Australian children’s classics: Storm Boy’s tough, tender ode to wild childhood will make you cry

Storm Boy, 1976 film ABC iView Storm Boy, Colin Thiele’s much-loved classic, has never been out of print.

Its iconic 1976 film version, with David Gulpilil as Fingerbone, turns 50 this year – and it has long been hailed one of Australia’s greatest books .

On publication in 1963, the Times Literary Supplement argued for it to earn a place among the few “lasting children’s classics”.

Storm Boy, whose mother is dead, lives with his father, an isolated man called Hide-Away Tom, close to nature on South Australia’s Coorong, a spectacular saline lagoon and wetland of international significance .

Storm Boy befriends Ngarrindjeri man Fingerbone Bill, who becomes his mentor and guide when he rescues three pelican chicks.

Storm Boy becomes close to one of the pelicans, Mr Percival – until the outside world violently intervenes.

The books we read as children can shape us forever – as readers and people.

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

Thiele loved the Coorong.

Home to more than 200 bird species , it sits where the Murray River meets the Southern Ocean, protected from it by sand dunes and windswept beaches.

Alarms have recently been raised about the threat of bird flu to the thousands of pelicans for whom the Coorong is an important breeding sanctuary.

“A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other,” he wrote of Storm Boy’s home in the book’s opening passage.

Conservation and protection of the environment would be themes in many of his more than 100 books, most of them for children.

Thiele died in 2006 , aged 85.