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Welcome to the charmingly funny and perfectly peculiar world of Aussie animal parents, and their amazing offspring. Peculiar Parents introduces young readers to 60 Australian native animals, focusing on all things family, including their courting practices, gestation periods, births and the raising of their young.

Discover the weird, the wonderful, the adorable—and even the downright slimy! You’ll meet drumming parrots, colour-changing cuttlefish, dancing spiders, globe-trotting turtles, kissing lizards, plonking pobblebonks, and many more unforgettable Aussie creatures.

This new title from multi-award-winning children’s book author, Stephanie Owen Reeder, features hundreds of fun and wacky animal facts to educate and entertain readers aged 6-12. Stephanie is an ACT author of over 25 books for children and adults and has deep roots in the local community. She is a recipient of the CBCA Laurie Copping Award for Distinguished Service to Children’s Literature, a winner of the NSW Premier’s History Award and a winner of the CBCA Book of the Year Award. She is also an Ambassador for the ACT Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge and a life member of the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

Accompanied by watercolour, family-portrait style artworks of each animal by talented artist Ingrid Bartkowiak, who was shortlisted for the CBCA Award for New Illustrator in 2023, Peculiar Parents connects to key areas of the national curriculum, such as biological sciences, geography and sustainability.

This book is perfect for curious kids, classrooms, and budding young biologists, eager to explore the fascinating world of Australian wildlife.

The Peculiar Parents book launch is Saturday 5^th July, 2025 at 10.30am – 11.30am in the foyer of The National Library of Australia, Parkes Pl, W, Canberra, ACT. It is a free event, bookings essential.

Multi-award winning children’s book author Stephanie Owen Reeder is a huge fan of Junior Landcare activities. She kindly took some time to have a chat with the Junior Landcare Team.

What inspired you to write Peculiar Parents?

Like most of my environmental books, the seed for Peculiar Parents was planted in my brain while I was working on other books. My nonfiction picture book Australia’s Wild Weird Wonderful Weather features a page called ‘Animal Antics’, which explores how animals respond to changes in the weather. From this, a shoot grew which turned into Sensational Australian Animals, in which I explored the five senses through the eyes, ears, noses, mouths and skin of 145 Australian native animals. Peculiar Parents blossomed from the research for that book, as I kept uncovering interesting facts about how Australian animals find a mate, have babies and look after their young. I had so many ‘I didn’t know that!’ moments, that I had to write another book so I could share what I had discovered about these remarkable creatures with as many people as possible.

What makes Australian native species so ‘peculiar’?

The word ‘peculiar’ can mean ‘strange’, but it also means ‘special’, and both meanings apply to the often unique and always fascinating animals that live on the vast continent of Australia. Peculiar Parents features sixty of these animals and their families. There’s a father fish that carries his babies around in his mouth, a palm cockatoo that uses a branch to beat out a tune on a hollow tree to attract a mate, and a humpback whale that’s milk is the consistency of toothpaste, so it doesn’t float away while its calf is feeding. Then there’s the hip-pocket frog that walks rather than hops, so his babies don’t fall out as he carries them around, and the mother koala who produces special poo for her baby to eat to help it digest the toxic leaves of the eucalyptus tree. It’s certainly a strange but very special world out there in our gardens, bushland, countryside, deserts, rainforests, mountains and seas!

What do you love about Junior Landcare and what’s your favourite activity in the Learning Centre?

The biodiversity activities in the Learning Centre particularly caught my eye – I love anything that encourages us to get out among native creatures like birds, lizards, frogs, butterflies and bees and do things that encourage them to live in harmony with us. I live in Canberra, Australia’s bush capital, where possums scamper across my roof at night. In my garden, lizards rustle through the leaflitter, a family of blue wrens nest in the bushes, screeching cockatoos hang upside down in the gumtrees, magpies serenade me every morning, and yellow-tailed black cockatoos feast in the big bad banksia bush. It’s those daily encounters with nature that inspire me to write about our wonderful and unique environment, and that should inspire us all to look after the land that we live on.

Why do you think it’s important Australian children learn to care about the environment from an early age?

I know firsthand the impact of learning at an early age to respect and care for the land you tread upon and the creatures that inhabit it. I grew up in a suburb of Sydney in the 1950s and spent most of my childhood exploring the nearby bush. This early contact with Australia’s peculiar creatures fed my interest in Australian flora and fauna. One of the first stories I wrote in primary school, which I had to read out to the class, was about the rainbow lorikeets in my backyard. If we learn to appreciate these creatures as children, we are more likely to want to look after them and the land they live on when we are adults. That appreciation for nature becomes part of our psyche, part of who we are.

Why is storytelling such a powerful way to capture children’s attention and get them excited about science, geography, and sustainability? 

Storytelling is an integral part of being human, which is why we read stories to our children to help them learn about the world they live in. In my nonfiction picture books, I tell stories about the way animals live their lives: Sensational Australian Animals explores the science of how our senses work, while Peculiar Parents deals with the biology and behaviors of native Australian animal families. Geography and sustainability are also at the heart of my narrative nonfiction books. Swifty: The Super-fast Parrot tells the story of the critically endangered migratory swift parrot, while Rakali of the Riverbank is about the ways in which the native water rat helps clean our waterways and control invasive species such as black rats, carp and cane toads. For me, part of the joy of telling these animal stories is to share my sense of wonder, surprise and delight with the children who read my books.

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National Science Week Junior Landcare activities.

There is a wonderland of fun activities on the Junior Landcare activities pages to keep everyone busy during the school holidays. Perhaps, while doing outdoor activities, kids can keep an eye out for the sixty animals that feature in Peculiar Parents. So far, I have seen thirty-four of them in the wild. I wonder how many of these animals Junior Landcare kids will be lucky enough to see in their lifetime.

About the Author

Dr Stephanie Owen Reeder is the author of over 25 books for children and adults. She has worked as a schoolteacher, a librarian, a book editor, a university lecturer and a Hansard Editor at Federal Parliament. Stephanie has won many awards, including the CBCA Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier’s History Award. In 2019, Stephanie was presented with the CBCA Laurie Copping Award for Distinguished Service to Children’s Literature.

About the Illustrator

Based in Meanjin/Brisbane, Ingrid Bartkowiak is an artist and illustrator who works primarily in watercolour. Her hand-painted work features native flora, fauna and fungi. Ingrid has a fascination with all things small and intricate, from tufts of moss on a footpath to the fungi sprouting from a wombat dropping. Ingrid has worked across a diverse array of projects, including picture book illustration, murals, packaging designs and even pet portraits.