Interview with Donna Rawlins, illustrator of My Place, children’s picture book
1. How did you conceive your ideas for the illustrations in My Place?
All of the illustrations, naturally, were led by the text. Sometimes people ask illustrators what came first, the story or the pictures. It is very, very rare that pictures come first, and often, when they do, the book doesn’t work.
For those periods of the story that were within my own lifespan, or fell into a period of my own family history, the pictures were easier to visualise.
My father was a photographer, and all of his family had been early adopters of the camera, so I had grown up with a very rich exposure to images of daily life, both rural and urban.
I grew up decades before digital cameras were invented, and as a child, I spent many hundreds of hours in my father’s darkroom, learning to develop photographs. They were, more often than not, other people’s family pictures and I have very strong childhood memories of feeling as though I was always peeking through a window into other family’s homes and lives.
It was like eavesdropping on people’s conversations. I felt as though I was a fly on their wall.
As a result of this, I developed a growing fascination for the stories embodied in family photographs, and to this day one of my greatest pleasures is poring over other people’s photo albums and visiting exhibitions of photography.
I had, before illustrating My Place, also been involved in many oral history and local history projects over the preceding years. One, with the ground-breaking oral historian, Morag Loh, was a history of Italian immigrants and their families. Hearing and reading their stories and seeing their lives through the precious photographs they had carried with them across the sea left so many powerful images lodged in my memory, and made me always hungry for more stories, both verbal and visual.
Gradually, over the years before working on My Place, I was moving more and more towards children¹s literature. I loved the medium of picture books, the marriage of art and text, and I could see it was the perfect place to discuss the ideas and beliefs I held about many aspects of Australia’s cultural history, primarily of the importance of indigenous culture and heritage, and the courage of immigrants and refugees.
I’d grown up with many fabulous children’s books, and I knew how much of what I’d learnt was thanks to the way they transported me into other people’s lives.
So, I’ve been lucky to have so many sources of real inspiration, all feeding into the toolkit I take with me into any new book.
In the end, though, an illustrator’s primary source of inspiration will always be the text at hand, and all one’s images must honour that and serve it as honestly and as best they can. Then, it's just the long haul of research. And there was a mountain of that!
2. What were your initial ideas and how did they evolve? Are there any preliminary sketches that you can show us?
This is an interesting question. This part of the process elicited a great deal of discussion with Nadia.
I always saw the pages as a kind of photo album. Nadia did as well; it was the way she presented the manuscript to me in a Spirex sketchbook. Well, not as a photo album, as such, but more in the structure of a kid’s scrapbook.
Originally, perhaps as a result of much of my visual memory being in monochrome because of my familiarity with my family’s photographs, I had very strong leanings towards a limited palette (a small range of colours).
An artist’s choice of colours isn’t just a matter of taste. It is usually driven more by an attempt to convey atmosphere and mood. Colours have come to symbolically represent feelings so, for example, cool colours, blues, greys, tend to symbolise sombre or sad feelings are reds, yellows and oranges feel more cheerful, joyful, summery and optimistic.
So, with this idea of a photograph album in my head, and equating all my historical memories of such things all in tones of sepia and black and white, I set out making the preliminary drawings on coloured papers.
The coloured paper, for me, represented the aged pages of an old album or book. And, I knew, too, how colour can really create impact. Young artists know that too. We all know if we want to make a scary picture, working on black or dark paper creates instant atmosphere and sends a message to our viewer.
I envisaged the period covering the Great Depression all being in muted greys and blues to represent the enormous sadness and difficulty of people¹s lives then. (My parents had grown up during the depression and so much of my received knowledge of this period had come from hearing theirs and others stories of their lives then, how their families had struggled to put food on the table.)
I explained my approach to Nadia in one of the many hundreds of discussions we had making the book. And, then, very wisely, Nadia made a comment that turned my whole approach around. She said that my vision of portraying these children’s lives with such a shadow of sadness was based on the knowledge of hindsight. She meant that I was planning to tell the story with an adult’s interpretation, and not, as I should be telling it, from the child’s point of view. She said, quite rightly, that the child living through such times has nothing else to compare their life to, and that for them, their childhood was golden. It was so true. A child living through a depression or war knows nothing else. They are not seeing their lives as an adult, with all their worries might see it. Of course she was right.
From that moment on, my approach to each image moved in a much warmer, more joyful and child centred direction. And, of course, this was not only liberating, but far more truthful to the text.
I was very lucky, to have in Nadia, an author with an astute visual literacy. By that, I mean that, like me, Nadia was always acutely aware of the power of messages that are conveyed visually, and, like me, as well, forever ready to wrestle with the nuances, the shades of meaning, of an image. We were always testing our ideas for the images as rigorously as we discussed every word.
Working collaboratively like this with someone who has the same vision for a project is a great experience. I have many happy memories of the countless long and involved conversations we had and how we always hung up feeling like we’d had a really great meal!
One of my favourite memories was of the character of Miss Mueller / Miller. Both Nadia and I had become very attached to her over so many decades. I remember Nadia and I both agreeing that she should live just one more decade and then, just another, and another. So we just didn’t want to part with her!
***** (I think the bulk of the working images are held on loan at Dromkeen in Melbourne. I will endeavour to locate these.)
3. How did you choose the medium for the illustrations and why did you choose it?
There are probably several answers for this question.
On a purely technical level, I had been using coloured pencils in most of my previous books and felt most comfortable in this medium.
I am always much more comfortable with a drawing tool in my hand than a paint brush. Most artists have a preference this way. (Even so, I now paint much more because after many years of exclusively drawing, sadly, I have done damage to my tendons. Young artist¹s beware of getting too locked into one way of working, and don¹t sit in front of that computer every waking hour!)
The second answer, perhaps, is a more important one, and that is that the medium an illustrator uses will never be as critical as what he or she chooses to put in the image, or leave out. The medium allows the artist to add intangible elements to the visual storytelling. It can allow the artist to choreograph the atmosphere and the mood, to give the image vigour, or dreamlike qualities, minute detail, or broad sweeps. But, in the end, the choice of the actual medium is secondary to the choices the artist makes about just what they want the images to convey and reveal. And, here, the role of the illustrator is that of a story generator, and the crafting of the images, especially in a book such as My Place, is more about telling stories, than creating a look.
The images for My Place needed to both create atmosphere (and feeling) as well as inform. And so, for me, the medium of pencil, with its capacity for detail, was a sensible choice. I could show the reader all the little details I wanted to portray. I could show the contemporary child reader just what a little girl in 1868 might have worn or what plants were growing before white people stripped the land back to bare paddocks.
The way an artist chooses to make an image is often, though, the least important factor. On the Sydney north shore just almost opposite the Sydney Harbour Bridge at a place now called Balls Head; there is one of the most eloquent images I have ever seen. It was carved into a flat rock by one of the Eora people, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years ago. It is a simple line carving of a man inside the belly of a very big shark. It is clear that this image says, Don’t even think about jumping in the water here or yo’¹ll be eaten by a shark! The style of the image is far less important than the content! But, now that I think about it, I imagine there were a lot of people who owed their lives to that artist’s choice of medium to carve that image permanently in stone so that it remained there as a constant reminder! I guess it was a better choice of medium than drawing it in the wet sand with a stick!
In the long run, it¹s all about making decisions about how you want to get your message across and choosing the right tool for the job, pencil, paint, or stone.
4. What is the meaning behind the cover design? How did you lay-out the text and the images to achieve balance and convey the story?
The cover illustration was a simple expression of the history within the book. That, if one peels away the contemporary, one finds the history beneath. I wanted the readers to know that wherever they lived, there was once a pristine landscape. As simple as that. For kids living in towns or cities, I know that it might sometimes be hard to imagine their familiar places as unspoiled bushland. But it was.
Neither Nadia nor I would have wanted to spell out a judgement about that. It is for the reader to discover that truth and make their own mind up about how they feel. We just wanted to make sure nobody forgot.
The layout of the pages was very much Nadia’s concept. Her manuscript was laid out in scrapbook/ photo album pages right from the outset, and that’s how each decade of the story arrived at my door. I didn’t ever know what was going to happen next. Nadia sent me a decade at a time, and like you, the reader, it was a revelation each time.
Nadia gave me a lot of latitude and allowed me the freedom to determine the order of the individual passages of each child¹s story, so the reader might notice that the priority each child gives to their pet, or party or family members changes from page to page, character to character.
5. Where did the ideas for the maps come from; through research &/or imagination? How were they sequenced over time?
The maps were entirely Nadia’s concept. She also did all of the primary research for these and wrote almost all of the captions and commentary for them. (I made some of the children’s comments, often slipping in a jokey message that I thought one of her cheeky characters might make.)
I was living very close to where the book was set while I was making the pictures. In fact, I had moved from Melbourne to Sydney to make the book. So, a lot of the streetscapes and topography was informed by the walks I did around the streets.
6. Did you use photographs of real people to model the identities of the main characters? Or how were they conceived and designed?
This is also another question that can have several responses. Some observers say that illustrators draw themselves. That is sometimes true. If there is a character in My Place who resembles me, it will certainly be Sofia in 1968. I don¹t look like Sofia, but I certainly wore those clothes so there¹s a bit of me in her, and when I lived in that era I was just Sofia’s age. So, not photographs buy memories!
But, when we do draw ourselves, it’s never really intentional. We just draw what we know and how we feel. Sometimes, when I’m with kids in a classroom, and we’re discussing what a particular character in a story might look like, without fail, almost every kid describes themselves!
I love that! Because what it tells me is that those kids see themselves as a character of that story. It tells me that the writer’s story has drawn them into that story world. And that’s how I feel when I read a story I love. I want to be in it.
I didn’t use photographs for my characters in My Place. I never do. I’m not enamoured of photo-realistic images. I feel that there is often a cold, wooden remoteness that can creep into images that are made this way. But, most of all, I don’t want my readers to be observers of some other kid’s story. I want my images to have enough open doors, that any kid can come in and be a part of the story.
But, I did use photographic references for such things as cars, which I am very, very bad at drawing because I just never practice, and if I don¹t have something to refer to. In the image of Sofia with her Beatles posters, I had to look at photos too.
Then, of course, all the drawings for the decades before 1868 (when the camera was invented) were all based on drawings, paintings and relics. So, for example, the fabrics of the dresses in 1868 were based on real remnants of cloth I saw in a museum.