to the whim and benefit of senior players. At the same time, it’s also about the way that younger siblings voluntarily participate in such games, even when defeat is inevitable. Claims of unfairness may follow, but too late to be of any consequence. The winning or losing of games can often be particularly intense emotional experiences in childhood, and probably lays some groundwork for equally convoluted adult politics, especially at the highest levels.

A secondary concept involves the invention of a doppelganger, the fantasy of literally making a new friend, in this case, from mechanical parts, powered by a car battery, an ‘improved’ model of the younger brother, given it has the same colour and shape. Is the robot a better player, or has the older brother been constantly revising the rules of the game to favour the machine, as evidenced by complicated chalk marks on the ground? Either way the result is the same: complete power can be exercised with the cool remoteness of an umpire. A yellow flag, a comfortably high chair, a megaphone to drown protest. No physical exertion necessary.

The brooding background is as interesting to me as the foreground, as I’m often inspired by landscapes full of big electrical wire arrays, especially over desolate country. Aside from often being simultaneously beautiful and ugly, they suggest a fringe universe of industrial sub-consciousness beyond suburbia, largely unseen. I imagine a pervasive electrical hum and other noises of a cruder analog technology; I also imagine the smell of overheated old TVs and bitumen on a hot summer afternoon.

This painting also draws some influence from the Australian artist Jeffrey Smart, himself perhaps influenced by American artists Edward Hopper and Charles Scheeler and Surrealists such as De Chirico. These painters excel at amplifying the stillness and disquiet of painted landscapes, particularly in urban spaces with brooding skies. Characters often seem trapped on a vast stage, playing out singular actions for eternity.

Details to note: the very distant crow again looking on from the highest point (almost as if it is the real umpire here). The robot boy has very rigid joints, you can’t imagine moving very gracefully, more like those tennis-ball launching machines. Its head is covered with electronic eyes looking in all directions, and slightly steaming / smoking; its hands are graceless C-clamps. The cables in its back lead back to a large battery, which is kept near the older brother. At one point I had the older brother holding the battery or even controlling the robot with a joystick, but this was visually too complex, and metaphorically too direct. But I do feel that the older brother has built this machine himself with a particular purpose in mind – to win! Even if it means orchestrating a situation of artificial ‘fairness’. Anyone growing up with a sibling knows well what this is all about.

Never forget the password

A a simple contrast between soft golden light and grey buildings, inside and outside, with a small portal in between (very similar ideas are presented in my picture book and film The Lost Thing, a utopian world within a drab city).

The experience of denied access is familiar to everyone, and it’s particularly galling when it comes from a sibling who, for whatever reason, is lucky enough to have the upper hand, the ultimate petty bureaucrat, taking pleasure in being arbitrarily punitive. It’s a darker turn  in the narrative, a sense that the older boy wilfully mean rather than oblivious or impatient. The younger boy finally ‘asks for a reason’, and of course there isn’t one, at least not a just one. This naturally leads to a fight.

When painting this picture I’d been reading reports by early European visitors to the coast of New Zealand, describing a massive ‘dawn chorus’ of birdsong coming from the forest (relatively silent now due to rats and other introduced animals). I imagined this walled garden as a secret Eden of small birds and insects, a place of peace and enlightenment. In early concept sketches  for Rules of Summer, a similar space featured a birthday party, the young boy refused entry for forgetting to bring a gift. On balance this idea seemed too similar to the ‘parade’ image and I wanted something more open to interpretation. The focus remains on a place you might desperately wish to visit, but never can. I’m reminded here of a H.G. Wells short story that left a strong impression on me as a young reader, ‘The Door in the Wall’, about a man who spends his life trying to locate a lost green door he once opened as a child to witness ‘immortal realities’. A similar idea recurs, I’ve noticed, in many of my stories, including Rules of Summer

Never ask for a reason

A fight, a sudden, violent climax. The boys are animated yet surrounded by passive spectators, creatures standing still like puppets without masters. The resemblance to a campfire in a deep black night is intentional: an immediate feeling of heat, a following feeling of isolation in a silent wilderness.

I’ve often looked at a Goya painting of giants buried knee-deep in a landscape swinging clubs at each other, deadlocked in eternal, pointless battle, the meaning of which is unclear. Images of small figures fighting in vast, strange landscapes also feel biblical, or more broadly, mythological.

Here, all the entities from previous adventures have come to observe the conflict in a kind of bewildered silence. In earlier sketches I had the various creatures falling apart or walking away, as if the magic of a shared imagination has dissolved, but I felt there was something too obvious about this. I preferred a more subtle sense of playfellows fading from reality, all the desaturated to the same brownish hue, weakly illuminated within a greater enveloping darkness. The game is coming undone.

Train sequence: Never lose a fight. Never wait for an apology. Always bring bolt cutters.

Beginning with ‘Never lose a fight’ and ending with the rescue scene, ‘Always bring bolt cutters’, this set of paintings form a clear sequence, unlike the episodic imagery preceding. It’s as if the story has stalled once the boys have fought and been separated, and sinks into darkness. It does not progress back to light until they reunite. In fact the boys become gradually invisible for the first time. The older boy steps off-stage completely, and the carriage transporting the younger boy recedes into the darkness of a disintegrating landscape, almost slipping off the page. A kind of nothingness takes over, ushered by a murder of crows. Winter quickly replaces summer, so here the seasonal concept becomes especially relevant in these paintings.

The ‘crown’ scene – ‘Never Lose a Fight’ – was a key starting point for the book as a whole, the idea of an older brother selling a younger one to some shadowy merchants in a moment of weakness, a story I’d been writing in sketchbooks for years. The crown itself does not figure strongly elsewhere; originally I had the older boy give it to the younger at the end, but then realised the crown is not relevant to their relationship. It’s more of a distraction, a symbol for selfish victory, since the idea of a king has little to do with partnership or shared privilege. There is also a sense that the boys have crossed into a ghost-city: a hollow, empty version of their more familiar environment. Maybe it’s the world of crows, a backstage mirror of the human plane, with dull buildings and silent chimneys; or at least a train station that belongs to them: readers may notice a crow embossed on the pediment.

The strange train, like a carriage and engine fused into an elemental form was inspired by news images of cars covered in volcanic ash. It seems built only for the purpose of incarcerating a passenger, and has an unsettling resemblance to fairytale ovens. Crows, ovens, crowns and contracts: familiar Grimm’s tropes with a post-industrial twist. It’s not clear what the older or younger boy is thinking, but it’s possible that both characters are somewhat resigned to an inevitable situation. Neither are particularly enthusiastic or resistant.

The crows themselves are, I think, a kind of neutral presence, neither good nor evil. Like real crows, they are adept at exploiting opportunities. We don’t know why they want the younger brother, and it’s important that this narrative remains open. My own feeling is that these painted crows prey on negative emotion, and drawn to suffering and loneliness, contrasted with their own bustling flock. The repetition of so many black angular forms against a colourless landscape suggests vacuousness, a loss of individuality, creativity or purpose, the dissolution of all things that make life interesting.

The first long ‘white’ landscape is for me like a world bleached, bones in the sun, an empty set all actors have left, or fading from memory. In the following image, darker, ash-coloured drifts are burying the remnants, the atmosphere airless and lunar. In the final image, a total darkness threatens to swallow everything completely, and there’s a suggestion the explanded flock of crows may well stretch on to infinity.

The final rescue is implied more than illustrated, but you can imagine quite a dramatic maneuver, breaking the padlock and transferring the prisoner from a blindly rushing train that’s unlikely to stop. The beauty of illustration lies in not showing these things. The crows scatter voluntarily – they don’t fight – perhaps this event is also inevitable to them, as it may be for the boys. We might wonder if the older boy has been trailing the train on his bike all along , at least I like to think so. The image of a completely dark world illuminated only by small headlights or torches has always been particularly appealing to me, and one I return to often in my drawings, paintings and written stories.

Always know the way home

This painting, one of the earliest images imagined for the book, is largely inspired by a recurring dream I used to have as a child. It involved walking home from school (either alone or with my brother) and then suddenly noticing it was the middle of the night and nobody else was around, no house or streetlights, no sound, and even after walking for hours we were no closer to home. It came with a dreadful feeling of complete stillness, of being left behind by life. This painting, however, is far more hopeful than frightening. The boys look small and vulnerable, but they are secure in their togetherness and purpose, and the road home is clearly marked. They just need to keep moving, to stay together, and eventually they will reach the dawn light.

In some ways this landscape is an extension of the crow universe, except that it might have more to do with the boys’ inner fears, an emotional graveyard of previously failed adventures. Earlier sketches involved a backyard strewn with half buried and burnt toys and domestic objects, or just piles of exposed landfilll that accumulate as a result of ordinary living.

The objects here are very stream-of-consciousness and not especially symbolic. A huge animal skull, gutted institutional buildings, a crashed warplane, bombs, machine parts, craters, and spiky growths. In hindsight, I think there is some similarity with landscapes of World War I, such as those depicted in paintings by British artist Paul Nash (which I studied at university) as well as photographs of landscapes devastated by mining and other environmental degradation. The photographs of Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes are particularly inspirational here, and less consciously, The Isle of the Dead by 19th century Symbolist Arnold Boecklin. The colour of the image is a little unnatural, a bit poisonous and mineral, in contrast to the more organic blush of light on the horizon. It’s a borderland between life and death, with all the grim beauty that might entail.

Never miss the last day of summer

Two boys ascending a bottomless ladder against a dark, faceless wall, arriving in a sunlit landscape of giant fruit and cakes where the most natural thing to do is march with musical instruments. The melody is inaudible, and the boys are small like ants on a picnic rug. Like many Australians, I have strong memories of the last days of long summer holidays, and the more regular wistful atmosphere of late Sunday afternoons, wanting to extend indefinitely the slanted light of a sinking sun.

The image of a fruit landscape developed from earlier sketches in notebooks, involving two children improvising an imaginary festival, marching between colossal teacups, riding on the back of a large cat as it prowls across suburbia at night, or simultaneously exposed and hidden. This has something to do with the scale a private universe between two very close people, it’s both big and small. No other person is likely to notice it, and even if they do, it will escape their understanding. The colourful burst of fruit, flowers and cake also implies impermanence – this precious moment will not last, and is all the more precious because of it.

As for the brothers, the youngest is now heading the procession on horn, and the oldest is supporting with a drum. I later painted a title illustration in which these roles are reversed. The little brother, struggling with the oversized drum, has dropped a stick while the older one marches on. This give an important context to the final spread: the older boy has, perhaps, learned to make allowances for the younger one, including the privilege of leading the tiniest of processions.

That’s It

This is arguably the only realistic (instead of surreal) painting in the book, tuning things back to a more prosaic reality. All fantasy is relegated to children’s drawings pinned to walls, scattered on the floor, and some other fiction playing unseen on a television that glows unusually brightly, it’s not unlike a setting sun. Outside it is evening, and we can just see a crow take wing in the distance. An interesting point about this composition is that the sky would not be visible from this angle, so this maintains a slightly dreamlike feeling to an otherwise normal scene. It’s a quiet, low-key way to end a story, without flourish or message, the way I often like to do.

It’s also quite a personally nostalgic image. I probably spent most time with my own brother watching TV or playing computer games on a beanbag in the late 70s and early 80s. Much like the fishing mentioned earlier, this was an ideal way for two boys to spend time together. Although we might not have conversed much, we enjoyed another kind of communion of thought and feeling through television, games and books. This TV set also looks very much like our own from that time, a black and white tube which took about a minute to warm up with a high-pitched sound akin to tinnitus. You’d always hear the disturbing Dr Who intro music long before the image burned onto the screen.

In my memory this is the way most family conflicts would resolve. Not by overt apology or discussion, but instead we would just end up doing something together. The action itself was quite arbitrary, but revealed some deeper continuity or meaning, in a way that is quite hard to explain rationally. Pictures can sometimes summarise those unspoken feelings well. A musician friend, Sxip Shirey, who worked to develop a soundscape for the app version of this story (sadly no longer available) put it very well when he said that it’s like the TV ‘is singing a future memory of one another back to them.’ One thing I do like about picture books, and art in general, is the feeling of collapsed time that sometimes happens, where past, present and future come together. On reflection, this is not just a ‘story’ about childhood or even sibling relationships, but something more like a daydream about broader successes and failures that come with trying to understand our connections with other human beings.