Editorial

Abstract

Not so long ago, a well overdue clean out of the garage and its accumulated 20 years of family life stored in an array of deteriorating boxes led Phil, one of the co-editors of this special issue, to reflect on the glorious story that might be told by those forgotten artefacts. But, it was time for this bloke to reclaim the garage as his 'shed.' 1 However, what my partner and I had expected to be only a few short hours of sorting donations for a local charity shop and recycling depot was soon capsized: we had stumbled our way into something far more absorbing. The boxes held many story books and, thus, parenting memories of what we had read and showed to our child as a baby, a toddler, a young child and the ones she read later as she became textually and visually literate. As we opened successive boxes with a I wonder what's in this one? on our silent lips, we found ourselves re-inspecting each book with much shared 'memory work' about the stories we had read, time and time again, to our then child. Shifting gear, a morning's labour became a nostalgic engagement with things past and with fondly remembered 'once upon a times'. We were re-imagining what we valued most in our parenting. And what we thought about the future. Needless to say, many of the boxes of books were returned to the rapidly diminishing prospect of an uncluttered shed. For we now thought that many of those story books could be read once more, even time and time again, to an imaginary child of our daughter should she one day become a parent.