Reviewed by Wendy Lipke
As I get older, I often think of the early years of my life spent at my grandfather’s holiday home across the Esplanade from the beach at Hervey Bay. The time spent on the beach building volcanos and preparing bonfires or walking along the sand, exploring rock pools or just swimming at high tide especially when there was a king tide, created great adventures. This was a place of freedom, learning about nature and using your imagination.
This book does the same thing. Alison Lester wrote her Magic Beach book over thirty years ago and it has now been brought to life on screen by director Robert Connolly (Paper Planes) and some of Australia’s leading animators. This latest Magic Beach book is not a true copy of the original publication but takes its own interpretation of the theme just like the film.
Alison Lester wrote Magic Beach in 1990, partly remembering what playing at the beach on the Victorian coast felt like as a child, but also after watching her own three children at the beach. The freedom children had back then can only be imagined in today’s society.
Stories from Magic Beach, is a beautifully presented hard covered, 22x28cm book which begins with a double page drawing of a family’s outing to the beach. A six-line verse accompanies this illustration. The remainder of the book is made up of six- to ten-page contributions from eleven animators. Each of these begins with a verse and photos of people enjoying the beach in their own way followed by extraordinary, animated adventures that bring you to a dreamy seaside world where anything is possible. They appear as storylines in comic form, some with dialogue but most without.
Some are based on legends, others are memories brought back to life, while others are on remembered observations. Towards the end of this publication information about each of those involved in presenting the children’s book in cinematic form can be found. The Guardian reported that ‘this film is about nature and creation, the amazing world around us and the art we use to reflect its awesomeness’, a good summation of what this book is about.
The main messages from Magic Beach will vary with the reader and their experiences. This book shows the power of the imagination, and how this can take you anywhere you want to go.
Stories from Magic Beach
The Book of the Robert Connolly film
by Alison Lester
(2025)
Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 978-176118-155-9
$29.99; 98pp