Christmas is coming to Australia read Rain for Christmas

Many of us here in Australia know this second stanza of this famous poem by Dorothea Mackellar:

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

Rain for Christmas

Rain for Christmas, like the book from yesterday - Applesauce and the Christmas Miracle - explores our harsh climate and frequent natural (and man-made) disasters through a Christmas story. In our book today, as the title implies, it is a time of extreme drought. In the rural setting, beautifully painted by Wayne Harris, you will see a parched landscape where the grass looks like tall stalks of straw.

Here are a few text quotes to give you a flavour of this book:

"That Christmas was smack in the middle of the driest, hottest, summer anyone could remember."

Santa speaking - "Eureka! I've got it! We can take a giant snowball to Australia."

"Three times round the moon they flew, faster and faster and faster until the snowball burst into a million sparkling pieces, sending tiny fragments of glittering ice tumbling slowly down towards the earth."

This book might also make you think of the song Six White Boomers. 

Rain for Christmas was published in 1989 so it is long out of print.  Thank goodness the publisher (Cambridge University Press) used really good paper for this book. I have a second hand copy which looks as new as the day it was printed. Back in the 1980s and 1990s publishers produced books like this which are halfway between a picture book which usually has 32 pages and books like this which are longer and have more text than a picture book but with lots of terrific illustrations. These books could be described as larger sized junior novels. I do hope you can find a copy of Rain for Christmas to enjoy with your family this year even though here in my part of Australia we have actually had a very rainy start to summer.

Richard Tulloch is the author of several books (and some terrific plays) which I enjoyed sharing with classes who visited my school library - Danny in the Toybox illustrated by Armin Greder; and Cocky Colin from the Solo series.  I think Rain for Christmas might have been his first book.

Wayne Harris is the illustrator of these books:

I mentioned the larger sized junior illustrated novels of the 1980s and 1990s.  If you are curious about this format your school library might still have copies of books like Thing by Robin Klein; Birk the Berserker also by Robin Klein; The Extradordinary magics of Emma McDade by Libby Hathorn; Paolo's Secret also by Libby Hathorn; One night at Lotties House by Max Dann; and from the UK the original edition of Jeremiah in the Dark Woods by Allan Ahlberg.