From Ursula Dubosarsky

When we were looking for an illustrator for "The Carousel" I happened to see a painting of a toy horse that was part of an exhibition at the Randwick Children's Hospital. Captivated, I took a photo and sent it to Jane Godwin, the publisher at Penguin, saying "I think this is him!" At the time I didn't know the story behind the painting, I just knew it was layered very deep somewhere, as indeed it turned out to be...

From Walter di Qual

I was born in a demilitarised zone overseen by the United Nations. It was the Cold War and lines were being redrawn on the map. The beautiful old Venetian seaside town of my birth, Pirano, fell into a “strategic” area and was being claimed by Marshall Tito’s communist Yugoslavia. My family moved to a refugee camp in Trieste when I was 3 years old. It was called San Giovanni.

Our new home was a corrugated iron army hut. We shared it with a sardine can of other displaced people with nowhere to go and nothing to do. It was called the “Free Territory of Trieste” but I don’t think there was much for free apart from aid packages of old clothes. Toys were very few. A family had given us a papier mache horse - a home made thing that may have been built up over a carpenter’s saw horse or scrap timber. My brother Corrado reckons that it was his, but other kids in the camp played with it.

One day, after the rain stopped, I went out to play. There, outside the door was the horse .. melted. Its flour and water glue dissolved in the rain. I was HORRIFIED. Maybe it was just a kid type of horror over nothing much…. But when you are 4 years old, living in a cold and wet camp, crowded with miserable people and this was one warm spark of happiness whose light had been extinguished….. then I guess it could be a big thing.

Possibly from this, I have learnt that:

1-It’s useful to be able to make your own toys – even if all you can do is draw them.

2-Rain can produce some interesting effects.

3-Things come and go but we get to keep the memories.