Where's Jessie?

Bertie the teddy bear sets off with his family to head out into the Outback.

When Bertie is packed into a box to travel with the cameleers, he doesn’t understand where his owner Jessie has gone. ‘Where’s Jessie?’ is the refrain that runs through the book, as Bertie bumps along on a camel, then falls off unnoticed. Bertie meets desert animals, is swept along in a flash flood, gets taken high in an eagle’s talons, and finally falls to the ground, left all alone. Luckily, a young Indigenous boy finds him and returns him to Jessie: a happy ending!

And Bertie is a real bear! Meeting Bertie in 2011, Janeen said ‘I liked him straightaway’. Janeen found out he’d travelled into the Outback a long time ago, first on a train and then a camel. She ‘daydreamed about a new story for Bertie’. Here she has created a beautiful story for him, a mix of truth and her own imagination.