The Sunflower tells of the nymph Clytie and her unrequited love for Apollo. Giving in to despair, she stays rooted to the ground, her face bound to follow the sun, the god Apollo. 

The Golden Touch depicts a version of the King Midas story. When Midas begs the “golden touch” from the god, Bacchus, his clothing, food and his little daughter all turn to gold. After he goes to the river to wash off the curse, there is a permanent residue of gold dust on the river bed. 

The book is generously illustrated for an Australian children’s book of its time, considering wartime paper shortages. The poems cover double page spreads, of which every second page, the right hand page, is a watercolour. 

In the illustration of The Sunflower, amidst the green, yellow and orange watercolour, Clytie’s dejected face forms the centre of the sunflower. Through her pathos and suffering Beetle constructs Clytie as a victim of Apollo’s abandonment, which is antithetical to the narrative of Ovid’s Metamorphoses iv 204, 234–256. Ovid tells of "the mad Clytie whose head is turned by the sun", suggesting that she was foolish, to be besotted by a man, Helios, who had abandoned her for another. Clytie’s vindictive jealousy of Helios/Apollo’s love for Leucothoe spurns his hatred of her. So, she pines away, sitting naked on a rock, transfixed on the distant Apollo, and is transformed into a sunflower (helianthus) or a heliotrope, upon her death. "Her ghastly pallor…[gives her the]…appearance of a bloodless plant: but part was reddened and a flower hid her face" (Ovid, Metamorphoses iv. 256–273).

Beetle distills the myth to a romanticised tale of unrequited love in which Clytie’s desperate behaviour leads to her own demise. Santry’s water colour evokes a sad silly girl dressed up as a brightly clad sunflower. Published during the changing role of women in the 1940s when they were taking agency with regards to their economic role in the community and, to an extent, their own sexuality, Beetle’s portrayal of irrational love is a conservative exemplar for younger readers.

Beetle’s story of The Golden Touch, adapted from Nathanial Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852) presents the tragedy of avarice for King Midas, for whom an unnamed stranger transmutes all he has into gold, and whose young daughter proves to be the most important joy of his life. In the Santry illustration King Midas is facing the viewer, dressed in a red and blue robe set against a glowing yellow background, depicting a friendly father figure emanating warmth and love. (This illustration is omitted from the online version). Traditional story illustrations depict Midas in white or gold robes in static austere poses. In Beetle’s narrative, King Midas’s subsequent atonement from Bacchus restores the catastrophe of his greedy ambitions to normality, suggesting that he moved on to enjoy the simple pleasures in life, such as the scent of the roses in his garden, but especially the love of his young daughter.

The two rhyming tales from Greek mythology are included in this anthology amongst tales of koala, kookaburra, kangaroo and platypus as well as a caricatured naked frizzy haired Aboriginal child. Described as a “little hunting black”, with a boomerang beside him, his large eyes and exaggerated red lips, he is ridiculed by being hit on the backside by the kangaroo that he was attempting to kill. 

A specific local reference is made in the poem, A Trip to the Museum in College Street, The Australian Museum, the first public museum in Australia, to see skeletons with their "outsides off and insides out".  

Santry’s representation of the Aboriginal child promotes Aboriginal people as primitive and forever childlike, whilst the “skeletons in the museum”, supports a contemporary view of Aboriginal people as “living fossils”. The Australian Museum had been an avid collector of Aboriginal remains since the 1860s and during the 1940s the skeletons of Aboriginal people were on display in several Australian museums.

The Australian content appealed to the child reader’s sense of place and appreciation of the exoticism of the country’s natural fauna, but it also promotes a sense of cultural superiority to the Aboriginal people.  Whilst The Sunflower and The Golden Touch ensured some familiarity with traditional classic mythology, their inclusion engages with the desire to transmit intergenerational literary icons as integral to the pursuit of higher levels of social and moral progress, especially during the War, a time of social instability.

Consolidated Press was associated mostly with newspaper publication, the new building in 1925 reflected an important period of the modernisation of Sydney in the inter war years. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1972.