Visualising emptiness: the landscape of the Western Front and Australian and English children’s picture books

Although the Great War made extraordinarily complex demands on the nations involved, it is the landscape of the battlefield which has continued to dominate contemporary perceptions of the conflict. Australian and English children’s picture book authors and illustrators have adopted a similar focus, particularly regarding the Western Front. It is the illustrators, however, who have the more complex task, for they have inherited an aesthetic issue that has challenged artists since 1914. Like the British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand official war artists of the time, they are confronted, at every turn, by the challenge of depicting a surreally empty landscape. It was not so much a landscape as the artists understood it before the war, but rather an anti-landscape, as though the war had annihilated Nature. What was left was a dystopian wilderness that bore witness to the destructive power of industrialised warfare. This article will explore how a selection of Australian and English children’s picture book illustrators respond to the emptiness of the battlefield landscape, or as Becca Weir so evocatively characterises it, the paradox of measurable nothingness.