Follow Me Home
Home is 3,000 kilometres, two planes, one flooded river and a rock bridge away. Lottie is going anyway.
At boarding school in the city, Lottie dreams of the Kimberley: red dirt, boab trees, firelight yarns, and Lanky, the magnificent brolga she raised from a rescued chick. When her heart can’t wait any longer, she sets out on the long journey back to country. And when the outback tests her, it’s Lanky who finds her, calling the song she’s known all her life: follow me home.
Follow Me Home
Home is 3,000 kilometres, two planes, one flooded river and a rock bridge away. Lottie is going anyway.
At boarding school in the city, Lottie dreams of the Kimberley: red dirt, boab trees, firelight yarns, and Lanky, the magnificent brolga she raised from a rescued chick. When her heart can’t wait any longer, she sets out on the long journey back to Country. And when the outback tests her, it’s Lanky who finds her, calling the song she’s known all her life: follow me home.
Hand-painted in watercolour by renowned Kimberley artist Jeanne Barnes, and endorsed and culturally reviewed by Maria Morgan, Jessica Bennett and Lyn Dimer, this is a story of homecoming that ends the only way it could: in a sunrise dance between a girl and a brolga, with her family and community gathered around her.
A beautifully illustrated keepsake for readers 8 to 108. Give it to the homesick and the far-flung, the lover of art, the dreamer of the Kimberley, or anyone who’s ever watched a brolga dance. Or keep it, and come home to it.
Dorothy Dowling. Stories worth reading 200 times.
Illustrator: Jeanne Barnes
Recommended age: 8 years to adult
Setting: The Kimberley, Western Australia
Themes: Country, family, belonging, homesickness, homecoming, dance
Cultural review: Endorsed and culturally reviewed by Maria Morgan, Jessica Bennett and Lyn Dimer
Audio edition: not yet
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-922981-07-3
Hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-922981-08-0
Format / page count / dimensions: 75 pages, 216 mm (W) × 279 mm (H)
Publication date: 2023
Dorothy Dowling is an Australian children’s author, midwife and nurse from the South West of Western Australia. Her stories began long before her books did. When her son Alex was three, they kept chooks, and Dorothy would invent tales for him out loud: silly ones, told again and again. He was her most exacting critic, and revisions were made on demand. Nearly twenty years on, and three years after Alex’s tragic death at seventeen, she published his favourite, Chookity Chook, to preserve and continue the goodness he gave so freely. Every book since carries his laughter, and every one is read-aloud tested: written to be just as good on the two-hundredth reading as the first. A career midwife who has built early-childhood health services across outback Australia, Dorothy writes for the wonder she has spent her life around. Her stories roam from a mischievous farmyard, the incredible Outback, to the sea garden beneath the famous Busselton Jetty, where Monty the pelican and his quietly hidden friend Gerald await sharp-eyed readers.
Visit Dorothy Dowling Author Page
Jeanne Barnes is a South African-born Australian artist and children's book illustrator based in Kununurra, in Western Australia's remote Kimberley region. Her artistic journey began at Johannesburg's National School of the Arts, followed by fine-art studies at Technikon Pretoria, now Tshwane University of Technology, where she specialised in painting. She also has an award-winning background in jewellery design and became a full-time artist in 2016.
Learn More About Jeanne
Inside the Book
Meet the Character
Lottie — Protagonist
