We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. Luckily we found this oversized book at a book fayre recently and have so enjoyed seeing these wonderful illustrations again. During the 1939-45 conflict, Briggs was evacuated, like three million other city-dwelling children, to the countryside, in his case to life on a farm in Dorset.

By the mid-1980s, The Snowman had become a global sensation thanks to the 1982 animated film and its global merchandising, from lavatory seat covers to chicken nugget advertisements in Snowman-mad Japan (a line was apparently drawn at the idea of a Snowman condom).The hilarious and heartwarming tale of a magical friendship between a girl and a polar bear, from beloved author of The Snowman, Raymond Briggs. As it does, the shining star vanishes from Tilly's hand, and she wonders about the bear from her window. With surprising page-turns, felicitous pauses, and pitch-perfect dialogue, Briggs renders the drama and humour of child–adult and child–bear relations, while questioning the nature of imagination and reality.

Briggs was drawn to illustration by his love of the newspaper comic strips of his childhood, when Mary Tourtel and Alfred Bestall’s Rupert Bear was a publishing phenomenon in the mass-circulation Daily Express newspaper and, from 1936, as an annual. We celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories, traditions and living cultures; and we pay our respects to Elders past and present. It is peculiarly English – his attractively fuzzy style draws … on a line of beautifully domestic and idealistic English artists, going back to the great Edward Ardizzone to Samuel Palmer’.I wanted to show the petty nastiness of life – slime and spit and dandruff, all this awful stuff which is slightly funny because it detracts from human dignity and our pretensions… everyone’s got that in their life. As the sun rises the next morning, Tilly wakes up to find the windows open and the Star Bear's constellation fading. By the tiny end panel, the snowman has vanished, poignantly leaving the boy – and the readers - with only his hat and scarf. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words and his particular style of illustration is unmistakable as are his understated and poignant words of narrative and dialogue.

The reader was shown how Tilly's mum, busy to get off to work used similar cross expressions with Tilly. Raymond Redvers Briggs was born on 18 January 1934 in Wimbledon, Surrey (now London), to Ernest Redvers Briggs (1900–1971), a milkman, and Ethel Bowyer (1895–1971), a former lady's maid-turned-housewife, who married in 1930. As a picture book presented in graphic novel format, Briggs's work was ground-breaking when first published and remains cutting edge twenty years later in its creative unity of text and picture.

Briggs was a commended runner-up for the 1964 Kate Greenaway Medal ( Fee Fi Fo Fum, a collection of nursery rhymes) [17] [a] and won the 1966 Medal for illustrating a Hamilton edition of Mother Goose.