Reading children’s literature is often considered important for developing readers’ empathy towards others. Picture books that thematise cultural diversity and issues of cultural difference often affirm positive models of cultural harmony and tolerance, thereby providing young readers with exemplars of human rights and social justice. Since 2000, many picture books have responded to Australia’s changing policy regarding immigration, especially the impact on refugees and asylum seekers. This chapter will discuss how picture books targeted for primary aged children engage with the subjective experience of migration and encourage readers to take up an empathic position with regard to the plight of others as represented in the texts. Picture books discussed in this chapter will include recent examples that deal with Asian-Australian relations, refugees, and asylum seekers. The chapter will have direct relevance to the cross-curriculum priority ‘Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia’, and will include the general capabilities: ethical understanding and intercultural understanding.

'The books we remember strongly as adults are often the ones we read as children. Not only do we remember particular books, but the emotions we experienced.

Children’s books are reread and remembered over a lifetime, and many authors believe their best writing is for children.

Rereading favourites is a good thing. With each rereading, deeper meanings emerge and understanding becomes richer.' (Introduction)

'This article uses cultural representations to write refugee history. It examines twenty-first-century picture books about displaced children, alongside published responses to them, to explore how refugee experiences and histories are constructed, both for and about children, in an Australian context. The visual literary form of picture books as political texts is examined as a space for discussion and dialogue. Published responses to them, however, more commonly reveal rigid interpretations of imagined readers, invoking binary divisions between displaced and non-displaced children. Through these sources, questions of humanisation and (de)politicisations in refugee history are considered.'  (Publication abstract)

'In this article, I survey eight Australian picture books that seek to redress a seeming absence of care in Australian politics in relation to refugees and asylum seekers: My Two Blankets (2014), Suri's Wall (2015), Ride, Ricardo, Ride! (2015), Mate and Me (2015), Teacup (2015), Flight (2015), Out (2016), and I'm Australian Too (2017). These books depict a healthy community founded upon an ethics of care, and/or a depleted community when care is absent. Although none of these books invokes structural change, all of them demonstrate how relational well-being forms a foundation for civic virtue.'