Tangara (novel)
book by Nan Chauncy
Tangara (1960) is a novel for children by Australian author Nan Chauncy, illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. It won the Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers in 1961. It was published in America in 1962 under the title The Secret Friends.
Plot outline
A young girl, Lexie, finds a necklace which belonged to her great-great Aunt Rita. This leads to a friendship with Merrina, and Lexie comes to learn of the treatment of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The novel is part fantasy and part historical fiction.
Critical reception
Katharine Scholes considers this one of the books that had a major impact upon her. "I first read this story about the friendship between two Tasmanian children - one white, one black - when I was 10 years old. My family had just moved from East Africa to Tasmania. The descriptions of the landscape and the magical feel to the story helped me see my new country as a place with imaginative and spiritual meaning.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Tangara (novel)” as book by Nan Chauncy. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as book by Nan Chauncy. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25218601. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1961 and 1962.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Tangara (novel) primary sources, Tangara (novel) archive and Tangara research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Tangara (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.