Plague by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley

Long ago, the men hunted kangaroo while the women ground the seeds from the grasses where the nymphs lived, and nearby the ibis worked the swamps. Things were balanced, not too many people, nor grasshoppers or ibis to eat them. But two hundred years ago, settlers came, cutting down the trees, clearing the swamps, planting vast crops. And so it was that the grasshopper numbers increased, the ibis had moved, and those vast farmlands were eaten away, even the green hoses and washing on the line were food for theses plagues of locusts.  Poison was sprayed from above, the locusts killed, but enough lay low for the next season. In the meantime, the land was poisoned, the animals and birds died.

The locusts can hear those from the past laughing at the attempts to kill them, and sometimes they hear sobbing. Those gone can see what an impact the poisons have had on the land and cry.

A hymn for the country, for people to think about how we use the land and the ramifications of our attempts to impose ourselves on the land, the story is one we see repeated over and over again, in the abuse of the rainforests, of the sea, of the rivers, each a black mark against human intervention. French wears her heart on her sleeve as she cries out for the land and its animals and birds, looking at the devastation from the grasshopper’s perspective.

Coupled with Wheatley’s magnificent watercolours, each page is an image that will live with the reader long after the book is closed.

I loved the grasses on the endpapers, and the study of the hands holding the dead hoppers, and the image of the little plane about to cause so much destruction, the wonderful detail of city life, complete with the raiding ibis … each page has a story in itself, giving many layers to French’s powerfully sparse words, which plead with us to listen to the land.

The destruction caused by colonisation meant not only were we giving plentiful food to allow the hoppers to breed, the draining of the swamps meant the ibis had to look for somewhere new to live, causing the plague of bin chickens seen in towns and cities around Australia.

A beautiful book to present to younger readers to encourage thinking about the land they live on.

See Jackie French reading the book and talking about the reasons behind the book here. 

Themes: Environment, Grasshoppers, Colonisation, Ibis, Australian history.

Fran Knight