Follow Me by Rick Searle illustrated by Bronwyn Searle

It is day six of my twelve books of Christmas. We are suffering here in Australia with high temperatures and horrendous bushfires. On Christmas Eve in 1974 the Australian city of Darwin was hit with a powerful cyclone - Cyclone Tracy. The words of Dorothea Mackellar (verse 2 from her poem My Country) aptly describe our environment:

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror -

The wide brown land for me!

"There were no presents that Christmas.

There was no house!

There was hardly any town left! ...

The fig tree was a sorry sight.

Not a twig. Not a leaf.

'It will grow back,' said Dad. 'It's a survivor."

Follow me begins when Dad was a boy. A tiny tree has taken root in the brick work of their Darwin house. Dad and Gran rescue the little plant. They put it in a pot and the next Christmas it goes into a bigger pot and so on until eventually the tree needs to go into the ground. Many years pass. Dad grows up and the tree becomes enormous. Every Christmas Dad returns to visit his mum (Gran) with his new family and to see his tree. Each year it is decorated with hundreds of Christmas lights. Then comes the Christmas of 1974.

"One sleep to Christmas. Christmas eve.
The storm broke.
Lightning flashed. Thunder crashed.
The wind moaned.
The rain drummed on Gran's tin roof.
It was so noisy I couldn't think.
It got worse.
Lightning flashed. Thunder crashed.
The wind howled. The rain pelted down."

Sadly the old fig tree crashes to the ground but six months later the family return. Gran has a new house built on the land of the old one and there, growing out of the driveway bricks the family see a tiny seedling. The fig tree has survived and is ready to grow all over again. I love the final image in this book. I hope you can see the vegemite jar:

Follow Me was published in 2001. Oddly I had not read this book until this week. I had no idea it was a Christmas story nor did I know it was such a perfect one to read here in Australia especially this year.