Australian children’s classics: Shaun Tan’s essential migrant story still mesmerises, 20 years on

Shaun Tan Holding Shaun Tan’s 2006 book The Arrival, you get the immediate impression of holding a found object – a family album or personal archive held together by hopes and dreams. The book, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, is a wordless visual narrative about a man who leaves his wife and child to build a new future for his family. He arrives in a strange new city, a stranger in a strange land. Its story is told in comics form, with meticulous graphite pencil drawings, reproduced in…