Australian children’s classics: Shaun Tan’s essential migrant story still mesmerises, 20 years on

Shaun Tan Holding Shaun Tan’s 2006 book The Arrival , you get the immediate impression of holding a found object – a family album or personal archive held together by hopes and dreams.

The book, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, is a wordless visual narrative about a man who leaves his wife and child to build a new future for his family.

He arrives in a strange new city, a stranger in a strange land.

Its story is told in comics form, with meticulous graphite pencil drawings, reproduced in sepia tones.

In 2007, the New York Times called it “mesmerizing” and said it tells “not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story”.

Now, Tan’s central theme of immigration is more timely than ever, as politicans – particularly a resurgent Pauline Hanson – conjure the dangerous fantasy of a homogeneous (white) Australia migrants can assimilate to.

But The Arrival shows the city as a place of intersections, where people from different cultures may meet, interact and help each other – without giving up their identity.

Many beautiful books come and go, but The Arrival has both persisted in Australia’s consciousness and captured imaginations worldwide.

What makes it a classic? And what exactly is it? The books we read as children can shape us forever – as readers and people.

In this series , we ask experts to reflect on some of Australia’s most beloved children’s classics, spanning the 19th century to the new millennium.

Tan, who grew up in Perth (“one of the most isolated cities in the world”) and is based in Melbourne, was born in 1974 to a Malaysian–Chinese father and an Anglo–Australian mother.

He has said this experience – along with low-level racism – contributed to his recurring interest in notions of belonging.

He has earned international acclaim (including an Oscar for his animated film of his book The Lost Thing, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award) for using surreal, dreamlike imagery to explore social and historical themes in both books and films.

Picture book, comic or graphic novel? The Arrival defies classification.