Illustrator Jedda Robaard and author Johanna Bell, both Tasmanians, have won the 2024 Environment Award for Children’s Literature (EACL) in the Fiction and Picture Fiction categories respectively.

Robaard told Tasmanian Times that in winning the Environment Awards for Children’s Literature, she hopes that her book, The Littlest Penguin: and the Phillip Island Penguin Parade, “will travel far to share with future generations the sense of wonder I encountered”.

“[The book] will get more exposure and get a little bit more well-known, which means even more people learn about [little penguins and their habitat], which is great,” she said.

“There are still [little penguin] rookeries around that aren’t protected, so if we can educate people that story and through engaging illustrations, that’s fantastic.”

Robaard revealed that The Littlest Penguin was something she had “been wanting to do for a while” because of her history with little penguins.

“I grew up on the [Tasmania’s] north-west coast near Ulverstone and Lillico,” she said.

“There are penguins along there and when they put the highway in, of course, the penguins’ burrows were on the other side of the highway and there was no fence, so there were a lot of squished little penguins. As a kid, I found it really disturbing that these little penguins weren’t protected. Why weren’t they protected? That was always in my head, and when the Penguin Foundation and Penguin Random House got in touch [with me], I was like, ‘Yeah, I’d love to do something about re-educating people’.”

Robaard collaborated with the science team at the Penguin Foundation to create the ‘look’ of the little penguins that appear in The Littlest Penguin.

“The science team obviously have very specific ideas about what penguins look like and they wanted [them] to be fairly realistic, whereas I [wanted] to make them a little bit cute. So, there was a balance of trying to make them accurate yet cute and engaging.

There was some back-and-forth: ‘They don’t have pink cheeks. Can we tone that down? Can we change this? Can we do that?’ It was a bit of a challenge, but we got there in the end.”

She also got to go to Phillip Island, the location of the world-famous Penguin Parade, and was given a tour of the rookeries.

“We even got to weigh baby penguins,” she said.

“They had these little bags and you put the penguins in these little bags, and you hang them up and you weigh them. It was quite cute, and that was great for the book; it was really inspiring. It was so good to be able to go and see the penguins in a natural environment. I took a heap of photos!”

Jedda Robaard. (Photo credit: Xavier Castagne).

From fire to hope

Johanna Bell was “absolutely thrilled” when her book, Hope is a Thing, won the 2024 EACL in the Picture Fiction category.

“Picture books take a very long time to make,” she told Tasmanian Times, “and this one took three years. It’s always really rewarding to know that your book has been well received by readers.”

Bell considers EACL to be a very special award because it is the only award in Australia that is given to children’s literature for environmental reasons or qualities.

Hope is a Thing came from a desire to create a work that directs children’s focus or gaze towards the incredible birds that we have in Australia and also the natural places.”

She also drew inspiration from two places.

“Off the back of the 2019-2020 bushfires, [illustrator] Erica Wagner and I were really devastated by the amount of loss to landscapes and biodiversity,” she explained.

“[Hope is a Thing] was our way to give ourselves and others hope about the way landscapes can regenerate after being burned. Around the same time, I re-discovered Emily Dickinson’s very famous poem, ‘Hope is the Thing With Feathers’, and I thought, ‘If hope really is the thing with feathers, what does that look like in Australia right now?’”

This sparked the poem that became Hope is a Thing.

“It’s an illustrated poem that takes the reader to various different landscapes across Australia, celebrating the incredible and strange and wonderful and colourful and very specific things that birds can do,” Bell said.

“To create a work that encourages the next generation of caretakers to lean in and pay close attention to birds, so that when the time comes for them to protect those species, they know them well and love them as we do.”

The simplicity of picture books belies the amount of work that goes into making them, according to Bell.

“It’s a very competitive industry,” she said.

“The book production process takes two to three years. If you’ve got a good idea, stick at it, write and re-write and read it out loud and re-edit. Read widely, borrow books from libraries, go to book launches, keep people up for mentoring, pitch to publishers when they have their open pitch days, and don’t be afraid of a few knockbacks. It’s all part of the process. Try, try and try again. You never know where your book might end up.”

Illustrator Erica Wagner and writer Johanna Bell. (Photo credit: Helen Orr).


Callum J. Jones studied English, History, and Journalism at the University of Tasmania. He has written fiction and non-fiction for Tasmanian Times since 2018, and can be traced by the smell of fresh coffee.

Follow him on Twitter (@Callum_Jones_10) and Facebook (@callum.j.jones.creative).