At the risk of making Peter feel even more awful, I'd have to say it makes me want to sob like a kid to know that the books of Nan Chauncy, whom I believe to have been our finest writer for children, an author who won the Children's Book of the Year Award three times, have been out of print for more than 10 years. But Chauncy is not alone. There's hardly any children's book from a previous generation that's still in print, apart from Blinky Bill, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, and The Magic Pudding. The works of Joan Phipson, Eleanor Spence, Lillian Pyke, David Martin, Dale Collins, James Aldridge, are endangered. The writers themselves are endangered.
Libraries contribute to the problem by culling savagely.
Any book that has not been borrowed for a couple of years is thrown away. The obeisance of libraries to the ephemera of fashion, and the abdication of their role in preserving books of the past, is a quiet cultural scandal. It's hard to imagine this indifference to the past in other cultures. Every culture has guarded the stories of the past and handed them on to each succeeding generation. The tradition of Europeans in Australia is not so much one of oral story-telling as one in which stories have been recorded on paper.