Along the road to Gundagai by Jack O'Hagan
Ill. by Andrew McLean. Omnibus Books, 2014. ISBN 9781862919792.
(Age: All) Highly recommended. Folk song. War. War does not finish
when the final whistle blows, men are returning years later, the
effects of what they have been through apparent on their faces and
in the eyes of the grieving families. Jack O'Hagan, an Australian
musician, was 20 when World War One finished, and worked for Allen's
Music, playing sheet music for customers. In his career he wrote
some 600 songs, and one of the earliest was Along the road to
Gundagai, published in 1922, when he was 24.
Dyan Blacklock of Omnibus books gave this well known Australian song
to Andrew McLean, and his re-imagining it as a story of returning
home after the war is simply powerful. His research of Jack O'Hagan
led him to see the song in a different light, and any person reading
it with his evocative illustrations, will succumb to the emotional
pull of the words and illustrations he creates. McLean gives the
familiar words a new layer of meaning, a returning soldier headed
for home.
Historical film, illustrations and paintings, were used by McLean to
develop a series of paintings to illustrate the lines of verse.
Images of war cover double pages, whereas the others, giving an
impression of home, are often framed one to a page, the watercolour
and charcoal images accentuating the difference between war and
home.
McLean tells the story of his father as a postscript and this
combined with the scant information about O'Hagan,
will enable people to read this Australian folk song anew. It then
is impossible not to believe that O'Hagan wrote it after seeing the
men coming home from war. In a classroom or library the strands of
this evocative picture book can be mulled over, kids thinking and
talking of their ancestors' involvement in war, looking at the
history of war in Australia and how it is commemorated, discussing
the coming 100th anniversary of the start of World War One, and next
year, the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli. Many, many books have been
published recently predicting the rise in interest in this topic
within schools, but this is one that stands alone, taking as its
theme a known song and giving it a stunningly new perspective.
Fran Knight