Crunch, Kaboom! by Conor Mills and Clodagh Starr. Illus. by Alison Mutton

A big yellow truck on enormous wheels is featured on the cover of Crunch! Kaboom! Mighty Mining Machines, set against an ochre and brown background. Turning to the first page the reader is immediately drawn in with the rhyming text setting the scene for the narrative:

Outside the town, in the heat and the dust,
where the sky is bright blue and the earth is like rust,
is an iron ore mine that’s bigger than big
with mighty machines that blast, drill and dig.

Then follows an expose of all the machines that are used in mining iron ore. There are dump trucks, a drill rig, a truck filled with dangerous goo ready to blast, a grader making safe roads for the machinery and water carts to keep the dust down. An excavator lifts the rocks to the haul truck which takes them to a belt going to the processing plant, and the book finally shows how steel is made using the iron ore and concludes with a list of how steel is used.

Onomatopoeia  matches each of the machines (Crunch! Ka-Booom! Vroom Vroom, Chugga Choo) and the rhyming verse and fabulous bright pictures make it very easy for the reader to visualise the mining and production process, one that I found fascinating.

Notes from the publisher give extra information about Conor wanting ‘to write a book that helped parents share what they did for a living – particularly FIFO parents’ and it succeeds brilliantly. And children who love machines will delight in this fabulous book that reads aloud perfectly, while the process of mining for iron ore, its production and use will be a boon for the classroom teacher. Teaching notes and an activity are available from the publisher.

Crunch! Kaboom! Mighty Mining Machines is a wonderful introduction for everone to iron ore production which employs more than 200,000 Australians, while it will be appreciated by young children for its depiction of large trucks and machines.

Themes: Mining industry, Trucks, Machinery.

Pat Pledger