'Eight is a plush toy octopus. He and Timmy have been together for a long time, and he is a special toy, the one that goes to bed with Timmy and sometimes even to school with him, too. They are almost inseparable. One day, Timmy and Mum and Dad go for a picnic in the national park, and Eight comes too. They go for a walk in the bush and a row on the river and play near the water.
'Suddenly it starts to rain, and Mum and Dad and Timmy gather all the picnic things together quickly and pack up and go home. It’s raining heavily now, but Timmy has a hot bath and something to eat and goes to bed. As the storm goes on outside, Timmy wakes in horror to find that Eight is not in bed with him. He must still be at the picnic spot in the national park! Timmy and his parents go to look for Eight the next day, but he is nowhere to be found. Timmy is sad to lose his friend, and wonders about what he is doing. Dad suggests that maybe Eight woke early, and made a raft and sailed down the river. What would he do if he met pirates, Timmy wonders.
'While Timmy returns to life without Eight, his toy has many adventures, which may be just in Timmy’s imagination, or not ... One day Timmy and Dad are down by the water again, and Timmy is looking in the shallows, finding interesting things. At first he finds a bucket which looks a little like one he has played with once before, and which Eight might even have used for a pirate’s hat. He sees something stuck in a mangrove and pulls out a very sodden Eight! They take him home for a spin in the washing machine and the clothes drier, and Eight is as good as new.
'Timmy feels now that his friend can sit on his shelf where the boy can see him, as Eight is big and strong enough and brave enough to sleep on his own.' (Publication summary)
Teacher's notes from publisher's website.
This is affiliated with Dr Laurel Cohn's Picture Book Diet because it contains representations of food and/or food practices.
| Food depiction |
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| Food types |
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| Food practices |
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| Gender |
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| Signage | n/a |
| Positive/negative value | n/a |
| Food as sense of place | n/a |
| Setting |
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| Food as social cohesion |
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| Food as cultural identity |
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| Food as character identity | n/a |
| Food as language | n/a |
'This chapter explores how Australian writers and illustrators in the twenty-first century depict the act of mothering in picture books for young children in relation to cooking and serving food. It draws on the idea that children’s texts can be understood as sites of cultural production and reproduction, with social conventions and ideologies embedded in their narrative representations. The analysis is based on a survey of 124 books that were shortlisted for, or won, Children’s Book Council of Australia awards between 2001 and 2013. Of the eighty-seven titles that contain food and have human or anthropomorphised characters, twenty-six (30 percent) contain textual or illustrative references to maternal figures involved in food preparation or provision. Examination of this data set reveals that there is a strong correlation between non-Anglo-Australian maternal figures and home-cooked meals, and a clear link between Anglo-Australian mothers and sugar-rich snacks. The relative paucity of depictions of ethnically unmarked mothers offering more nutritious foods is notable given the cultural expectations of mothers as caretakers of their children’s well-being. At the same time, the linking of non-Anglo-Australian mothers with home-cooked meals can be seen as a means of signifying a cultural authenticity, a closeness to the earth that is differentiated from the normalised Australian culture represented in picture books. This suggests an unintended alignment of mothers preparing and serving meals with “otherness,” which creates a distancing effect between meals that may generally be considered nutritious and the normalised self. I contend there are unexamined, and perhaps unexpected, cultural assumptions about ethnicity, motherhood, and food embedded in contemporary Australian picture books. These have the potential to inscribe a system of beliefs about gender, cultural identity, and food that contributes to readers’ understanding of the world and themselves.'
Source: Abstract.
'This chapter explores how Australian writers and illustrators in the twenty-first century depict the act of mothering in picture books for young children in relation to cooking and serving food. It draws on the idea that children’s texts can be understood as sites of cultural production and reproduction, with social conventions and ideologies embedded in their narrative representations. The analysis is based on a survey of 124 books that were shortlisted for, or won, Children’s Book Council of Australia awards between 2001 and 2013. Of the eighty-seven titles that contain food and have human or anthropomorphised characters, twenty-six (30 percent) contain textual or illustrative references to maternal figures involved in food preparation or provision. Examination of this data set reveals that there is a strong correlation between non-Anglo-Australian maternal figures and home-cooked meals, and a clear link between Anglo-Australian mothers and sugar-rich snacks. The relative paucity of depictions of ethnically unmarked mothers offering more nutritious foods is notable given the cultural expectations of mothers as caretakers of their children’s well-being. At the same time, the linking of non-Anglo-Australian mothers with home-cooked meals can be seen as a means of signifying a cultural authenticity, a closeness to the earth that is differentiated from the normalised Australian culture represented in picture books. This suggests an unintended alignment of mothers preparing and serving meals with “otherness,” which creates a distancing effect between meals that may generally be considered nutritious and the normalised self. I contend there are unexamined, and perhaps unexpected, cultural assumptions about ethnicity, motherhood, and food embedded in contemporary Australian picture books. These have the potential to inscribe a system of beliefs about gender, cultural identity, and food that contributes to readers’ understanding of the world and themselves.'
Source: Abstract.
