The Bicycle

Save the Children, Colin Thompson et al,

HarperCollins, Australia: September 2011

ISBN: 9780733329876

Genres: picture book

Issues: education, hope, poverty

In many parts of Cambodia (and other countries), children are unable to go beyond primary school because the nearest high school is too far away. They cannot get there and back in time to attend school each day. Education is the road to a better future so Save the Children is giving such children a bicycle. As Thompson says in his introduction: 'that bicycle is the difference between a child spending their life unable to read or write and working hard just to survive, or becoming anything they want from a teacher to a doctor to the president of their country.'

Fourteen illustrators donated their creative efforts to the cause and the result is a beautiful book that celebrates both the simple joy that a bicycle can bring and the significant ways it can change the lives of children who have nothing. The great Quentin Blake has contributed his distinctive, joyful, energetic style to the cover.

Colin Thompson, who initiated the book and approached most of the illustrators, has contributed two illustrations, one of which is an adaptation of a complex double-page spread from How To Live Forever. The other is unattributed but those who are familiar with Thompson's current style will recognise it – and the humour.

One of Sean Tan's darker, discomforting oil/acrylic paintings ends the book, an image that shows two children travelling (by bicycle) through a bleak, damaged landscape suggestive of war and deprivation. This final image shows that, with effort, a brighter destination is reachable – the path the children are travelling heads out of gray-toned despair to the colour and light of hope and change.

It is not hard for the reader to understand that humanity has a long way to go in helping the struggling amongst us along that path towards hope; but the images make clear that it is a journey made easier by small gestures of kindness. Of charity in the old sense of the word, where it once meant love.

All royalties from this book go to Save the Children, as they do with Dust which has, at time of writing, raised $250,000.