Written by Gary Crew, The Viewer (1997) tells the peculiar story of a boy whose obsession with curious artefacts leads him to discover an mysterious box at a dump site. It proves to be an ancient chest full of optical devices, one of which captures his interest; an intricate mechanism that contains cryptic scenes of destruction, violence and the collapse throughout history. The boy is afraid, but cannot help looking into the machine time and time again as the images shift and change…

*

The Viewer was the first picture book I illustrated, and developed from my intial meeting with Gary Crew, an Queensland writer and academic best known for mind-bending novels and picture books such as Strange Objects and The Water Tower. We soon realised common interests and tastes in science fiction, horror and illustrated fiction. We are also both artists and authors in different proportions; Gary originally wanted to be an artist, and I originally wanted to be a writer! 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.

 The Viewer was a much more collaborative project than most picture book creation, where there is often – and strangely – little direct communication between author and illustrator, something I was familiar with as an illustrator of many short stories and book covers. Usually a text is written and then given to an illustrator to consider, a process overseen by an editor. Gary and I discussed concept, imagery and book design together from the outset, before any text was written, along with our mutual editor, Helen Chamberlin at Lothian Books, then an independent publisher based in Melbourne.

Gary had a vague initial idea about a kind of corrupted Viewmaster toy, one that showed horrible scenes rather than the usual delightful ones; that there would be a circular motif involving disks and many small paintings instead of the usual picture book page layouts. The only clear concept either of us had at this beginning was actually what the cover was like - normally the last thing you worry about - that it would have holes in it and ‘hidden inner workings’ underneath, the book as a viewing machine. Gary also suggested that there was an extra-terrestrial element driving a mysterious narrative, and that it would have an unclear ending where the main character simply disappears, somehow zapped into oblivion.

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. This book has to be rotated halfway through, and is more visually suggestive than illustrative. Notably, Gary has been a strong advocate of picture books created for ‘older readers’ – essentially arguing that there is no reason for them to be only young children’s literature, since our interest in reading visual images does not decline with age.

So what actually is ‘the viewer’? My key contribution at the conceptual level was probably the suggestion that this dangerous device was not from outer space, but ‘home-grown’ terrestrial spookiness. It was some kind of time capsule that may have existed since the dawn of creation, in a box with many other artefacts that would be recognisable to people of different ages and periods - hence the fact that the viewer would emulate a children’s toy, and be picked up by a twentieth century suburban kid. The purpose of all these devices is essentially unknown – part of the attractive mystery of the story – but there are suggestions in the illustrations, full as they are of inscriptions, that the box containing them has passed through the hands of many different histories and cultures.

There are a few key ideas that emerge; that all the mechanisms work to record and re-play images of violence and death, especially the collapse of successive human civilisations, whether by natural disaster or self-destruction. The use of circles, spirals and other cyclical patterns through the illustrations emphasis the idea of life and death revolutions, that things are on one hand mortal and immortal in their patterns. There are numerous ancient symbols of this, such as the serpent biting its own tail, and the concept of time as cyclical, rather than linear, is historically much more dominant. The belief that civilisation progresses continuously is ultimately a temporary illusion; things either change radically or collapse, the current ecological crisis of our own age proves the case. Still we go on as if oblivious to the slow disaster unfolding before us.

In the story, Tristan becomes at once fascinated and horrified by this tiny theatre of horror, and absorbed in a much more literal sense – he gets somehow physically drawn into the machine. The reason for that is also an open question, although a careful study of the illustrations shows that each image ‘disk’ has a figure walking beneath every picture, carry a certain kind of visual device particular to their historical time: a caveman with a stick, an Egyptian scribe with a scroll, a medieval nun with a book, an Aztec chieftan with a telescope, a WWI nurse with a camera, a toxic-waste worker with a video camera. The idea was that these were anonymous people that had perhaps come across the box, and been entrapped by it and made to silently witness and record the disasters of their time. An image of each witnessing eye appears at the centre of each disk. At the end, Tristan’s own eye looks out from the centre of a blank disk, bearing witness to an uncertain future. Events such as climate change, pandemics, war and things yet to be named will inevitably ensue.

Some interesting details to look for in this book include a small comet that appears in the background of some images (the first square of each disk), as comets have often been regarded as bad omens, bringing great calamity and destruction (it also suggests a cosmic cyclical theme). A snail and beetle appear from time to time, as these are often symbols of death and renewal, the slow-moving spiral of the snail and a possible reference to ancient Egyptian scarabs. In the dump, there are reflections of skulls on some shiny surfaces, and many objects relate to subsequent images in a coded way (one reason why this landscape is so unnatural looking).

 The mechanisms around the boy’s eye as he watches the disks is quite elaborately worked out visually, though did not read clearly in print in the original edition. In 2011 I redesigned the book, given it was still in print, and the text was edited to accompany reproductions of illustrations closer to my original intentions in 1997. It’s now clear that different sections rotate and telescope inwards as the boy’s pupil dilates, so that eventually his pupil becomes that of a new big mechanical eye.

The design of the book itself is quite self-consciously mechanical, and unusually repetitious for a picture book with its seven ‘disk and eye’ compositions. One reason for this is that we wanted the book to emulate the machine, or the box it came in, so the physical turning of the page opens things up. In the above images, you can see how each page turn moves us closer to the universe of the viewing machine. There is an intended cinematic feel to everything also, from the gradual ‘zoom-in’ from the strange dump landscape to tiny mechanisms in the viewer, and one image actually leads into the next at the edges. There are a number of framing devices, such as an open window or broken TV, which suggest that we are always ‘looking through’ something (the book itself being another device). We are never able to see a broader reality directly, it always comes to us via technology. 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.

Tristan himself is never shown, and instead becomes simply a stand-in for ourselves as readers - the character is only really visible incidentally, as reflection or shadow, with the sense that the machine is watching him, rather than the other way around. One interesting thing to notice is that there are two images of Tristan’s room through the idle lens of the viewer or the box (which also has an eye in it). In the first image, his room is quite disorderly, and in the last it is unnaturally neat and tidy.

In retrospect, I’m not sure if many of these ideas actually work or are even noticeably to readers, as there’s always the danger that a work becomes far more meaningful to the creator than the receiver. One flaw of the book is that it’s perhaps too visually inventive for it’s own good, a common mistake of new picture book illustrators (I was 22 at the time). As a first picture book it was a valuable learning experience in partnership with a more experienced writer, seeing what works and what doesn’t in terms of continuity, detail and design. It does at least succeed to some extent in its purpose - to intrigue the reader rather than enlighten them.