Welcome!
I began work as a children’s librarian in 1977, and my last year of paid employment with that job description was 2017. I was inspired  early in my career by Dorothy Butler’s Babies Need Books to specialise in family literacy from birth to five.

During those forty years, I was also a stay-at-home parent, reviewer, editor and project manager – and, a reader. Always a reader.  I am lucky to live in Australia, where the best of the world’s picture books converge.

Working with the foundation team of Better Beginnings at State Library of Western Australia was a sublime culmination of all of these experiences and my first experience of being a published author when Nola Allen and I collaborated on the writing of a text for a board gift book for babies. Baby Ways appeared in 2006, and since then over one million families have received it in their baby’s first year of life.

Since 2017, I’ve published my own picture book called A Construction of Cranes with exquisite illustrations by Caitlin Ziegler, who also designed the whole book to be tall like a crane.

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As a reader, she is the manipulator of the physical object, which in turn manipulates her emotions, raises and satisfies her curiosity. She is the reader of words travelling through the text, but because it is a picture book, she is not required to make her own image of the fictional world, so she is not entirely a reader in the literary sese of the term. She is the beholder of the pictures, looking at what is depicted and being affected by the interwoven arrangements that meet her eyes. And there is the synthesis of the picture-book experience, with object, words and images uniting in the composite text – the work that exists only in her mind.

–JANE DOONAN IN LOOKING AT PICTURES IN PICTURE BOOKS