Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Coral Vass, Illustrated by Christina Huynh, NLA Publishing, $24.99.
What a remarkable way to tell your story to the world. Empathy and life experiences have also played big roles in shaping the illustrations of this book.
Coral Vass has created a beautiful story and Christina Huynh has made the most of the platform in which to tell her family story. She walks in her grandmother’s shoes to explore her refugee past.
It was while reflecting on an old adage about ‘walk a mile in someone’s shoes’ that Vass had the idea of using actual shoes as a motif to convey a refugee’s life story and a new beginning in Australia. It was also written to encourage Australian children to understand and appreciate the contribution of refugees in shaping this nation.
“They need to grasp a sense of the suffering and sorrow felt by Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s and give them a window into the anguish felt by many refugees even today.”
The story resonated with Christina in line with her own family’s story of coming to Australia. Their journey in boats and at refugee camps is hard to comprehend, but it’s easy to comprehend how scared it would have been to live through. They “realise how fortunate” they are today.
For children over three, there’s subtleness in the narrative, encouraging them to understand the plight felt by refugees. Through read-along, cadenced text and colourful images, we come to know Grandma has oodles and oodles of shoes!
Walking shoes, dancing shoes, fancy and plain, Grandma has a shoe for every occasion.
We follow Grandma from her home country, wearing her ‘roaming shoes and weary shoes’, on a boat with her ‘salty but free shoes’ and into her new life where she wears ‘tiny shoes, school shoes, red shoes and blue shoes’. Yet her memories are with the ‘scratched shoes in the cupboard’ and the ‘weary pair that led her here’.
So true are these words from the first president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela: “a fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world a better place we so passionately dreamt of”.
