You would curl up in their arms and analyse the images as the words were read aloud. Perhaps, you would even know it off by heart and were able to "read" parts in unison.

Even though decades may have passed, chances are you still get a warm fuzzy feeling when you think back on those times.

Australia has a long history with children's literature, not just when it comes to those early experiences of reading, but in the creation of these stories.

You would be hard-pressed to find an Australian who hasn't heard of books such as The Magic Pudding, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, and Blinky Bill. But the history of Australian children's literature stretches back further than that.

The National Library of Australia celebrates this history with their latest exhibition Story Time, starting with the country's first children's book A Mother's Offering to Her Children.

For many years, its author was not known beyond the fact she was "a Lady long resident in New South Wales" but in 1980, biographer Marcie Muir identified Charlotte Waring Atkinson (also known as Charlotte Barton) as the author.

"I would say that it doesn't have some of the engaging elements that we'd find in a picture book, and picture books really sort of took off more into the 20th century," exhibition curator Grace Blakeley-Carroll says.

"It's more of a dialogue between a mother and her children and has these moral messages in there. I'm not sure many children would be picking it up, but it is an important part of our history of literature for children."

The book is a demonstration of just how much children's literature has changed in the more than 170 years since it was published.

Not only have we seen the introduction of picture books, but Blakeley-Carroll says there is now more of an awareness of having different books for different ages in a child's life.

"There are the early childhood readers, or even those card books for really young little kids, right through to your young adult fiction, as well and everything in between," she says.

"Books and reading books is a really important way that children develop literacy fundamentally and I think fiction often can be more engaging than non-fiction, so that's really important.

"It's relationships as well. I think a lot of the early encounters we have with books are people reading to us, usually adults, whether it is a parent or a teacher or some other adult in a child's life and often it's that sharing of the story.

"That's partly why we called the exhibition Story Time because these stories are alive and we're interested in how these stories have been told over time and how they are shared."

No one would blame Blakeley-Carroll for including her own favourite children's book in the exhibition. The curator still has the copy of Graeme Base's The Eleventh Hour which she grew up with and now, those who attend the exhibition will be able to see the original artwork for the book's dust jacket that the National Library has borrowed from the National Centre for Australian Children's Literature.

Children's author Stephanie Owen Reeder's favourite book as a child was Quippy: A Story for Three Year Olds, written by Olive L Mason and illustrated by Walter Cunningham. Just like Blakeley-Carroll, she made sure to include this 1940s tale about a yellow duck in the exhibition's companion book, Story Time Stars.

The book is a collection of Australian children's literature from the past century, giving insight into the diversity of styles and stories over the decades. It's this diversity which makes it near impossible for Owen Reeder to pin down exactly what it is that makes a good Australian children's book.

"What early critics commented on was the sense of light in Australian picture books in the illustrations, that weren't in European books," she says.

"They tend to be a lot darker, which is interesting because you wouldn't think that sort of thing would come out. But obviously, we also have things like wombats and koalas so there's that very distinctive part of it."

There are moments in history which seem more Australian than others. Around the time of the centenary, children's books were filled with Australian animals and during the 1970s and 80s, there was a phase of releasing poems by Banjo Patterson such as Mulga Bill's Bicycle.

"I mean Waltzing Matilda - what's more Australian than Waltzing Matilda? And that was made into a picture book," Owen Reeder says.

"I'm not sure that there really is that [sense of Australia anymore] - apart from when it's obviously Australian.

"When you look at the bestsellers like Pig the Pug, it's not really Australian, is it? It could be from any country and I suppose that's part of the whole thing isn't it?"

Something that both Owen Reeder and Blakeley-Carroll agree on is Australian children's literature's ability to address larger topics within their texts, particularly in contemporary works.

Blakeley-Carroll says this representation doesn't always have to be blatantly obvious.

"Sometimes it might be a more subtle thing, like one of the more recent books in the exhibition is called Love Makes a Family," she says.

"It's by Sophie Beer and it's just full of pictures of different families doing things together and through her pictures that the families she has depicted are very diverse and she doesn't make a big statement about it, it's just kind of implied and that obviously it reflects family life in Australia.

"But I do think there is a really long tradition of children's books having a kind of educational element to them. If you even think about things like fairytales often there is a moral in the story."