Cheeky dogs: to Lake Nash and back by Dion Beasley and Johanna Bell
Allen and Unwin, 2019. ISBN: 9781760528119.
(Age: 5 to adult) Highly recommended. Themes: Aboriginal themes,
Aboriginal stories, Autobiography, Outback Australia, Communities,
The Lands. A wonderfully inventive chronicle of one man's life
unfolds as pages full of those well known cheeky dogs punctuate his
journey from Lake Nash to Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Elliott,
and all places between in the eastern part of the Northern Territory
abutting Sandover Highway. Here Dion was born in 1991, his mother
going to Alice Springs, but returning to Lake Nash after his birth.
From there he travelled all over the area, Soapy Bore, Elliott,
Ampilatwatja, Canteen Creek, with his mother, finally living with
his grandfather at Mulga Camp after her death. Each place has a mix
of cheeky dogs coming in all shapes and colours. Once when Dion went
to the shop several big angry dogs surrounded him and scared him.
But now he loves riding his mobility scooter around the town of
Tennant Creek where he lives with Joy and her husband, Tony, feeding
the dogs and collecting rocks and images of dogs for his artwork.
Joy, an old white woman, took Dion in when his grandfather died and
is now his carer. Being profoundly deaf and contracting muscular
dystrophy has not stopped this young man taking life as it comes,
greeting every new day with purpose as he feeds and watches the
dogs. His memoir is full fo life and humour and is intoxicating in
its portrayal of a life lived so far from the cities where most of
us live.
His lively illustrations are full of the dogs he sees in all the
places he has lived and on each page readers will spot the dogs - on
the roads, travelling in packs, fighting, surrounding the edges of
the page. Beasley's marvellously naive style documents the many
places he has lived, with his flat maps of the communities and
camps, drawings of the houses, swimming pool, shops, images of the
environment as well as drawings and photos of his journey through
the footpaths and laneways of Tennant Creek. Readers will learn of
the remote townships where he has lived and the life he lives now in
Tennant Creek, of the events which fill his day. This is an
absorbing look at one man's life in remote Australia, his affinity
with his environment, his love of family and the place called Lake
Nash.
Fran Knight
