A war imagined: Gallipoli and the art of children’s picture books

The artists and authors who produce children’s picture books dealing with the First World War, and Gallipoli in particular, find themselves burdened by the expectation that they will balance a respect for this foundation myth with a ‘pity of war’ approach more in line with modern attitudes to conflict. Whatever their personal ideology, to meet these expectations many of them embrace the thematic imperatives of those who have already painted and written about Australians at war: the increasingly sentimentalised construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma, the providing of a moral lesson with many of the characteristics of a displaced Christianity and the traditional use of Australian war literature as an exercise in nation building.