Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot!
I loved Guy Fawkes night when I was a kid. My siblings and I would make an effigy of Guy Fawkes out of old clothes, build a bonfire and throw him onto the top of the burning pile. I'l never forget my old orange nylon flares bursting into flames while my sisters set Catherine Wheels spinning on the gum trees in our back garden. Every year our Dad brought home a bag of crackers; penny bungers, tom thumbs, throwdowns and scary jumping jacks. There'd also be an indulgent array of fireworks; roman candles, flowerpots, golden showers and gorgeous rockets that we set in milk bottles before sending them into the night sky. The advent of daylight savings took some of the thrill out of the night, then crackers and fireworks were banned and finally suburban bonfires became illegal.
As Australia becomes safer and more secular, many of the festive events of my childhood have lost their pizzazz. But yesterday I went to the National Gallery of Victoria to attend the awards ceremony for the Victorian Premier's Reading Challenge and realised there's some excellent new reasons to celebrate.
I'm seriously proud to be an Ambassador for the Challenge. I know I would have loved to have been part of it when I was a kid. No one except my mum was particularly impressed by the volume of books I read as a child. It was almost a secret vice and not something you bragged about in class. But yesterday, hundreds of kids rolled up at the NGV to celebrate their achievements as readers. During the course of this year's Challenge 212,000 Victorian kids read 3.6 million books. According to most of these kids, 'Reading Rules'.
Being an arty, bookish kid in 1960s Melbourne wasn't all that cool but judging by the attitude of the funky junior readers at yesterdays event, things are a whole lot better for young booklovers these days. Frankly, things are better for readers of all of ages. There are more bookshops, more publishers, more support for readers and writers, better libraries and more opportunities to celebrate the importance of art and books in our lives.
For all the nostalgia for Guy Fawkes night, there's still plenty of reasons to be cheerful about the things we can and do celebrate.
As an afterthought, one of my other favourite childhood festivities that's still huge in Australia - possibly even bigger and better - is the Melbourne Cup. It helped that I had a weird dream that was both 'Shocking' (winner!) and about a 'Crime Scene' (2nd) which led me to placing a couple of very lucrative bets on Tuesday. Mysterious and magical. More reasons to be cheerful.
Reasons to Cheerful - Part II
Reasons to be Cheerful - Part I
When I was seventeen, I put a little book together called 'Reasons to Celebrate'. It was a birthday present for my best friend and consisted of a diary/birthday book with a justification for celebration listed on each and every day of the year. My friends and I were always trying to think up a good reason to indulge ourselves: to eat another ice-cream, order another pizza, not do our homework, or have another beer (yes, we were underage drinkers). My idea was that anytime we were looking for a good excuse to indulge, we could flick open the little green book and say, "Oh, look, today is National Ferret Day (April 2). Can't let that one slip by without celebrating!"
I spent weeks trying to fill in some of the more obscure dates, using religious calenders and the Encyclopedia Brittanica to find events of note but in the end I had to invent celebrations for days that proved too hard to find anything to commemorate. It's much easier being a teenager today. You can find so many more reasons to be cheerful.
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the internet. Now that is a day worth noting. If it had been around when I was a kid, I could knocked up that little book of celebrations in an afternoon just by referencing the following two sites:
http://www.holidaysforeveryday.com
http://www.holidays.net
Todays listings of 'Reasons to celebrate' include:
Halloween
All Hallows Eve
Beggar's Night
Magic Day
National Knock-Knock Day (USA)
National UNICEF Day
Reformation Day (particularly in Slovenia & Brandenburg)
Samhain (Wiccan)
&
The anniversary of the death of Harry Houdini.
It's the last one that's on my mind this afternoon. One of the characters in my new novel, Charlie, is obsessed with magic. I've just finished reviewing some of the chapters where Charlie tries to create illusions and discovers exactly how Indian fakirs perform their mysterious acts.
There is something about magic, about our relationship to the invisible, the unknown, the unseen and unseeable that is at the heart of celebration. It's the essence of Halloween, Samhain and, of course, Magic Day.
Houdini died in 1926 and there was nothing cheerful about his passing. But he lived a dazzling, daring and passionate life and perhaps that's what celebration and magic are all about. Embracing life.
Because it's important
October has been an utter drought for me on the blog front, even though there has been a million things about which I have thought 'I must write a post about that...'.
I've super-charged my brain with new ideas at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival, spent two weeks in South Asia, pondered the Americanization of 'Vulture's Gate', made a big leap forward with the new novel and scribbled lists of ideas for future blogs in three different notebooks (yes, I know, counterproductive).
But when uber-librarian Pat Pledger of Read Plus emailed me about a recent survey of government school libraries, I knew it had to be the topic for the first blog I would write to break my drought. I know how important teacher-librarians are to the literary life of a school. I feel their presence as soon as I walk into a school library. Schools that are lucky enough to have libraries staffed by a dynamic teacher-librarians invariably have powerful literary cultures. In the past decade of visiting schools, I've grown to deeply admire teacher-librarians. The impact they have on the developing literacy of children is crucial in creating skilled readers and writers.
Following is the results of the survey, courtesy of Pat Pledger, and a link to a petition urging the federal government to ensure that all Australian primary and secondary students have access to a school library and a qualified teacher librarian:
The ASLRP survey undertaken on the behest of ASLA and ALIA shows a
great inequity in school library staffing and funding across Australia.
The survey showed that 35% of government school libraries have
no teacher librarians. Approximately two thirds of all schools have
either no teacher librarian or less than one Full Time Equivalent (FTE)
working in their school library. After the Northern Territory (5%),
Tasmania (50%), Western Australia (almost 60%) and Victoria
(65%) have the lowest number of TLs employed K-12 across all
sectors. Instead there are high numbers of library technicians
in Tasmania and Victoria and library officers in Western Australia.
As it has done in the past, the federal government is in a position to
influence state school library funding and staffing. To do this, they
can: collect national data on school library staffing, funding, and
scheduling; tie funding so that states can and must adequately staff and
fund school library programs and services; require that literacy
programs and other national curricula should explicitly recognize the
central role school libraries have in student achievement, literacy
attainment, and preparation for post-secondary success; develop national
school library standards; increase teacher librarian training positions
in university programs.
All Australian students deserve 21st century schools staffed by 21st
century professionally qualified teacher librarians.
Join in signing the petition now
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/a-qualified-teacher-librarian-in-every-school.html
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Collected Works from Collected Works
On Friday morning I dropped by my favourite bookshop in the world - Collected Works. It's in the Nicholas Building on the corner of Flinders Lane and Swanston Street in downtown Melbourne. I was searching for books for my very-well-read godchildren. There's been a run of birthdays in the last month and somehow I've managed to fall behind in my godmotherly duties. But the great thing about godparenting is that you are so easily forgiven (or at least, that's what I'm banking on).
One of the lovely things about being a god-parent is having the luxury of being the source of strange and unexpected gifts. I'm ashamed to admit my presents rarely arrive on time and are inevitably of the bookish persuasion but, so far, the feedback from the kids has been positive and I like to imagine that they sow a seed of curiosity.
After a long and intense conversation with the ever-wise Kris Hemensley, the resident poet of Collected Works, I put several books on order as belated birthday presents and walked out with three books of poetry which I KNOW I should put in the post immediately. Unfortunately, I'm going to have trouble parting with them. Especially Adam Ford's 'The Third Fruit is a Bird'. There's a certain seventeen-year-old who is destined to eventually own it but perhaps I'll have to go back and buy another copy as this one is already looking well-loved. (Okay, RW, you know it's on its way). Perhaps I'll have to hang on to all three books for the moment and start all over again because sometimes books are simply too seductive to allow themselves the luxury of travel.
Sorry much-loved kids, you'll have to wait a little longer.
Parallel histories or Things we have Lost
The tiny coloured ramekins, jugs and eggcups that line my kitchen windowsill were made by my father. In the early morning light they glisten like opals. Their glazes are smooth and rich. In the late 1940s imported glazes were hard to come by so my father sourced his pigments from the Dulux paint factory and made the glazes himself. My grandfather was also a potter who dug his own clay and built his own kilns. In my early childhood I imagined that making pottery was a very Australian occupation. Our house was awash with ceramics made by friends and relatives. We were so spoilt for beautiful crockery that we even used elegant, hand-thrown bowls to feed the cats.
For more than twenty years my father worked as a potter, building up his pottery from a tiny studio pottery in a shed in Sydney in the 1940s to a successful commercial pottery in Melbourne that employed a team of potters and artists who decorated the work. In the early 1960s, my father went to Canberra with other Australian potters to lodge a formal plea with the government not to remove tariffs that protected the Australian ceramics industry from being swamped by cheap imported crockery. Their bid failed.
Despite the fact that his work was popular - a 'must-have' for every Australian that aspired to stylish dining - my father had little confidence that his pottery would survive an influx of cheap imitations. So he sold the potteries before the inevitable slump and collapse of Australian commercial potteries. He committed himself to his deepest passion and became a full-time sculptor. In the long run, it proved a good move for him and our family but I always felt sorry for the artist who bought the business from my father. It lasted less than a decade once the restrictions against imports were removed.
Australians gained a huge range of cheap crockery but we lost access to a large body of studio and commercial pottery. There are still Australian potters working on a small scale but few can support themselves and you won't find their work in mainstream shops. In the wake of the Australian productivity commission's recommendation to lift restrictions on the import of books, I can't help but draw comparisons.
If Australian publishing went the same way as Australian potteries, writing in this country would become the luxury of the hobbyist. Most Australian writers, if it is no longer possible to make a living from their work, will have to resort to other jobs and a huge body of Australian writing will be lost.
There have been a lot of articles in the newspapers and on the internet over the course of this year thrashing out the arguments for and against the removal of restrictions. Perhaps I should have written this post months ago but when authors were accused of being 'greedy', I felt a wearying grief that history was repeating itself. If you want to understand the situation fully, check out Saving Aussie Books and Australians for Australian Books.
Stories serve a very different purpose to aesthetic objects. Putting the cat's food in a mass-produced bowl from China isn't the same as reading a child a story that fails to reflect any aspect of their country's history and culture. Everything changes but we should always be mindful of what will be lost in our haste to embrace the future.
Business
It's about to start - the whirly-gig of events that happen during the Melbourne Writer's Festival and Children's Bookweek. Having the two festivals coincide makes for a very crazy time for most children's authors. For me, the action starts tonight with the presentation of awards for the junior writing prizes of the My Brother Jack Literary Festival (yes, another festival). It was a huge job judging the awards this year - 156 short stories and 103 poems were entered in the competition. I'm looking forward to meeting the young prize-winning authors.
Then I'm heading straight onto a party to celebrate the opening of the MWF. Tomorrow I have one day of grace in which to get some writing done before twelve days of back to back events.
On Saturday, Vulture's Gate will be launched into the world, officially, at Fairfield Library.
On Monday, I'm doing two gigs at the Melbourne Writers' Festival - one with Julia Lawrinson on 'Truth, History and Fiction' and then one on my own talking about 'Tomorrow, Today' and the premise of Vulture's Gate. Then every other day of the week and the following week, I'll be visiting schools, conducting workshops, catching up with other writers who are in town for the festival or attending Children's Bookweek events. One good thing about having so much on is that I can't get particularly stressed about any single event. I'm probably more excited about having a full day of Punch and Judy on Sunday than anything else, simply because it's outside the normal run of activities for August.
I feel as if I'm living in two universes - one in which I am incredibly busy racing around Melbourne, meeting people and engaging with the present and another where my mind is totally pre-occupied with the book I'm working on. At night, I dream of travel, of being at sea, in airports, other countries or the landscape of my new novel - sailing through the Malacca Straits on my way to India.
Somedays, striking a balance between real life and the life of the imagination is like trying to juggle water. Maybe that's why writing is like magic. In one moment the ideas are simply falling through the air like raindrops that disappear into the earth and in the next, they're soaking into the pages of your story. Not the best metaphor, perhaps, but one that makes sense to me as I head out into a rainy Melbourne afternoon.
Punch and Judy Live
Okay, I have to admit it. I have another life. A life outside books. It involves a lot of other people and a huge cast of puppets.
In my other life, I'm in love with Mr Punch. As gross, violent and irreverent as he may be, there is something simply irresistible about Punch.
Maybe it's the fact that he is around 400 years old - which puts him way ahead of your run-of-the-mill vampire. Maybe it's all his alter egos that add to his appeal - Pulcinella in Italy, Kasper in Germany, Jan Klaassen in the netherlands and Mester Jakel in Denmark. In Russia he is known as Petrushka, in Romania he is Vasilache; in Hungary, László, and in France Polichinelle, while all across the English speaking world he is loved, loathed and reviled as Mr Punch.
I'm not alone in loving Punch. He has a grip on the imaginations of millions, including author Neil Gaiman whose book Punch : The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy references the comic puppet show and a tragic reality. But within the construct of the puppet show, Mr Punch is the absolute antithesis of a tragic figure.
Andy Griffiths, who understands more about humour than anyone I know and is also a fan of Punch, explained that what kids love in a comic character is the character's inability to learn, that the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is that the hero of the tragedy sees the error of his ways. The comedic hero never learns.
Kids love the fact that Mr Punch never changes. They know he is wrong about everything. They are deliciously scandalised by his behaviour; when he gets away with throwing away the baby, knocking the policeman on the head and tricking the devil. He is about as far removed from a moral paragon as you can find in fiction - which is why adults worry that he is a bad role model. But no child wants to emulate Mr Punch. They do love laughing at him. Perhaps it's an added pleasure for them to realise they're morally superior to Mr Punch. Even though they're still kids and everyone is telling them how to behave, they're way ahead of Punch.
This Sunday, 23 August, my better half, the puppeteer and Punch Professor, Ken Harper will be staging three Punch performances at Northcote Town Hall. If you've never seen Mr Punch live, you haven't lived! Tickets will be available at the door.
