Naturopolis is a narrative non-fiction picture book for kids aged 4+, parents, teachers… and anyone who loves to celebrate the myriad of life on this planet.
Among the steel and stone canyons of the city, nature flourishes in tiny, tenacious ways. Follow the ant (Iridomyrmex purpureus) to discover the scraps of wilderness hiding in plain sight in this lyrical celebration of urban flora and fauna.
Naturopolis is illustrated by Ingrid Bartkowiak and published by Storytorch. The lush images are full of tiny beautiful details to discover - exactly like the urban landscape itself. I’m so lucky that my first book is such a beautiful physical thing!
CBCA Award for New Illustrator - Shortlist, 2023
CBCA Eve Pownall Award (Information Books) - Notable, 2023
ABIA (Small Publisher Children’s Book of the Year) - Longlist, 2023
Nautilus Awards (Children’s Non-Fiction) - Gold, 2023
A warm and fun picture book with a spunky female lead, a grandma full of surprises, and all the glittery magic of Sydney Harbour. Illustrated by Cate James and published by Affirm Press.
Nanna is taking Charlie for a Girls' Day Out. They'll have high tea, watch the ballet, smell flowers and visit the Harbour Fairy. Charlie does not like the sound of a Girls' Day Out. And she especially hates fairies.
But the Sydney Harbour Fairy isn't what Charlie expected, and her Girls' Day Out with Nanna just got so much better.
A sparkling ode to imagination, grandmothers, and finding magic in unlikely places.
Contains:
murderous swans
toilet roll contraptions
not-at-all-dainty burgers
the biggest, noisiest, honking-est fairy you’ve ever seen
The Sydney Harbour Fairy book trailer
A story about cats and humans, immigration and identity, and homes lost and found.
Some cats are house cats. Some are apartment cats.
But Tinka is a truck cat. Tinka lives everywhere.
Along with his human, Yacoub, Tinka travels roads wide and narrow, near and distant. But no matter how much they travel, home feels very far away – for both of them.
Yacoub drives his truck to make a living, learning the landscape of a new country along the way, and longing for connection. When Tinka and Yacoub are unexpectedly separated, they are determined to find their way back to each other – and, in doing so, might find more than they expected …
The Truck Cat is illustrated (extraordinarily!) by Danny Snell and published by Hardie Grant (Bright Light).
Looking for Truck Cat resources? I’ve compiled as many as I can find here.
(Side note: if you know of any others, please let me know via my Contact page, and I’ll add them to the list!)
You can reach for anything
When you’ve reached 100 days.
When you start school, there are a lot of firsts. Your first friend! Your first excursion! Your first sports day! As the days go by, all those firsts add up … and soon you've reached 100 days of school.
I wrote this book as my daughter was in her first year of school and put a lot of her first experiences as a preppie in it: from the excitement of the practice excursion, to the joy of singing in a choir, to the extraordinary magic that happens when marks on a page turn into letters… and then words! And, of course, the utter pride when you get to celebrate your 100th day of school - complete with talcum powder hair and op shop old lady glasses and a gang of other 5-year-old centenarians.
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100 School Days is illustrated by Laura Stitzel and published by Affirm Press.
I’ve always thought’ ‘HMMM’ about how it’s no big deal for boys to have long, curly, crazy hair until about the age of 4… then it rapidly becomes for some reason A BIG DEAL INDEED.
Then the mutters of ‘shouldn’t he have a haircut like a big boy?’ begin. And hair that just does its long, growing, innocently hair-like thing becomes more than hair: it becomes a statement.
Anyway, that little HMMM became the starting point for this silly, joyful story.
It’s a story about being different.
About shame.
And boldness.
And community.
And hair, of course.
(Lots and lots of spectacular hair.)
Boldilocks will be out via EK Books in September 2025, illustrated by the brilliant Carla Hoffenberg. Yay!
If you’ve ever hung out with kids who are learning to read, you’ll know there’s this magical moment when the entire landscape suddenly becomes legible to them.
Wherever you go, there are words to decipher! STOP! NO SMOKING! COME IN WE ARE OPEN! HALF PRICE SALE! And especially TOILET, for some reason. (“Toilet toilet toilet! I read it, Mum! Toilet!!!! HAHAHAHAHA!”)
That was my starting point for How to Get Home - the realisation that the joy of literacy (and toilets) was calling, every time my kids and I left the house:
The world sings with words
Wherever we roam…
I decided I need to write a story that incorporated all these ‘found’ or ‘ambient’ words into the narrative. So in How to Get Home, we follow some kids heading home from school with their grandpa, with the signage they encounter along the way treated as part of the text. And this was where illustrator Karen Blair’s brilliance came in - she made the text I’d written make sense as both words and as signs situated within a visual narrative.
Hats off to Karen and the endlessly clever Affirm team for making it all work. This project felt a bit like picture book sudoku, and I’m so pleased we got our characters home safely and soundly, with words ringing around them on the way.
How to Get Home is out via Affirm Press on 30 December 2025 and is now available to preorder.
Photo credit:
Photo by Harvey Mandt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-western-swamphen-walking-on-the-water-5654272/
