Once upon a time, there were five good friends: a cow, a donkey, a sheep, a pig and a mouse. They decided to take a boat out on the bay. Do you know who sank the boat?

If you do, chances are you either grew up with this story, or you read it to your children or grandchildren. Who Sank the Boat? is one of more than 50 books written and illustrated by Pamela Allen. She’s been busy creating such tales since 1980, when she showed us a naked man sharing his bath with a kangaroo, a goat and a wombat in Mr Archimedes’ Bath.

New Zealand-born Allen was appointed a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to literature in the 2024 Australia Day Honours. She has described her work as “fragments of theatre” that are meant to be read out loud. It’s no surprise that some of her books have been adapted into theatre productions that have toured Australia and New Zealand.

She says her books were inspired by her time as a parent in play centres in New Zealand in the 1970s. “I realised that very small children respond to the voice before the words,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020.

It’s significant that Allen is one of two women to receive an AM who are both veteran award-winning writers, prolific and much loved, and best known for their work for children. Both of them are alert to the fact that children’s response to sound, language and storytelling begins at a very early age.

The other recipient is June Factor, folklorist, social historian and creator of a series of books (Far Out, Brussel Sprout!, All Right, Vegemite! and so on) containing collections of schoolyard nursery rhymes, often invented by the children themselves. She’s a distinguished expert and archivist on the lore and language of childhood. But her young readers know her as a teller of rollicking, funny and often very cheeky bits of verse.

Factor came to Australia from Poland when she was two; her family was fleeing Nazi persecution. They settled in Carlton in Melbourne and she spoke Polish and Yiddish at home.

She said in an interview with Dumbo Feather magazine that her interest in language and children started very early; she used to go out looking for babies. Play for children was both an escape and an assertion of life: even in the Nazi ghettos, children played at being Germans and Jews.