Magic Casements

2011-11-06T23:29:00.002+11:00

In September, I spoke at the Ballarat Writers' and Illustrators' Festival. My panel was called: Imagery in Fiction: Visualising, Imagining, Creating

The other panelists included author Penni Russon, illustrator Michelle Mackintosh, and editor Alison Arnold. Librarian Julie Bull managed to keep us more or less on track discussing the topic but somehow I came around to talking about the importance of 'place' in my writing. I talked about travelling through the far north of Australia, camping in mango orchards, travelling from Queensland into the Northern Territory and feeling the landscape as a living, breathing presence.

While I spoke about landscape, Simon Swingler drew this illustration of me, which I love because it captures exactly what it feels like to have a place enter your consciousness and take over your thoughts.

Recently, I've been dipping into Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I first heard of Thoreau when I was around 11-years-old and read My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. George's novel is about a 13-year-old boy called Sam who runs away to live alone in the Catskill Mountains partly because he is inspired by Thoreau's life at Walden Pond.

Reading My Side of the Mountain led me to track down Thoreau's classic book about living in the wild. His writing affected my life in many ways and it still has impact on the way I think about landscapes and wilderness.

As I write this post, a chorus of frogs is singing in the darkness of a Western Australian night. In a chapter on 'Solitude', Thoreau wrote: "There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still." This year of travel has made me fully appreciate that truth.

Kimberley Writers Festival

2011-07-29T20:02:00.003+10:00

This is the view from my desk. But the reality is much better than the washed-out photo. The water is deep blue, the sky moves from shades of morning gold and azure through to mauve and orange at sunset.

We're camped on the banks of Kona Inlet, a peaceful stretch of water that links up to Lake Kununurra. I think this particular campsite has to rate as one of my favourites. The only drawback is the water is full of freshwater crocodiles, which puts a little bit of a pall on the idea of swimming in it.

In a little while, we'll be heading off to the official opening of the Kimberley Writers Festival, though it feels as though the festival has already been going for a couple of days. We met up with some of the other authors and the lovely library staff who are engineering the festival on Wednesday night for dinner. Last night there were pre-festival drinks and tonight it will be a little more formal with all the authors finally in town, a big crowd of readers and the festival fully underway.

Today I did three sessions with students at Kununurra High School. They were a great mob - funny, intelligent and attentive. Over the course of the weekend I'll be doing readings and sessions with adult audiences, whom hopefully will be as much fun as the kids, though perhaps not. The reason I write for younger readers is partly because I like their company. I also love the way they behave as characters within the context of a story. I'm always a little bewildered when I meet authors who write for and about kids but don't actually like them.

When the festival is over, the Professor and I will head back into the Northern Territory. I have a lot of writing to catch up on. The Kimberleys is a landscape that inspires all sorts of story. It's ancient, exquisitely beautiful and yet very complicated. I'm currently reading a Mary Durack novel set in the region, Keeping My Country, which I'm enjoying but I'd love to be reading some children's and YA fiction set in these landscapes too. A few years back I read Leonie Norrington's YA novel The Last Muster which was a great read and very under appreciated. It captured so many layers of the complex stories that belong to this landscape. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to write something set in the Kimberleys - I'd need to spend more time soaking up the place - or maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to come back.

Out of the desert

2011-07-18T20:53:00.005+10:00

It's a deliciously warm night in Katherine, NT. I'm sitting at the desk of a friend who has kindly given us the keys to her house while she is off traveling the world. It's two months since I last wrote a blog post and six months since we drove out of the driveway of our home in Melbourne.

Last time I posted a blog, it was to announce I was starting yet another blog - this one dedicated to travelling with Punch and Judy. But the best laid plans went astray. I lost all interest in blogging. There was so much going on, so many new places, new faces and new ideas to assimilate that to regurgitate it onto a page without much reflection felt like just adding a lot more white noise to the blogsphere.

I have always been the type of writer that likes to think about an idea for a long time before I put the words on the page. I've also never been very interested in writing about myself. So blogging about my journey across Australia with The Professor and a trunkful of puppets as our adventures unfolded became increasingly difficult.

I've kept a journal - as usual - about day to day events but it's not something I would choose to share. I've written several short stories, some junior fiction chapter books and a non-fiction book for the National Library which will be released next year . I've also made some headway on a new novel. I spent a lot of time thinking about each of those projects as the speedometer on our car clicked over - climbing up to nearly 30,000 kilometres of travel since leaving Melbourne.

Some writers can produce self-revelatory stories at the drop of a hat. I've discovered I'm not one of them. I've discovered a lot of things about myself, about writing, about puppets, about Australia, about the things I value and the stories that I want to share.

Perhaps too much is asked of young writers when they're told to 'write a story' for an English class or an exam. Some stories can take a long time to brew.

When you can't beat 'em...

2011-05-20T16:56:00.005+10:00

It's been a month since I last wrote a blog and I blame it all on Punch and Judy.

Since my last post, written while we were in Mudgee, I've been thinking constantly about books and writing. I've toured Tasmania, speaking at an AATE/ALEA Conference in Devonport and talking to thousands of kids from Penguin to Hobart. I've been to the Hunter Valley and talked books and babies with the lovely Alyssa Brugman. I've written grant applications, scraps of short fiction, worked on my new novel and generally got on with the business of being a writer. I've visited schools and libraries in NSW, and travelled from Newcastle to Port Macquarie to the Byron hinterland. This week, I've dined with fabulous teacher librarians on the Gold Coast and worked with students at Aquinas College. I've also read dozens of great novels. But every time I've sat down to write a blog post about any of the above and books and writing, which is what Magic Casements has always meant to be about, I've been distracted by Mr Punch.

The conflict of interest between writing about books or writing about Mr Punch has grown so intense that I've decided to start a new blog dedicated exclusively to Life with Punch. It might be a bad idea. Writing two blogs might mean less writing and less blogging gets done. But perhaps it will mean more of everything. Sometimes, when I'm working on a novel and find myself getting stuck, I start writing a completely different novel altogether. For some reason it seems to unlock the creative process.

I wrote my novels 'Vulture's Gate' and 'India Dark' across the same time period, working intensely on one and then the other and each seemed to make the other more do-able. So hopefully keeping two blogs will work the same way. I'm going to try and keep Mr Punch's long nose out of Magic Casements so if you want to find out what he's been up to, and about our lives in the 'Gas Bottle Republic' as the Professor calls the world of caravanning, then you can follow my new blog, 'Life with Punch'. Stick around on Magic Casements for updates on all things bookish and how to write in the face of intense competition from puppets. When you can't beat 'em - give 'em their own blog.

For Love and No Money - Of Poets and Puppeteers

2011-04-11T21:34:00.006+10:00

Every year millions of words are written for money and millions more for love.

I've been earning a living from my writing for around thirteen years and with each year, more and more, I have come to admire people who craft words with precision and skill for nothing more than the pleasure of shaping a beautiful sentence. For me, poets demonstrate the essence of pure writing. Poetry is Cinderella of the literary arts. Novelists and prose writers can always imagine that at some point they might earn a living from their words but even the finest, most successful poets are unlikely to every earn more than a few dollars from their work. They labour for love alone.

Puppetry is poetry's theatrical equivalent. Artists who fall in love with puppetry are quirky souls who love the magic and drama of bringing inanimate objects to life. It's definitely the preserve of the dedicated theatre practitioner which is why I never get tired of following the Professor and his crew of puppets around the country.

Anna Ryan-Punch's poem about the poet Henry Lawson and Mr Punch brought together everything I love about poets, puppets and life on the road. Thanks, Anna. No strings attached.

Henry Lawson Country

2011-04-09T09:28:00.004+10:00

Henry Lawson is haunting us. Everywhere we go there are references to him. Parks, streets and pubs all bear his name. It feels like every corner you walk around there's a plaque referencing him in some way or another - Henry slept here, drank here, wrote a line about this tree, creek or geranium...

I think I'm going to have to crack and go and pick up a copy of some Lawson ballads for weekend reading. Lawson was born in Grenfell but spent some of his childhood in Gulgong. Both Grenfell and Gulgong stage Henry Lawson Festivals in June. Lawson's work references towns all across this region - Central Western Tablelands of NSW.

Last week, I ran an all-day writing workshop with senior students at Gulgong High School. At one point, when we were working on character development, I asked the young writers to create a character that they might bump into on the main street of Gulgong. Some of them groaned. The familiar is so often less inspiring than the exotic. In defense of the premise, I suggested that if one of the students in the workshop - for example Jessica McLennan (who wrote beautifully) - spent the rest of her life writing about Gulgong and NSW, then eventually Gulgong would stage a "Jessica McLennan Festival" and Henry Lawson could wind up being completely overshadowed by her. Lawson is such an icon in Gulgong that all the kids fell about laughing, though Jessica looked rather chuffed at the notion.

I'm sure if you'd told Henry Lawson, as a young man living in Gulgong, that the town would lionise him one day he would have laughed too. Lawson led a tragic life and died impoverished and pretty much destitute. But he made these country towns and the people who inhabited them live on the page. I wonder what he'd make of it all now? As an alcoholic, I suspect he'd be pretty pleased to discover the area that he thirstily tramped through in his youth is now a fabulous wine growing region.

Shouters, Chargers & the Life of Punch

2011-04-02T12:16:00.011+11:00

Last Sunday, the Professor performed two shows of "The Terrible Story of Mr Punch" at Orange Regional Gallery.

The booth looked both spooky and elegant set up in one of the galleries that featured the work of the artist David Fairburn. From certain angles, it looked as though the portraits were watching the show as well.

I didn't have to do much in the way of 'bottling' in Orange. The gallery handled all the front of house so I actually had a chance to take a few photos.

It felt very relaxed and the Professor came out and chatted to the early arrivals which included quite a few dads with their sons. Audiences are different from one town to the next and it's always interesting to watch their responses. It's often the little girls who are the loudest, particularly four to six-year-olds. I'm usually too busy watching the kids to take pictures - or if I do manage a few, they're often blurry as the kids are often wriggling and shouting. I've taken to sitting down the front at most shows in case a very excited child leaps up and charges the booth. There was only one 'charger' at the Orange show but in Nowra, two little five year old girls were so keen to make Mr Punch take notice of their shouted instruction that they made a dash for the booth and started jumping up and down. Parents are often so surprised to see their little princesses shouting with excitement and lecturing a puppet that they don't quite know what to do. I quietly usher the kids back to their seats, agreeing with them that Mr Punch is very naughty and that if they wait until the end of the show, they can have a one-to-one chat and tell him off. They're always very obliging.

In Nowra, Lauren, the little girl in the blue t-shirt on the right, was one of the loudest kids at any of the Punch shows so far. She had a fantastic, shrill whistle and she was determined that Mr Punch was going to hear her and take her advice. "Behind you! Behind you! I told you there was a crocodile behind you!" She led a charge of several small kids on the booth. Just after I took the photo of the girls I had to make a dash down the front to lure them back to their seats. I don't think Lauren's dad had ever seen his daughter in a full blown argument with a puppet.

Tomorrow Mr Punch will be up to his usual tricks at the Pipe Band Hall at Victoria Park in Darling Street.

The shows in Nowra and Orange were terrific with lovely audiences but I'm a little nervous about tomorrow's shows. Dubbo has been a tricky town to get to know. That might be because I've spent the last three days in outlying areas, giving talks to kids at the shire libraries and running a writing class with secondary students at Gulgong High School. Every town has its own personality that impacts on the mood of the audiences. The Professor did a radio interview this morning and Duboo is plastered with posters of Punch and Judy. Fingers crossed, a good range of Dubbo shouters and chargers, mums, dads, grannies and totally feral toddlers will turn up at the Pipe Band Hall tomorrow morning.

Silence, music and tomorrow

2011-03-31T22:44:00.004+11:00

Silence is golden. Sometimes, being silent is the only way you can make sense of things going on around you. Or making music.When things get too intense, singing and making music about life can also help you make sense of it.

When I was a teenager, I read Mario Puzo's novel 'The Godfather' and then everything I could find of his, including his comments on how to be a writer. I've forgotten much of his fiction which was eventually overshadowed by the film versions of his books but I do remember a column he wrote on being a writer. He said that if you want to write interesting books, lead a dull life. There's truth in the remark as life has been anything but dull of late and I have done very little writing.

Here is a list of a few things that I haven't written about but which I've spent a lot of time thinking about, not necessarily in this order:

Katoomba Music Festival (misty, moisty but fun)
Hanging out with the wonderful James Roy (more fun)
Lymphoma, health scares and false alarms (not mine, but someone very close to me)
Mr Punch and his audiences (particularly kids who can't help charging the booth)
Orange (the city, not the colour or the fruit)
Dubbo, Gilgandra and Warren (all of which I've visited in the past 3 days)
Romance in caravan parks (other people's - not just mine)
Ukeleles (I'm getting better at playing them - we have two now)

Tomorrow I'm driving to Gulgong to spend a day workshopping stories with students at Gulgong High School.

As 'Annie' would sing: "Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow, you're only a day away."

It's Later Now

2011-03-15T21:45:00.004+11:00

I feel I need to apologise for not posting a blog for a couple of weeks. After encouraging so many people to read about our adventures, suddenly, I couldn't bring myself to write about them. I've been very much inside my own head for the last couple of weeks. I can't fully explain why I couldn't bring myself to write a blog post at Bundanon. I did manage to finish a book and made some decent headway into another as well as doing a surprising amount of socialising. So perhaps the days were simply too crowded.

The three week residency at Bundanon came to an end on Sunday and the Professor and I headed up the coast to a beach just north of Wollongong. The last couple of nights we've been camped at what is possibly the nicest caravan park in the world. It's tiny and smack bang on Coledale Beach. When we roll up the canvas walls of Gloria we get a sweeping view of a spectactular seascape.

This evening we ate dinner beneath a silky grey sky and watched the boats lining up and lighting up as they made their way into Port Kembla. A crowd of surfers sat waiting to catch a wave and a flock of cockatoos wandered about on the grass around our caravan.

A woman came up to our table as we ate our dinner simply to tell us how idyllic our set-up looked. She was on the second night of her own caravaning Odyssey and I suppose, two months into our own adventure, we're starting to look and feel a little more seasoned. The Professor and I joked about what sort of advice we could possibly give other would-be caravanning adventurers. We feel like we're only just starting to get the hang of this caper. But we did come up with a title for a book about it: It's Later Now...

When it comes to ambitions, both large and small, it's probably good to remember that there's not much point about saying I'll do it later - including updating a blog. It's later now.

Living in the landscape

2011-02-27T11:15:00.001+11:00

For most of the past seventeen years, I've lived in the city of Melbourne. I have a beautiful garden and a couple of times a year I go adventuring in the bush but I lead a very urban life. Over the past few weeks, as we've changed camp half a dozen times, I've been rethinking the way I understand landscapes and wilderness, not least because I have been surrounded by such beautiful vistas.

The photo above shows the Shoalhaven River at sunset. It was taken from a hill at Riversdale, one of the properties of the Bundanon Trust. I'm currently 'writer-in-residence' at Bundanon, staying in a the 'Writer's Cottage'. We drove over to Riversdale last weekend because they were staging a cabaret in the education centre there - a gorgeous space that overlooks the river. Long, glass doors were thrown open to the evening and the deep, bluesy voice of Christa Hughes melted into the night. It was an amazing setting for a performance.

This morning, at dawn, the eastern horizon above Bundanon was a brilliant shade of hot pink and tendrils of mist were floating above the river. Then the rain set in and everything faded to soft grey.

Maybe if I lived here all the time, I'd lose the sense of wonder that the shifting light and gentle rhythms of the bush and pastures evoke. Maybe not. The Professor and I have two more weeks at Bundanon so there's more to think about, more tracks to explore, more words to be written and puppets to be made.

Over the past week I've done a lot of work both at the desk and in thinking about my relationship to this landscape and to other places. There's too much to write about in a single post in relation to what I've discovered and what I've let go of. Probably it's enough to say I feel being here has involved shifting some old ideas, revisiting others, and trying to figure out how and why we so often neglect the connections between ourselves, our pasts, and the land. Damn. That means I'll have to write another post about this when I've pieced some of those ideas together. Stay tuned. I may actually write something intelligent on the topic before we head inland.

Two for the road

2011-02-23T17:22:00.008+11:00

In Melbourne, our house is full of clutter. Facing the prospect of paring down to just a handful of objects was a pretty scary concept. What's important? What's useful? What to take? What to leave behind?

Last year, Ruth Quibell, who writes the intriguing blogspot Precious Things, asked me if I'd write a post about a precious object to crosspost on her blog. My first idea was to write about the three Buta (giant) Indonesian puppets that stood in our hallway at home. But when we packed up the house last month only one Buta made it into the Professor's road case. And I realised, as much as I love the puppets, they're not that precious. Sometimes its the things you take for granted, that you become so used to living with that you don't see them any more, that prove more precious than you'd imagined.

At home on our kitchen wall there are two things that I look at every day. One is what we call 'the wall of fame'. It's a cobbled together organic mish mash of family photos that grows and changes from one year to the next. All the kids are represented at various stages of their growing up as well as godchildren, friends and other family.

The second thing is the big railway station clock above the doorway (there's always someone in our house running late to catch a train).

We told our kids not to give us objects for Christmas because we'd just have to put them in storage. But Romanie and Elwyn were particularly cunning about the directive. They looked around the house and recognised the things that we would miss and, very cleverly, created 100% caravan friendly versions of two very precious things.

Romanie's version of our wall clock is even nicer than the original. She made it from a corkboard placemat (unbreakable!). The background is a map of Melbourne with the lovely arc of Port Phillip Bay at the bottom. Rom pasted it down on the board and fixed the clock in place. The red circles on the map are where our kids live: Brunswick, Northcote, Preston, Collingwood - no one moved far from home except for one who is so far away, Romanie could only write "Paris" with an arrow in the top left hand corner.

When we unpacked the caravan for our three weeks at Bundanon, the clock was one of the first things I brought inside. It looks very elegant and very "Melbourne" against the white liner boards of the Bundanon Writers' Cottage.

Elwyn's Christmas present to us is a little less travel friendly but has amazingly survived a month in the caravan without springing a leak. I suspect it will safely make it all the way around the continent. It's the snow dome pictured at top and bottom. Elwyn bought the dome online and then found recent images of all the kids which he photoshopped into a funky design and inserted into the dome. Whenever we pull into a new campsite or destination, the first two things that come out of the cupboard are the snowdome and the clock.

It's too easy to be pragmantic when you're attempting to live like a gypsy and to think that objects don't matter. But in a way they matter more. One of the best bits of caravanning advice I had was from a friend who spent too much time in them as a kid. She said "Don't let anything inside this caravan that isn't beautiful."

Our clock and snowdome are utterly beautiful to me. If I'm feeling maudlin and homesick, I can give the snowdome a good shake and think about the kids (which usually improves my state of mind, rather than making me bluer). And every time I check the time, I think of them too and wonder what they're up to or where they might be in that moment in time.

Objects can represent so much about our connections to time, place and other people. Even gypsies need their precious things to make them feel at home.

Puppet in Residence

2011-02-22T21:22:00.012+11:00

Mr Punch is definitely enjoying the residency at Bundanon. This afternoon we took him out for his first jaunt in the countryside. Puppets don't get much of a break from their life inside the roadcase or the booth so this afternoon The Professor and I walked Mr Punch up to a tiny little cottage - the Single Man's Hut - that's set on a hill behind the main homestead.

You can just make out the Single Man's Hut in the distance in the photo below.

We made our way along the beautiful track, passing mobs of kangaroos grazing in the late afternoon sunlight.

No one stays in the single man's hut. There's no running water up there, no kitchen or bathroom, but that's not really a problem for a puppet. The hut would make a great puppet house. It's a bit like a glorified cubby house from a contemporary perspective though once upon a time working men lived there while they worked on the property. There's a great view from the hut, right across the grounds of the homestead, taking in the ornamental lake and the fields beyond that stretch down to the Shoalhaven River.

The Professor tried to get Mr Punch to take an interest but puppets often have their own agenda.

Mr Punch just wanted to check out the hut. The Professor didn't particularly approve of the Peeping Punch routine and hence a battle ensued. Mr Punch, wasn't interested in being stuffed back in his bag and made a run for it. But he didn't have a chance. He's only a 30 cm puppet and The Professor always has the upper hand. It was back in the bag for poor old Punchey. All he wanted was to have a bit of time out. But we dragged him back to the Writer's Cottage, even though the Single Man's Hut would have been a perfect retreat for a puppet like Punch. Then again, he's not actually single. Judy would have been a little annoyed to find him missing from the big red roadcase.

Narooma to Nowra

2011-02-18T21:34:00.003+11:00

For someone who loves the landscapes of other people's pasts, I've been surprised to find that arriving at Bundaon, just outside of Nowra, has felt a little bumpy. But that's another story which I'll write about during the next three weeks while I'm 'in residence' here and staying in the Writer's Cottage.

We arrived in Nowra mid-afternoon after a leisurely drive up the coast from Narooma where the Professor and I were lucky to score a very comfortable house (thanks to kind friends) for the past five nights. After a month in the glorious Gloria (our caravan) it was great to be able to spread out under a real roof, especially as it's done nothing but rain for the last week in southern NSW.

On Wednesday, the Professor took Punch and Judy to perform in a school in Cobargo. I tagged along and spent the misty morning sitting in a beautiful cafe in the main street. Southern NSW has been full of surprises - as well as cheese factories, fudge shops, fresh oysters, and hippy emporiums.

The Professor said the kids of Cobargo were the loudest, happiest audience he's come across in a while. I managed to knock over several chapters of the new book, in part thanks to the very good coffee. Country towns can render surprises on more fronts than one.

Now it's late on Friday night and the countryside has fallen quiet. Earlier in the evening we sat on the verandah of our little cottage and watched wombats and wallabies make their way across a neighbouring paddock. It's a good setting for the list of projects that I have to work on over the course of the next few weeks. But there's other work to do too, particularly about putting some of my memories of this place in order.

I first came here in the summer of 1974. It was a different landscape back then and I was a different person. But perhaps that's why we tell stories. To give shape to the complicated landscapes of our past.

A reason to write

2011-02-16T19:18:00.003+11:00

Writing can be a demoralising experience. For all the highs, the euphoria at finding the right turn of phrase and the love you have for your characters, when you finish a book you can't help worrying that it may fall into a black hole in space.

I wrote Zarconi's Magic Flying Fish between 1998 & 1999. It was published in November 1999. That's a little short of thirteen years ago - the entire span of someone's childhood. And yet it is still finding its readers.

Towards the end of last year, I received a series of emails from a Grade 4/5 teacher in Hobart, Tasmania who had been reading Zarconi's to his class. He initially wrote on the offchance I might be passing through Tasmania as his kids were loving the story. I was sorry to not be able to meet his class. Peter was obviously a passioante teacher. I couldn't help but wish my Grade 4/5 teacher had dedicated a big slice of fourth term to reading a novel aloud in class.

Just before Christmas, Peter sent me the following comments from his students:

· I really loved the book it was awesome and funny-Olivia

· I loved your book it was funny and some of it was sad but it ended really nicely, by Rachel

· I love the book and I enjoyed the story by Sam

· I think it was a very good book I am going to get it if I find it, by Tyler

· Please make a new one .my rating 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000/10 by jayden.

· Hi great book but did Gus stay at the circus? And will there be a part two? From Amy

· I loved the because it makes me want to be in a circus. By Matthew.

· I really liked the book because it was funny at times. From Brad

· I think the book really funny. by Raegen

· I liked the book, it was funny happy, exciting, and sad. I really want you to write a part two so please, please can you from Ella!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

· I loved the book because it tells a great story of guss I give it a 10 out of 10 FROM MONIQUE!!!!!!!!

· I really liked the book it was really funny 10/10 by MATTY.

· Best book I have heard in a while I would give it way over 10/10 from the best student Aidan

· I loved the because it makes me want to be in a circus. By Matthew.

Some authors, particularly those who write for adults, say they never think of their audience when they write. In some ways, I understand that. I understand being caught up in the story so absolutely that you feel possessed by it. But then, at some point as I write, I remember what it was like to be a kid. I think of the way I felt when I was read to and the pleasure I had in reading in secret. And I want to meet my reader in that place where everything becomes possible and the story becomes part of the way we both understand the world.

Writing for children is different to writing for adults in many ways. But perhaps the greatest difference is that children's authors never quite let go of the pain and pleasures childhood. Not least the pleasure of having someone offer you a story that you can love without reservation.

Nerdy, selfish authors

2011-02-15T18:08:00.005+11:00

Writing in a caravan while on the move has proved an interesting challenge. We left Melbourne in such a rush that I managed to carry away a weird assortment of papers. I've finally sorted through all the dross but was surprised this morning to find a big wad of feedback from a school in WA had slipped into the pile of unanswered correspondence.

The feedback consisted of dozens of assignments that Year 8 students wrote after I visited their school. One of the lovely co-ordinators forwarded them to me ages ago and I always intended to write a blog about how so many kids have low expectations of an author visit. Plenty of the kids wrote glowing comments but my favourite comments, and perhaps the most revealing about attitudes to authors, were from the kids who were surprised that a writer could be 'normal'.

The kids were asked to write about their first impressions of meeting a 'real author'. Following are some excerpts:

• The first time I saw Kirsty Murray I expected her to be a bit selfish. I don’t know why, but I always expect authors to be a bit selfish (I think it’s because of the big pictures of themselves that they put on their books). But Kirsty surprised me. She was really nice and didn’t even look like I imagined authors to look like.

• When we arrived in the P.A.C. I was expecting this to be a boring speech by an old laddy [sic]. But it turned out to be a good and exciting talk about how wrighting has afected her life [sic].

• Kirsty Murray was very interesting. She was nothing that I was expecting… I expected Kirsty to be older and more of a nerdy, old fashioned writer. Kirsty looked young, the complete opposite of what I expected.

• My first impression of Kirsty was how could she be a writer because I imagine writers as weird looking people with glasses but Kirsty looked like a normal person.

• I expected her to be an older person with short grey hair. I don’t know why. When I walked in I was surprised to see a young person with long blonde wavey hair. (very flattering - I am actually really old...)

• I thought “Wow! If she’s presenting a speech in front of an audience she needs to spend a little bit more time brushing her hair in the morning!” (another kid wrote that I had hair like macaroni)

• I first thought that it was just going to be another visiting author that sat down and formally talked to us while everyone fell asleep in their chairs wondering what they are going to do once they go home but I found it very interesting!

• I thought she would be really nerdy with glasses and dress weirdly. She turned out to be quite the opposite.

• My first impressions of Kirsty was that she was genuinely happy to be here. She wasn’t longing for escape or bored and uninterested about talking to a bunch of kids.

I think the last comment is the most telling. Kids spend so much of their time being talked down to that it's not hard to keep them interested if you can convey that you actually are interested in them. And it's probably a good idea to ditch the glasses and the sensible shoes.

Reading through the kid's assignments today, I realised that I really do love spending time with students. Some of them wrote fantastic reviews of my books, others about how much it meant to them to meet an author whose books they'd read. But I've been feeling a little torn about accepting school bookings. I want 2011 to be a big year of writing. It feels as though too much of the past year was spent simply keeping on top of the messy business of being me. Maybe if I can get ahead on the writing in the next month or so, I'll be able to spend a season in schools too, though I might have to do something about my hair...

Narooma - Seaside town of secrets

2011-02-14T18:28:00.008+11:00

I'm not a great tourist. Since my teens, I've tended to drift in and out of towns and entire countries and failed to do the things that most other people enjoy. But I genuinely admire people who have an instinct for tourism.

I know it's popular to bag tourists in some circles but tourism, at its best, is about being infinitely curious about the world and seeking out experiences that enrich your understanding. So now I try and do at least one or two genuinely touristy things in a new town before I lapse back into my usual routines, back to the comfortable landscape inside my head and the blank pages waiting to be filled with words.

The Professor and I arrived in Narooma late yesterday afternoon after driving up the windy coast road from Bournda National Park. The show in Merimbula on Saturday went well but was a little disappointing in that the crowd was smaller than we'd expected both in size and numbers. There was a clutch of noisy pre-schoolers and not enough schoolage kids. Who needs puppets when you have toddlers somersaulting in front of the booth?

We stopped in Bermagui on our way up the coast road, principally to check out the Zane Grey Tourist Park. It is one of the select few tourist parks in Australia named after an author (there's a Henry Lawson caravan park in Gulgoa and a Banjo Patterson caravan park in the Snowy Mountains). I can't imagine there'll ever be a Kirsty Murray Tourist Park.

Bermagui has a reasonable entry in the Oxford Literary Guide to Australia but Narooma doesn't crack a mention. It describes itself as a sleepy fisherman's haven. The town sprawls across the hills around the inlet. There's also a gorgeous long jetty where the Professor and I sat this afternoon to eat our fill of local oysters.

In the water, not far from the jetty, a seal was showing off his stye for a group of tourists. You probably can't quite make him out from the first photo. Every few minutes he'd roll over and wave in a leisurely fashion. A huge stingray circled him, just beneath the surface of the water, like a shadowy underwater understudy. Even an expert photographer would have had trouble capturing the two sea creatures and the strange interplay of their movements.

Towns like Narooma seem to shimmer with untold stories. I have no idea what the characters might be like - whether they revolve around the thousands of families that visit here every summer or are about the locals, so many of whom seem to live their lives around the ebb and flow of the tides. But I wish someone else would write them. I'd like to read them.

A travel guide for story addicts

2011-02-11T17:11:00.006+11:00

It's raining over Tathra. The Professor and I are sitting on the deck of the Tathra pub, gazing out at the hazy grey seascape.

We came here, in part, because we'd read about this pub. It's mentioned in The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia as being the setting for one of Arthur Upfield's detective novels, The Mystery of Swordfish Reef (1960). Bermagui also features in the story so I'm determined to find a copy of it before we get too much further up the coast. (Bermagui also has a caravan park named after the American author Zane Grey).

When I was trying to decide which reference books to take on the road with us, I knew that Peter Pierce's (ed) guidebook definitely had to find its place inside Gloria. The information inside it would be incredibly difficult to run to ground on the internet. It hasn't been revised since 1993, which is a shame, but there's still plenty of fascinating references, quotes and literary asides to make it a delicious read when you're on the road. Henry Lawson, of course, has been everywhere - at least in NSW. Some of the writers I've never heard of but am now curious to find their work. Since we've left home, we've flicked it open more times than I can count. It's my kind of travel guide.

We've hung around the Sapphire Coast a little longer than we'd expected, partly because we left home sooner than planned but also because its beaches are exquisite. Since we left the clifftop caravan park earlier in the week, we've been camping in Bournda National Park. The Professor has a show tomorrow at Twyford Hall in Merimbula and then we'll head a little further north to Narooma. Hopefully before we get much further, I'll have run to ground a copy of The Mystery of Swordfish Reef.

The Inimitable Nimmitabel Show

2011-02-06T22:49:00.011+11:00

I have a confession to make. A slightly embarassing confession - I cry at parades. And on Saturday, I discovered that I cry at agricultural shows too.

There's something about a group of people working together, selflessly, with the simple aim of celebrating being alive that I find deeply moving. In an era where so much of what we do is driven by consumerism and selfish gain, there's something affirming about witnessing a group of people getting together to simply share their skills, their pleasures and their connections.
On Saturday afternoon, the Professor and I drove through the Bega Valley and up into the mountains to visit the annual Nimmitabel Show. We took a while to get there, stopping off at various towns along the back roads to put up posters for Mr Punch's next Saturday show. We bought coffee in Candelo and stopped for one of Bemboka's famous pies. (It seems that every second country town in NSW is the home of a different famous pie and we're keen to try them all.)

It was mid-afternoon by the time we made our way over the mountains to Nimmitabel. The countryside west of the mountains was a shock after the lush, verdant vallies around Bega. The Nimmitabel Show was held in the wide, dry yellow fields on the edge of the town. Grasshoppers leapt up around our ankles as we climbed out of the car and made our way over to the sheds where the show was being staged.

Before we arrived, I'd imagined that I'd already attended a country agricultural show. A little bit like some of the people who come to see Mr Punch, I believed at some point in my life I simply must have been to one of these events. I'd read so much about country shows, seen them on TV, read about them in fiction and was so familiar with the idea of them that I was surprised to realise I'd never attended a real show before now. I've been to the Royal Melbourne Show more times than I can count but this was different. There was no noisy commercial Midway, just a bouncy castle and a very ancient looking Chair-o-plane. There were no showbags, except for the National Party incumbent's sad little yellow shopping bags with a couple of pamphlets inside. There were beautiful, well cared for livestock, historic tractors, steam and diesel pumps, crocheted rugs and a huge array of fruitcakes. There were fantastically inclusive prizes embracing the efforts of everyone from primary school artists through to sophisticated quilters. There were a lot of very nice people enjoying what they did well and celebrating their working lives and rural pleasures.

We watched the shearing competitions, checked out the prize winners in every category from scones to angora sheep, ate some very rich and creamy locally made blood-plum ice-cream, admired the horsemen, horsewomen and young pony-princesses, and listened to a group of musicans play a combination of Australian/Irish folk music on a verandah while the ladies form the CWA (Country Women's Association) served tea and sandwiches. It was all very simple and it made me want to cry.

A good friend of mine from Melbourne grew up around Nimmitabel and had tipped us off about the show. I'm so glad she did. It was too late for the Professor to line up a Punch gig. That spot had already been nabbed by a magician - The Maginifcent Zaboni. But maybe in years ahead, Punch might wind up on the bill at shows like Nimmitabel. I'd be really pleased to tag along if he did. Agricultural shows reveal things about human nature, about landscape and our place in it, that I don't often spend much time thinking about. And perhaps everyone needs to think about our connections to the land and our place in it a little more often than we do.

Measuring Up Merimbula

2011-02-05T21:44:00.006+11:00

The Professor and I spent a lot of time talking about G.J. Stroud's first novel, Measuring Up, over dinner tonight. There's nothing nicer than finding a book that reflects not just the physical landscape you find yourself in but ideas about local culture and the nitty gritty business of being alive. Measuring Up is a rites of passage novel set in Merimbula that captures a year in the life of 17-year-old Jonah as he sets about trying to lose his virginity. Despite all the raging hormones and teenage angst, it's a novel that keeps you turning the pages. Stroud knows how to sling a paragraph together and keep you reading.

After my last post - full of longing to find a book about Australian summers - it was perfect timing to stumble upon Measuring Up. All of a sudden, the local landscapes have connections from Bar Beach where we swam this morning to the rolling surf down on Short Point Beach, just down the road from where we're camped. Stroud writes surf scenes with a deft touch and an eye for the pure aesthetic of surfing.

On Thursday afternoon, a wind blew up off the sea that sent my outdoor office into chaos. I packed up a basket of files and my laptop and headed into Merimbula to work at the local bookstore/cafe Booktique.

Booktique is one of those independent bookstores that you just fall in love with the minute you walk through the door. Its owners, Michelle and Mark, are real readers and the sort of booksellers that should be cloned. It would be so nice to find a bookshop like Booktique in every country town in Australia.

In another life, Mark was a piano tuner and there are both baby grands and upright pianos converted into bookshelves inside the shop. Better still, the street aspect of the shop is a cafe that serves excellent coffee and it made for a great alternative office on a windy Merimbula afternoon.

When I told Michelle that I was hankering after a juicy Australian summer read - either kids or YA - she pulled Measuring Up off the shelf. I read it the same evening and the Professor picked it up the next day and swallowed it whole.

We'll be in Merimbula for the rest of the week, even though as I write this, Gloria is being pounded by rain. The Professor has booked a local venue - Twyford Hall - to stage a performance of Punch and Judy next weekend so by the time we leave Merimbula we'll know it a whole lot better.

If the weather stays like this, I'll be spending a lot more time hanging out in Booktique. Hopefully, I'll find a few more local gems while I'm here but Measuring Up was a solid start to our Merimbula season.

Kids, Caravans, and Australian summers

2011-02-01T22:34:00.009+11:00

We're camped on a cliff top overlooking the sea on Short Point in Merimbula. It's a beautiful spot and the Punchmobile is camped in the shade about twenty feet from the cliff's edge.

We stayed on an extra day in Malacoota because I was keen to put in a really big day at the desk. I've been pushing several chapters of a new book around for too long and wanted to make a leap forward. So Monday proved a good working day but we woke on Tuesday to mounting heat. There's a particular scent and feel of an Australian dawn that signals a day of unbearable intensity (44 degrees in this instance). I had the drafts of the chapters printed out and on the table before seven a.m. but the prospect of trying to work on them further on a blasting hot day was daunting. Suddenly, and a little sadly, it was time to leave Mallacoota.

On the way out of town, we swung past the Mallacoota Op shop. I'd run out of novels and was craving some junior fiction, especially some novels that could conjur an Australian child's summer holiday, particularly something set by the sea. I was going to make a list of my favourites from my growing up and post it on this blog but the only one that I could think of that has stayed with me since childhood is Hesba Brinsmead's Pastures of the Blue Crane.

I'm sure I must have read other Australian children's novels set by the sea when I was a kid. I can think of some great examples that I've read in the last few years, particularly Penni Russon's Indigo Girls. But I wanted something from the sixties, that brought back those summers of my childhood. So I pored over the shelves at the Op Shop. Country opportunity shops are often a fantastic source of old Australian children's fiction. I found Nan Chauncy's 1957 classic Tiger in the Bush and two other junior novels by Australian authors that I'm looking forward to reading; The Belonging of Emmaline Harris by Nette Hilton (who is always a reliably good read - this one from 1994), and an intriguingly dated novel from 1965 called By the Sandhills of Yamboorah by Reginald Ottley. None of the three novels is set by the sea but Op Shop buyers, like beggars, can't be too choosey. If any reader can think of a work of junior or YA fiction that conjures Australian beach summers, I'd love to have some recommendations.

I'm hoping to have a big week of writing and reading in our shady campsite here in Merimbula. School's gone back and the caravan park is quite, with only a few kids and teenagers wandering about. (That's the Punchmobile on the left, all set up for a week of writing).

There must be thousands of stories of summer childhoods spent in caravan parks but I've only read two - Michael Gow's play Away and Libby Hathorns short junior fiction title Caravan Kids. Maybe the Mallacoota Op Shop will yield some treasure and I'll get a new insight the stories that this and other caravan parks must hide across years of summer childhoods.

Puppet Life

2011-01-31T08:00:00.009+11:00

It's tough being a puppet. Not only do you have to spend a lot of time lying around in a road case, waiting for your moment in the booth, but you have to suffer the indignity of being hung upside down on a clothesline alongside a row of skanky beach towels.

The Devil, Judy, Policeman Plod and Mr Punch were all looking a little travel weary so the Professor gave them a touch up before Sunday's show and hung them out to dry.

The Mudbrick Pavilion was cool inside despite the heat and the puppets were finally allowed out of the red roadcase to wait for the show to begin. Half an hour after this photo was taken the Persian rug was covered with tiny kids while the older kids and adults made themselves comfortable on the chairs.

Four year old Nikita (who was had brought her birthday party along) led the cry to 'Whack him! Whack him!"

As usual, I was so engrossed by the show that I forgot to take photos of the crowd, a cheerful bunch of locals and holidayers. Oh well. I'm sure most of the kids who were in the Pavilion yesterday have Mr Punch etched on their memories.

For me, the view below will be what will stay with me long after we leave Mallacoota. I don't usually like photos of landscapes without people in the shot and this image fails to capture how stunning the inlet actually looks but until I improve my camera skills, it's all I've got to give you a sense of the view, though perhaps a short description might help. Last night, the Professor and I walked along the road past the inlet beneath a starry, moonless sky. The water was dotted with tiny lights as people waded through the shallow water catching flounder at low tide. I watched a pair of teenage boys standing on one of the jetties with their flashlights and nets, waiting for a boat to come and fetch them to take them onto the sand bars.

Tomorrow we head north up the coast, making our way into New South Wales but Mallacoota was a great place for Mr Punch to have his first airing on the road, even if he can't appreciate the view.

A bit of a Bottler

2011-01-29T21:32:00.006+11:00

A few people have written to me lately to ask why I call my husband, Ken, "The Professor". A 'professor' is a professional Punch and Judy artist and the term dates back to Victorian times. You can read a little about the background on Wikipedia. Checking on it before I posted the link, I realised that makes me a bit of a 'Bottler'. The Bottler was the Professor's sidekick who hung around outside the booth, engaging with the audience. I'm a pretty flakey sort of Bottler and if the Professor could sack me, he probably would. As much as I love Mr Punch, I don't collect money on his behalf and generally prefer to sit in a nearby cafe or library writing, rather than spend all day hanging around the booth.

This morning the Professor was up at dawn. He'd arranged to do some promotional performances at the local arts market and had to get down to the market to set up bright and early. I dutifully tagged along and minded the booth while he raced off to do a radio interview for the local radio station. Later in the morning, the local Arts Council ran puppet making workshops between short Mr Punch excerpts and tomorrow the Professor will do a full show at the nearby Mud Brick Pavilion. I handed out a few fliers on the Professor's behalf but mostly enjoyed the aspect from the verandah of Lucy's Home Made Rice Noodle House that overlooked the market.

I wish I was a better 'Bottler'. I'd love to be able to play the piano accordion and be a more integral part of the show but in the end, I'm more at home in the audience than on stage. Perhaps it's why I write. As much as I like to show off now and then, I'd rather write about the show than actually be part of it.

It's after ten p.m. now and the Mallacoota Foreshore Holiday Park is full of late night laughter and the scent of smokey campfires. Our charming neighbours, a group of young Persian-Australians who are up from Melbourne, have just brought over several delicious shaslicks for us to sample. The Professor is asleep and has missed out. Lucky me.

On the opposite side of our Gloria/Punchmobile, the Bombala Cricket team sound sleepily worn out from a long day on the pitch (they were very noisy last night). Earlier in the evening they told the Professor 'It's not whether you win or lose that counts, it's how sunburnt you get.'

And maybe they're right. Maybe just being part of the game is what really counts.So perhaps I'm allowed to claim being a bit of a Bottler simply because I hang around and get a little sunburnt.

Ghosts of Summers Past

2011-01-28T13:18:00.005+11:00

For more than a decade, the Professor and I took our tribe of kids and teenagers on a yearly trek to Croajingalong National Park. We would camp at Thurra River and spend long, crowded days (crowded with family and friends) walking, swimming and cooking up a storm.

This year was the first time the Professor and I visited there without any of our crew. It was great to be back but every beach and fireside was haunted by the ghosts of summers' past. We had a quiet little campsite and watched with nostalgia the comings and goings of hordes of teenagers and clusters of small children. There were crowds of little girls on tiny pink bikes, long and lanky teenagers in wetsuits, a small boy learning to cycle for the very first time, another boy practicing his trumpet as he wandered down the dusty road and the sound of endless thwacking as a totem tennis set next to the campfires was thrashed from dawn to dusk.

Though we arrived late in the season, there were still a few of our old friends camping at Thurra and so it turned out to be a grown-up sort of social time. It also provided a good opportunity to catch up on some sleep and reading and recover from the frantic weeks of preparation. There's no running water at Thurra, no electricity, no internet, no mobile phone reception. I wrote a few blog posts but couldn't upload them, caught up on emails but couldn't send them and finally let go a little and snuggled down with a couple of good books.

I tried to take some atmospheric photos at Thurra and naively attempted to photograph the amazing, swirling stars above the bridge that spans the river. But of course they came out as rather dull, black images with blurry pinpricks of light. The shots of the ground turned out to be of more interest than the spectacular night sky. I should probably just give up on taking pictures. I like words much better.

We left Thurra River yesterday. For more than a decade, at the end of every holiday, when we reached the Princes Highway, we turned left and headed back to Melbourne. Yesterday, for the first time ever, we turned right and headed north. Finally, it felt like the adventure was really, truly beginning.

Now we're in Mallacoota, camped in the foreshore holiday park. As much as I loved Thurra River, it's great to be back to hot showers, electricity and access to the Internet.

As I write this, the Professor is in town putting up posters to advertise Mr Punch. On the spur of the moment, he's organised a show to be staged at the local Mudbrick Pavilion on Sunday afternoon. There's nothing like a dose of Mr Punch to exorcise every melancholy ghost.

What's in a name?

2011-01-28T12:44:00.001+11:00

Blind Joe's Creek
Tom's Creek
Archie's Creek
Eleven Mile Creek
Emu Creek
Boggy Creek
Reedy Creek
Ironstone Creek
Hospital Creek
Wombat Creek
Dinner Creek
Bosses Swamp
Sheep Dip Bridge

Driving through East Gippsland, there are lot of places that aren't on what I thought was our very comprhensive map and yet they have signposts with their names clearly identified. The boggy, reedy creeks are pretty straightforward kind of names. No guessing there. But who was Bllind Joe? And whatever happened to Tom and Archie? More mysteries.

Australia - Country of mystery

2011-01-26T13:46:00.002+11:00

There are a lot of books written about Australia. Every year, more books are published about its history, culture, its people and its geography. But there are so many stories that are never written, so many places that are rich in story but never wind up being memorialised in print.

On Saturday night, the Professor and I wandered down to Hollands Landing on the Gippsland Lakes. It's a tiny, bleak but beautiful launching place for small boats and a fisherman's paradise. There's probably a lot more to the place than we could discover in a single visit. The photo is of its tourist information board.

Holland's Landing was so evocative, it would make a great setting for a movie - maybe a psychological thriller or a moody drama. But you probably won't be reading about it any time soon.

Wild Babies of Wild Dog Creek

2011-01-24T09:16:00.002+11:00

Our first stop after leaving Melbourne was Wild Dog Creek in the Strzelecki Ranges in Gippsland. In the folds of the hills, a group of young parents were holidaying on the banks of Wild Dog Creek, including our Bella and grandson Louis. We camped out for a night beside the old shearing shed that was a communal space for the families who were staying in tents scattered across the fields.

A wild, playful tribe of kids were endlessly busy with jumping games, battles in the grass, playing 'mother' and generally being deeply involved in the complex business of discovering and reinventing the world of play. Watching them made me long to write stories for really little kids, picture books especially. The kids' conversations were full of rhythm and rhyme and even the tiniest babies were already engaged with language, making funny chatty sounds as if they were involved in serious conversation. The three baby girls in the photo were all born within a few days of each other. On the left is Anna and her beautiful Maya, who was born with a lovely, gentle sense of humour, laughing and nodding when you talk to her. I didn't get a chance to get to know Nikky's very cute Imogen (in the middle) but I had a couple of long conversations with Mary's baby, Illaria. Illaria is a serious conversationalist. At three months, she already has a lot to say and likes nothing better than to have your full attention while she chats.

I wish we'd been able to spend more time in conversation with the kids but we were so exhausted from the weeks of packing that we fell into bed early, even before the five year olds, and woke to early morning bird calls, the laughing of kookaburras and the shouts of the wild babies and toddlers. A great start to a year of thinking about kids and stories.

Last Days of Chez Nous

2011-01-22T10:00:00.001+11:00

I'm not much of a photographer and I didn't take the photograph on the right. I like the image because it captures a little of that strange sense of dislocation, of things not being where they should, of the last days of packing all our possessions into storage.

I don't have a photograph of the final image of leaving our home to head off on a year of travel. In a way, that moment is more deeply inscribed on my memory than any picture could ever be. It was just after 7.00 am last Friday morning. Our lovely goddaughter, Jocelyn, had come to say goodbye. Together we tip-toed across the freshly steam-cleaned carpet, through the empty, echoing house. The rooms glowed in the soft, early morning light. The house seemed enormous, stripped of all the clutter of our lives.

Joc was amazed that in just a few weeks so much had changed. Then she shared exciting news about her plans for the year ahead. All of a sudden I felt alarmed that although we will eventually come back to the same house, so much will happen while we're away. Children will grow older, babies will be born, lives will change. Life changes whether you try and hurry it along by setting out on adventures, or whether you stay in the same, familiar place. Maybe you can simply see the changes more clearly when you don't have a fixed base. A few days into our adventure, and I can feel a subtle shift in the way I'm thinking about many things. Change is the only constant.

Almost Gone

2011-01-20T23:26:00.003+11:00

We're nearly there. Not quite, but nearly. Tonight the Punchmobile is parked in the driveway and our home is stripped bare of puppets, paintings and the paraphenalia of decades of family life. A new family is about to arrive to spend a year in our home and we've spent every waking moment of the past few weeks packing, cleaning and preparing the house for the arrival of these new tenants and for our departure.

Both the Professor and I feel a little like the Burmese marionette in the photo. She was waiting to be packed away in a trunk for twelve months of storage. The Mexican 'Day of the Dead puppet also met the same fate. We can't fit everyone in the caravan.

The whole process of letting go of our lives here in Melbourne has been weirdly traumatic and not at all what I'd expected. There's guilt and grief and confusion all mixed in with the excitement of setting out on an adventure. This morning I cried as I read a poem that one of our kids had posted on her blog. Packing up a house is more than simply putting objects into storage.

In the midst of chaos

2011-01-11T12:53:00.004+11:00

There are boxes everywhere. Everything in the house has to be touched at least once and a decision made about its fate. Do we store it, take it, sell it, give it to one of the kids (provided they even want it!) or throw it away? Thousands of books, hundreds of puppets, mountains of junk - the list of things to do runs for pages. We started the process a couple of months ago and the end is very dimly in sight. But sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode.

Then this morning I was sent a very cheering email from a friend and I remembered that I have done things other than pack and sort. That I actually have a life that is separate to all this domestic chaos.

My friend had scanned a page from the December issue of Better Homes & Gardens that included a great write-up of 'India Dark' by reviewer Caroline Baum. There isn't an internet link to the page on the Better Homes & Gardens website but here's the short and punchy review. (I especially loved the last line):

India Dark
Kirsty Murray, Allen & Unwin, S16.99

This little corker is based on a true story of a troupe of Australian child
performers who rebelled against their exploitative manager in 1910.
As the troupe travels by train across lndia, money runs short, tempers
fray and secrets are exposed, The two young narrators offer different
interpretations of events, creating a layered tale full of tension and
intrigue. The months Murray spent in India researching the book show
in its authentic, colourful settings. A gem that could become a classic.

Seven random things about Castlemaine

2011-01-09T17:21:00.014+11:00

1. New friends, old friends and rediscovering long lost friends.

Being in Castlemaine was intensely social. Everyone was incredibly friendly and generous - we were treated to lunches, dinners, coffees and drinks all over town. Castlemaine has a rich and diverse local community with a strong appreciation of the arts. But maybe country towns are also inherently more friendly than big cities. 2011 could prove to be a very sociable year on the road, if the past few days are anything to go by.

2. Castlemaine Library and the sad, mangy stuffed koala above the encyclopedias.

I'll be spending a lot of time in country libraries over the next year. Castlemaine set me off to a good start. The air-conditioning was a godsend and the old koala keeping watch over the readers felt symbolic. I'm working on a book for the National Library of Australia about European responses to Australian animals. The first example of a koala presented to the Governor of NSW was a pair of pickled paws.

3. Walking through the Botanical Gardens at dusk.

I love the old world charm that so many of Australia's goldfield towns still possess. It's as if corners of them are frozen in time - Victorian architecture, monuments, grand sweeping boulevards and Avenues of Honour. Thanks to the recent rains the Castlemaine Botanical gardens were lush and green. There's something both worrying and poignant about the longing and ambition of early European settlers to replicate the old world in the (ancient) new world.

4. The municipal pool as the afternoon heat intensified

Something about walking down to the pool brought back flashes of all the Australian children's fiction that I read as a kid. It was as if I could hear little snatches from stories by Colin Thiele and Ivan Southall, Hesba Brinsmead and Nan Chauncy. I can't think that their novels necessarily featured country swiming pools but something about the heat, the crowds of kids splashing in the pool and the smell of an Australian summer conjured their stories.

5. Hosting our first caravan park ‘soiree’

At home, we have a long dining table and a great big friendly kitchen but the Punchmobile isn't really designed for entertaining. So it was great to discover that a table of cheese, biscuits, olives, and home-made pickles can be just as welcoming when the company is good and the conversation lively.

6. The night sky above the caravan park

Caravan parks have their own rituals which I know very little about as yet. Both The Professor and I are really baby-caravanners. His family had a holiday house when he was a kid and my family had too many kids to take on any sort of holiday so we're both learning about the complicated subculture which is the world of caravan parks. One of the things I was dreading - tramping out into the night to use the communal amenities - has turned out to be actually kind of fun. There's nothing nicer than staring up at the stars with your toothbrush in hand.

7. Mr Punch at the Castlemaine Art Gallery

Best until last. The Professor did four performances at the Castlemaine Art Gallery. I went to three of them. I never seem to tire of watching Mr Punch. Every show is different. Every audience's response is unique. Whether it's a small boy who can't stop shouting 'sausages, sausages, not squashages' at Mr Punch; a little girl in a pink dress with a chubby face full of wonder; or the delighted old lady stroking Toby the Dog, for me, watching the audience is part of the fun.

So much contemporary entertainment involves audiences sitting passively, soaking up culture without response, that Punch and Judy takes people by surprise. Mr Punch encourages kids to talk back. He argues with them, shocks them and astonishes them. The beautiful aesthetics of the gallery provided a perfect backdrop for his brazen craziness.

Castlemaine

2011-01-06T23:39:00.008+11:00

Castlemaine has so many layers of connection - to Australian history, to Irish history, to my personal history - it's hard to know where to start a blog about being here.

On the right is the view from my campsite in Castlemaine, overlooking the Botanical Gardens. This afternoon a riot of kookaburras cackled their outrageous laughter into the hot afternoon sky. In the morning, I sat in the Castlemaine gallery, flanked by beautiful paintings by E. Phillip Fox and Fredrick McCubbin and watched Mr Punch set off a small riot of children.

We're on our last practice run before we hand over the keys of our house to our tenants, lock all our possessions into storage and head off on our grand 12-month tour of Australia. Castlemaine feels like a very soft start. When I was a kid, I associated this town with The Wild Colonial Boy. As any Australian school kid who sang about him in class I knew he was 'born in Castlemaine'. It wasn't until I was driving through the West of Ireland, researching the 'Children of the Wind' novels that I discovered that the Wild Colonial Boy was actually born in County Kerry.

It's one of the things that has always perplexed me about being a member of an immigrant culture - it's hard to know where one thing ends and another begins. Late afternoon found The Professor and me sitting in our director's chairs admiring the view from campsite 13. I knew I should be working on the new book but the heat of the day and the fact I had a good novel to read undermined all my good intentions. Same old problem - when does one thing end and the next begin? When does the holiday give way to the work-a-day ethic of writing on the road?

Castlemaine is full of old and new friends and fellow writers that I want to catch up with including the lovely Simmone Howell, Lee Fox and Robyn Annear.
Lunch today was spent with two long-term Castlemainians and then dinner with two newer friends who regalled us with tales of Afghanistan and Germany. The Professor and I walked home through the cool dark of the Botanic Gardens and I realised the day had slipped away from me in terms of writing anything other than lists of what I should be doing. But at least I've stuck to one of my new year's resolutions to read more and finished Jonathan Franzen's latest novel. It's nearly Friday. I sit listening to the cicadas and the occasional possum arguing outside and remember John Lennon lyrics, 'Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans.'

Puppets, stories and stuff

2011-01-03T21:28:00.007+11:00

There are a lot of puppets in our house. They come from all around the world to take up residence in our hallway. On the left are Ravanna and Hanuman from Jakarta. They're from the workshop of a fantastic Indonesian puppetmaster, Tizar Purbaya. Tizar's house contains over 7,000 puppets so our collection of just over 100 is very small and cosy in comparison.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks most of the puppets will have to be packed away in trunks and put into storage. Only a select few will be allowed to travel with us around Australia. It will be a little strange to have to put them all away. They have watched over the comings and goings of our household for years now.

Some visitors to our house are unnerved by the long hallway of puppets and I must admit, at night, in shadowy half-light, it can be unnerving to have to walk past them. In some parts of Indonesia, people believe that spirits live inside the puppets and that you should treat the puppets with both care and respect. I can understand that feeling. Over time, I've learnt to respect the non-human inhabitants of our house. As we sort through all the 'stuff' that we have accrued in the last 20 years or so, I'm also starting to realise that if you don't feel that an object has a 'spirit', if it doesn't have a deep emotional connection to your life, there's not much point in hanging on to it.

Tomorrow I will start lugging things out onto our nature strip for the local council's hard rubbish collection. I don't doubt the pile of junk will grow tall. It's too easy to clutter your life with things that have no meaning, that don't connect to your history, your story. In the end, it's the stories about 'stuff' that give them meaning and value, not the object itself. Perhaps, when the things themselves are long gone, it is only the stories that will remain.

So You Want to Write a Novel

2011-01-02T13:46:00.002+11:00

Possibly everyone in the world has seen this clip already but it's so full of home truths about writing that I couldn't resist it. To write well you have to read widely. Good writing takes time, thought, skill and energy. But I don't think 'now' is a terrible or impossible time to be published. The publishing world is changing but there is always a place for new voices and good quality writing.

Change is the only constant

2011-01-01T13:12:00.009+11:00

I never used to understand that saying 'change is the only constant'. I used to favour 'the more things change the more they stay the same'. But change can sneak up on you. Sometimes things change imperceptibly, without you really noticing, and all of a sudden the world is a different place.

This morning I spent some time flicking through my journals of the last decade. A lot happens in ten years. In 2001 my husband, Ken, and I had six kids - five teenagers (and one almost teenager)- living under our roof plus a dog and a bunch of chickens. Ken was working as a drama teacher. I had published one novel (Zarconi's Magic Flying Fish) and was about to release my second (Market Blues). Our days were jam-packed with school events and driving our tribe to and from a million different activities as well as juggling our work loads. The dinner table was always noisy and and crowded. Life was a blur of chaotic dramas.

Now the house is almost empty - of both offspring and furniture -and we're packing up and picking over the detritus of all the years of bringing up our family. Since 2001, I have had seven more novels published and won a few awards. Ken has turned into a full-time puppeteer and we've both travelled to to China, Indonesia, India and Europe repeatedly. You'd think I would have seen it coming but so many of the changes in my life feel like they snuck up on me

This year, I'm going to consciously make big changes. As I write this, I'm surrounded by boxes and many of the rooms in our house are stripped bare and smell of fresh paint. In the driveway, our Punchmobile stands waiting to be loaded up with everything we can cram into it for 12 months of travel. The photo above shows Ken (The Professor) repairing poor old Officer Plod after Mr Punch had given him too much stick at Stawell Library last month. Once all the tools, puppets, paraphernalia, my mini-office and all our gear are finally on board, it's going to be pretty cosy inside Gloria. There's still a lot to do before the Professor and I can set out on our Year of Living Puncherously but it's a change that we're willing into existence, rather than the sort that takes you by surprise.

New Year's Day is always a good time for reflection. For me, 2011 will be a big year of change on many fronts, including the way I use this blog. When I started it in July 2007 it was an experiment. Since then, I've read enough blogs to understand their form a little better and to come to enjoy the craft. I started out mostly writing reviews of books because I wasn't comfortable with writing about my life. But in tiny increments, the way I think about blogging has changed. Many of the best blogs open a small window into the lives of their authors, rather than simply tackling a particular subject or issue. One of my favourite blogs, Eglantine's Cake, is by the Australian author Penni Russon. She has a lovely quote from CS Lewis in the margin: There is an extraordinary charm in other people's domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else's garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.
C.S. Lewis, Time and Tide, 16 June 1945

All good writing offers us the opportunity to look through a window into someone else's world. In 2011 I'd like to both document and share all the adventures of me and The Professor. I'll be writing posts a lot more often and trying to be bold enough to be a little more autobiographical. Top of my list of New Year's resolutions is to read more, write more and open a whole new array of 'magic casements'.

A Christmas plague of locusts

2010-12-14T11:36:00.003+11:00

I’m sitting under the awning outside Gloria (our campervan), trying to get into the swing of working in my new outdoor office. On a small island opposite our campsite, a black swan is sitting on a nest of eggs. I’m not much of a photographer and the picture can’t do justice to the setting. Or capture the images of the locusts that are swarming in the sunshine. They don’t like shade so they leave me in peace beneath Gloria’s awning.

The Professor and Mr Punch are off doing shows at Stawell Library and I am making my first serious attempt to figure out how to set up my portable writing space.

We left Melbourne on Sunday evening and drove up the Western Highway to the Wimmera so Mr Punch could do three days of performances. Last night he performed at Mt Difficult Golf Course for the Halls Gap Community Christmas Party. The golf course is at the foot of the Grampians. As The Professor set up the booth, kangaroos bounded across the green and a small boy ran through the a swarm of locusts, kicking his feet into the air as if he were doing a strange locust-inspired dance. I suppose I should feel appalled by the locusts but I actually find them intriguing.
Yesterday, as we walked down Main Street in Stawell, thousands of locusts dipped and glided their way through the shopping centre. Christmas carols were broadcast from loud speakers and in an odd way, the locusts added to the seasonal charm. Later, Mr Punch would tell the children watching his show that Stawell was full of Christmas fairies. He’d seen them, flying around in Main Street, dancing and weaving to the tune of “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”. A local told me it’s thirty years since she last saw a locust plague like this year’s so it’s not a regular Christmas event, just something particular to Christmas 2010.

This evening, I’ll be giving a talk on India Dark and historical research at the Stawell Library. Hidden stories, secret histories is the topic but there are so many stories from regional Australia that fit that premise, that aren’t part of our collective imaginations whether it be dancing with locusts or Christmas in the shadow of the Grampians that I’m starting to feel a little worried. This experiment in wandering with Mr Punch could deliver more potential story material than I’ll ever have a chance to use.

Practicing with The Professor

2010-12-05T11:33:00.001+11:00

Finally, after two weeks of sitting in our driveway, we’ve given the Punchmobile (aka Gloria) her first test run. Next week we have to take Mr Punch to Stawell for three days of performances so The Professor (aka Ken Harper) thought it would be a good idea to test drive our new home. Traditional Punch and Judy artists are known as ‘Professors’. There’s a lot to know about manhandling both puppets and caravans.

Yesterday evening we drove down Eastlink and set up for a couple of nights in a caravan park in Dromana. It’s a very modest beginning and we haven’t brought Mr Punch along with us. It’s enough to figure out how to handle Gloria without having Mr Punch and his mob along.

Last night the Professor and I ate fish and chips on the beach. As we sat looking out over the still, silvery waters of Port Phillip Bay, listening to a busker strum his guitar on Dromana pier, a middle-aged woman in a hot pink dress wandered past us. She sat down in the sand with her back to the sea. That’s when I saw the snake. Draped around her neck was a two metre python. It was only when she started to stroke it that I realised it was alive. It moved slowly, sinuously writhing its way through her straw-blonde hair and across her shoulders. They seemed a very companionable pair but it was a weird moment. There is so much circus and drama in the real world, so many stories that you can only get a small intimation of by venturing out of your ordinary life.

Christmas Shopping at Collected Works

2010-12-03T09:00:00.004+11:00

I'm heading into the city this morning and hoping to make a dint in my Christmas list. First stop, the wonderful Collected Works Bookshop.

I love Collected works. It's on my list of top places in Melbourne to hang out so I was alarmed when I heard that it's struggling to keep its head above water.

It would be awful to come back from our year on the road and discover that Collected Works had shut its doors. It's a Melbourne institution, a haven, and the only place in town where you can find a huge selection of poetry. So many bookshops these days don't keep many backlisted titles on their shelves but Collected Works has shelves chockablock full of beautiful anthologies, single volumes - you name it.

So if you haven't started your Christmas shopping, begin the adventure at Collected Works.

Later....

I know the above reads like an advertisement but visiting Kris Hemensley at Collected Works is a seriously fun adventure. Kris always helps me to discover new authors and reminds me of old faves. I came home with a swag of lovely tiles which will be hard to part with as I like each book so much. I can't blog about them or I'll spoil the pleasure for the people who will receive them very soon.

Eloping with Mr Punch

2010-12-01T09:48:00.006+11:00

The year is winding down but around our place, things are speeding up. Ten days ago, Ken and I drove across town and picked up our new caravan. In 2011, we're going to run away from home and live like gypsies.

We're taking Mr Punch on a grand tour - or maybe he's taking us - all the way around Australia. It's a thrilling and scary prospect. It means packing up a house in which we've raised six kids and reducing our possessions to a trunk full of puppets and the contents of a pop-top campervan. For me, it will mean rethinking the way I work and learning to write on the road. So expect a lot more blogging. For Ken and Mr Punch, it will mean the chance to entertain folk in rural communities around the country.

We've been talking about doing something like this for years and now that the last of our six kids is leaving home, we realised 2011 will be the year for Mr Punch to have his way with us. We'll be leaving Melbourne in February and heading up the east coast to start our "year of living puppeterously" (I know, it's not a word but how else to describe living in close proximity with Mr Punch?)

Stay tuned for updates on the hair-raising saga of how two people and twenty puppets adapt to living together in this slick but compact puppetmobile.

Dog's Tales and First Kisses

2010-11-09T14:29:00.005+11:00

Tonight I'm going to tell a story. I'm nervous. I spend a ridiculous amount of my time making up stories and retelling old tales yet there's always something a tiny bit unsettling about trying out a new story on an unfamiliar audience.

Dog's Tales is a weekly event hosted by Melbourne writer Chris Flynn at the Dog's Bar in Acland Street, St. Kilda. Every Tuesday night there's a different line-up of story-tellers. Tonight Peter Bakowski and I will be the featured story-tellers followed by whoever is brave enough to put themselves forward for the open mike segment of the evening.

The story-tellers at the Dog's Tales events are mostly of the very grown-up variety. My story is about being eight years old so perhaps you can understand why I'm not 100% confident it will work. It's a story I've never told before, one that has been prickling my senses for several weeks. Actually, it's a story that's over forty years old. Even after all those decades of brooding on it, I'm not sure it actually has enough form or makes enough sense to be aired in public. But story-telling as versus simply doing a reading from a written piece made me feel that this story's time has come. I'm going to do a tiny reading from India Dark and then I'm going to try and be brave, take a risk, take a punt and tell my old/new story. It's about a boy, a girl, Luna Park and a first kiss. Enough said. If you want to hear more, come along tonight.

8.00 pm.
Dog's Bar

54 Acland Street

Saint Kilda, Australia

Bambi vs. Saw

2010-11-01T13:03:00.003+11:00

It was wet and cold in Melbourne all weekend. Perfect movie-going weather. I flicked open the newspaper on Saturday morning, full of good intention to call up two young friends who are aged 5 and 7 and take them to the cinema. Except I couldn't find anything - and I mean ANYTHING - to take them to. There was nothing showing with a PG rating, let alone a G rating, anywhere within an hour's drive of our side of town. I know it's not school holidays but it struck me as pretty sad that nothing even vaguely suitable for young kids was showing at any cinemas in the city centre or suburban cinemas. When I was a kid, the local cinema always showed movies suitable for kids on Saturday afternoons. The Saturday afternoon matinee was a ritual in our suburb - complete with the tribe of bad boys who sat up the back and threw Jaffas at each other (and everyone else if the movie was boring).

Lately, in writing workshops with kids, I've started to notice the number of students who reference very gory films in their stories. Last week, a nine year old boy told me he wanted to write a story based on his favourite movie 'Saw', complete with all the gruesome violence that film portrays. Saw is rated 'R' and I presume the boy watched it at home. We talked about making a good character for the story, rather than just focusing on the action but I felt depressed by the conversation, mostly because it wasn't the first time I'd had that sort of discussion. I've read a lot of student writing in the last few months that feature psychopaths. I've also had many children cheerfully discuss their favourite films as inspiration for their stories and it's depressing how many of them are extremely violent 'R' or 'MA' rated films which I'd have trouble stomaching. My family sometimes bag me as having a 'Bambi' attitude to film as I hate watching screen violence. Though I know a few people who say they were scarred for life by watching the scene where Bambi's mother died, I don't think it's a patch on what kids' must be going through in watching 'Saw'. When primary school aged kids are starting to believe that violence is the key to good story-telling technique, I think it's time for a Bambi led film revival.

At last

2010-10-31T16:57:00.003+11:00

It's been far too long between posts. There are a lot of reasons why I haven't been writing blogs: I lost a couple of posts in cyber space that I'd gone to quite a lot of trouble to write. I've been traveling for most of the past two months. I've been thinking a lot and writing very little.

But on Friday I came home to a parcel of books that were too exciting to not post a blog about. The image is of the cover of the Cornelsen English Library edition of A Prayer for Blue Delaney which has been published in Germany. Excerpts from the novel had already been published in several versions of English language text books that are compulsory for Year 9 students and the abridged version is now available for further study. There's a vocabulary section in the back of the book with translations and pronunciation of some of the words. Damper is listed with its phoenetic spelling (which I can't find the symbols to type out for you) and then the wonderful German version of the word - "australisches Busch-Brot".

A prayer for Blue Delaney is set in 1950s Australia and includes a lot of rural usage. Some words were simply removed for the abridgment as being too difficult to contexualise but I'm impressed by the number that they included in the vocabulary section. I don't speak German so I can't judge if they've found the exact word to explain the terms but some of them must have been a real headache to translate.

Here's a taste:

billycan: Metalldose, die als Kochtopf verwendet wird
cobber: Kumpel
gooby eyes: Glupschaugen
kookaburra: australiche Vogelart

I know a lot of the language in the novel presented problems for the German editors who had to make the story accessible to German high school students for whom English is their second language. It makes you realise that, unlike British and American English, Australian English has its own flavour that students of English have small exposure to unless they travel to Australia. As the world grows smaller and the internet lends us the illusion that we're part of a global community, I guess it's easy to forget we really are a weird mob.

Tell Me Pretty Maiden (1930)

2010-09-11T20:11:00.003+10:00

Recently I received an email from a reader who had searched Youtube for film footage of child theatre troupes. As far as I know, there is no film footage of the child theatre troupes of the Edwardian era but this clip from the 1930 film 'Florodora' gives you an idea of the sort of musical numbers that the children performed. 'Tell Me Pretty Maiden' was one of the hit numbers from the 1899 musical which went on to become one of the most popular musicals of the Edwardian period. In India Dark there's a scene where Poesy Swift, the narrator, describes the thrill of performing the song on stage in Singapore.

The children from Pollard's Lilliputian Opera Company who performed the number were aged between 7 and 17. There were eight boys in the troupe between the ages of 10 and 14 so it's likely that the girls who were of similar age were partnered with them for the number. The children had a huge repertoire of songs and were, to all accounts, no less competent than adult performers, though shorter, cuter and with higher pitched voices. Part of the appeal of Lilliputian companies (and there were many Lilliputian troupes) was the 'mini-me' attraction. Watching little people mimic adult behaviour is an ancient and slightly dubious aspect of performing arts that has fallen from fashion, but hasn't completely disappeared.

When a book takes flight

2010-09-08T22:01:00.004+10:00

Next Tuesday night, 14th September, India Dark will be launched in Western Australia.

Lesley Reece, Director of the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre, will be doing the official honours and I am very grateful to Lesley for offering to grace India Dark by launching it at the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre. Lesley was one of the first people to read the uncorrected proofs of the novel back in April. The day after she finished it, she sent me an email that felt like a blessing, full of passionate enthusiasm for the book. I remember breathing a huge sigh of relief when I read her praise. I sloughed off some of the weight of the anxiety that every author carries in the months leading up to the release of a book.

When I stayed at the Fremantle Centre in June, Lesley gave me a serious pep talk about the importance of celebrating the release of India Dark. Sometimes, launches can feel a little like throwing parties for yourself but in some ways, the release of India Dark has made me realise that launches are also a way of acknowledging that once you have finished a book, it doesn't really belong to you any more. It belongs to its readers.

On Tuesday night, at its third Australian launch, India Dark will slip further away from me, closer to its readers. It's a little like watching your baby walk away from you, your child leave you for the first time at the school gate, or perhaps, it's more like opening your hands and letting a small bird that you've nurtured finally take wing and fly off into the world.

India Dark by Kirsty Murray
Published by Allen & Unwin
is to be launched by
Lesley Reece
Director, Fremantle Children's Literature Cetnre
on Tuesday 14 September 2010
at 6.30pm for 7.00pm

RSVP to: 9430 6869 of freoclc@iinet.net.au

So much to tell you...

2010-09-08T21:47:00.002+10:00

I'm sitting in a clean, brightly lit apartment in Subiaco, WA as I write this. I'm on the second day of a three week tour of schools and things feel like they're off to a good start. What is it about being in WA that always makes me feel like blogging? Maybe being away from my regular domestic routines is a big part of it. One of the up sides of travel is that your brain shifts into a different gear. Some regular routines are abandoned and others become easier to maintain.

The list of things that I haven't blogged about grows longer, not least the fantastic Canberra launch of 'India Dark'. I took my camera along and then completely forgot to take pictures as I was caught up in the pleasure of the event. It was held at Asia Book Room, one of my favourite bookshops in the world. The crowd was lovely and Anthony Eaton spoke so eloquently about 'India Dark' and put everyone so at ease that the evening became like an informal party, with the audience asking questions and Tony and I discussing the book and the whole complex business of writing truth, fiction and history.

Since the Canberra launch I've spoken to thousands of school students and at the Melbourne Writers' Festival. I've also been fiddling with a couple of small projects, trying to keep up with my emails, and endlessly preparing for talks and workshops. Hopefully, while I'm in WA, I'll squeeze in some time for more blogging. Stay tuned.

Tryst With Destiny

2010-08-16T09:57:00.003+10:00

Yesterday, Sunday 15th August, was Indian Independence Day. Sixty-three years ago, Jawaharlal Nehru made his 'Tryst with Destiny' speech at the Red Fort in Delhi and declared India an independent nation after more than three hundred years of British occupation.

On Saturday night, the eve of Indian Independence day, the wonderful Meera Govil of Eltham Bookshop hosted an event at the Meeting Pool Restaurant at Monsalvat to celebrate both Indian Independence and the release of my novel India Dark. It was a fantastic evening. Although I talked about my book I think the highlight of the evening was when Meera's father talked about being at the Red Fort at midnight and hearing Nehru address the huge crowd that had gathered. It was a major event in world history and it's a bit sad that so many Australians are oblivous to it.

In Salman Rushdie's famous novel Midnight's Children all Indian children who were born in the hour between midnight and one a.m. of that day were blessed with magical powers. I love that about India - the way magic and world events so naturally blend together, the way the Indian people really know how to celebrate both small wonders and large moments.

Coming full circle

2010-08-15T10:12:00.009+10:00

My ninth novel India Dark had its first launching into the world in Melbourne on Thursday, 5th August at the Sidney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne.

The photo on the left is of me 'in conversation' with Kabita Dhara, talking about the story behind the novel. Behind us is an image of some of the children who were members of Pollard's Lilliputian Opera Company, the child theatre troupe on which the book is based. Kabita is the publisher of Brass Monkey Books - a new imprint of Hunter Books that launched its first novel - Lunatic in My Head - by Anjum Hassan at the Sidney Myer Asia Centre exactly a week after my launch of India Dark.

I really enjoy going to other people's book launches but I can get ridiculously stressed in the lead up to my own. I'm going to have to get over my pre-launch nerves with India Dark because there are still more launches to come. Last night, Meera Govil of Eltham Books and The Meeting Pool restaurant at Monsalvat hosted a delicious event to celebrate both Indian Independence Day and the release of India Dark. This Friday, Anthony Eaton will launch India Dark at Asia Bookroom in Canberra and then on 14th September, India Dark will be launched in Western Australian by Lesley Reece at the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre. Last, but not least, the novel will also be launched in Indonesia at the Ubud Readers' and Writers' Festival.

I never feel I've spoken about the book as eloquently as I would like at my launches, though hopefully by the time I get to the launch in Ubud, I'll have found exactly the right words to describe India Dark. It's always thrilling and slightly amazing to hear other people talk about the book at a launch. Sometimes releasing a new book can be like flinging your heart into a black hole. Once the book is out in the world, it's hard to know how it is being received until the reviews start coming in and even then, reviewers represent the tiniest fragment of the people who are actually reading the book so you can't help but wonder about the reception your story is getting in the privacy of other people's homes. Launches go a small way to dispersing that sense of the loss of the book. You get to see the faces and watch the responses of people who will read your work. You also get the amazing privilege of hearing someone you respect talk about your book and give it their blessing.

Brenda Niall did the honours at the Melbourne launch and spoke so generously about both India Dark and my other books that I felt particularly honoured. Ever since I was a child, I've admired Brenda as a writer. When I was a teenager, she visited my parents' house to go through some papers and diaries that had belonged to my great-uncle whose biography she was working on. I remember putting my head around the dining-room door and seeing her sitting at the table, surrounded by piles of papers, and thinking that there was actually something incredibly exciting about what she was doing, that she was taking all those scraps of someones life and constructing a whole book about them. To have her launch one of my books so many years later felt like coming full circle for me. Perhaps that is one of the most important things about launching any book - a sense of completion, of knowing that all those hours spent thinking, dreaming, researching and writing have an end point which is not simply about the author, but all the readers who will engage with the finished book.

Crowded Days

2010-08-11T08:50:00.003+10:00

It's not a good time to be writing a blog post. I have to be out the door in ten minutes, heading off to Lalor North for a day of talks and workshops but the days have been so crowded these last few weeks, I feel like it's almost impossible to find a moment for blogging.

Last Thursday's launch of India Dark went smoothly (photos to come) and then on Friday I spoke to about 120 Year 8 & 9 students who were a fabulous audience. Friday night was the closing night of the University High School production of the musical 'Anything Goes' which my husband, Ken Harper, produced and directed. When the show was over we went on to a very late-night performance of a funky Melbourne faux-Mexican band at a club in Brunswick. Saturday was a blur of errands and domestic frenzy, guests for dinner Saturday night followed by a family birthday brunch on Sunday morning to celebrate the youngest member of our family turning 20. (No more teenagers!).

Sunday afternoon I raced out to Eltham to interview Jessica Watson on stage in an 'in conversation' event hosted by Eltham Book shop. There was a huge crowd and I'd meant to write about the event but the days keep speeding along with bookshop visits, more school visits, too much socialising, stacks of emails backing up in the in-box, unopened mail all over the desk and too many things left undone. I went to my weekly yoga class last night and lying on the floor in the 'semi-supine' position it was a battle to make my thoughts be still. One of the problems with doing so much socialising and public speaking is that my brain fizzes with ideas for new stories, partly inspired by all the interacting with different characters, but by the time I get to the desk, I'm inevitably too tired to string the thoughts into sentences.

August is always a crazy month and it's only going to get busier as Children's Bookweek approaches and is followed by the Melbourne Writers Festival. It's the season of scrambled note-taking around here. Hopefully some fresh new writing will sprout in the tiny cracks of time. (Always the optimist!)

Willful Children and Tempestuous Novels

2010-08-03T21:42:00.006+10:00

This time on Thursday night I will feel a little easier. This time on Thursday night the launch of India Dark will be over and I will have that strange sense of release that a book launch can give an author. After the launch, you know the fate of your book belongs to other people. Before the launch, you can still pretend the story belongs to you.

But in many ways, India Dark never really belonged to me. Because it's based so closely on a true story, I always felt it belonged to other people, to other places, to other times. It was a difficult child that I kept trying to dress in its prettiest clothes and send out into the world. And for years on end, week in and week out, it would spit and cry and and stamp its foot and say 'no', I'm not ready to go outside. So I would rewrite the wretched story all over again.

Now its shoes are shiny, its hair smooth, its dress clean and pressed, its soft skin smelling sweetly of sandalwood and roses as it skips out of warehouses and onto the shelves of bookshops around the country. I can only hope it finds people to love it.

A couple of days ago I received an email from someone whose opinion I value hugely in regard to this novel and it's gone a long way to salving my fear and worry about its release. The email was from Peter Downes, the fabulous New Zealand theatre historian who is the only person to have written a published history of Pollard's Liliputian Opera Company. (His excellent book is a history of the New Zealand branch of the extensive family company and is available through his website).

In many way, Peter has been a kindly 'grandfather' to this most difficult child/novel of mine. He wrote to me after he'd received his advance copy of the book:

"I just have to write and say what a wonderful job you have made of it. You portray those children and the adults associated with them in exactly the way I had imagined them. It's quite uncanny. They leap off the page at me and I can hardly believe that what I am seeing is so real. And it's not only the characters; their individual attitudes, the context of their surroundings, their clothing, their behaviour, their language, their interaction with one another -- oh everything about them -- is so exactly right. You have totally gotten under the skin of each individual and brought them not only to life, but true to life. The fine detail of your research
must have been immeasurable and you have my admiration for being so thorough. It has clearly paid off."

Perhaps only an historian can really appreciate the fine line between truth and fiction so I'm thrilled that Peter felt I got it right. It makes me feel all the blood, sweat and tears really were worth it.

PS. The Melbourne launch of India Dark will be held at the Sidney Myer Asia Centre at The University of Melbourne on Thursday evening at 6.00 pm. If you're in Melbourne, drop by to see my most wilful and tempestuous novel find its place in the world.

All or nothing

2010-08-02T11:04:00.002+10:00

When I was in my final year in high school, I played Ado Annie in the school's production of the musical Oklahoma. Ado Annie is a great character and I don't know whether I did her justice. I suffered terrible stage fright and when the curtain fell on the final performance I realised I was never cut out to be an actress. But the two featured songs that I sang in the musical have often come back to haunt me.

Ado Annie's theme song is "I'm just a girl who can't say 'No'" which my husband jokingly says is my biggest problem. My schedule for August with school visits, book launches in Melbourne and Canberra, book events all over the place, the Melbourne Writers' Festival, and dozens of social engagements looks a little scary. They're all fun activities that I'm looking forward to but there are a lot of them.

In regard to blogging and writing, I think Ado Annie's other big number is even more my problem. In June I wrote blogs nearly every day of the month. In July I was full of good intentions but life got in the way. It's an annoying pattern I have with all sorts of activities, including my writing. All or nothing. Too often, I write in a white heat - hours on end at the desk until neck locks up and my muscles feel like they're atrophying - while my brain fizzes. I tip thousands of words onto the page for weeks on end and then have to crawl out of my office to recover. It's not a very intelligent way to conduct a writerly life and when my family was younger and imposed limits on my writing time, I had to have a more structured approach to the working day. Now that nearly all the kids have left home I can lose my balance and disappear into the office for days or procrastinate endlessly, imaginging I have a lot more time up my sleeve than I actually do. It's a new phase for me and I know I have to break away from this 'All or Nothing' approach to work.

This morning, when I tracked down the film version of Ado Annie and her cowboy boyfriend singing All or Nothing, it sounded like the arguments that go on inside my head in regard to writing. So I'm promising myself that this month, despite the crazy schedule, I'm going to aim for a little bit of everything, rather than all or nothing. Hopefully that will mean a better month for blogging, writing as well as celebrating the release of my new book, 'India Dark'.

Twelve Days of Bloglessness

2010-07-13T16:43:00.004+10:00

So much for my list of future blogs. Looks like they'll take a lot longer than a month to get through. Especially when I haven't managed to write a single post for twelve days.

So here's where the twelve blogless days of July went:

1. Two days spent in Narre Warren and St Kilda, respectively, with young writers
2. A mediocre effort to get back to the gym after three weeks in the West and trying to reacquaint myself with Melbourne and familiar routines
3. A new term of yoga and remembering what it means to relax
4. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners with a dozen or more varied assortments of young people - both kith and kin
5. A lightning visit to Sydney for Allen & Unwin's twentieth birthday bash: the frock, the frolicking, the finger food, the speeches, the idle desire to transform myself into a dragon
6. Several hundred emails written and received and countless hours fretting about and talking to folk about the upcoming launches of India Dark
7. Three play dates with the lovely 2-year-old Louis and the reading of many picture books
8. Toy Story III with the great-nephews and the intensely interesting philosophies of four and six year old boys.
9. A blitz on the chaos of my office
10. Pruning the roses and playing in my winter garden
11. Coping with the strange emptiness of my rapidly emptying nest and visiting the new homes of two of the most recently transited younger inhabitants
12. Not writing anything in the least bit creative and pondering my shadowy writerly future. Sigh.

In their own way, each of the above twelve points were things about which I contemplated writing blog posts or journal entries because writing can help you make sense of the most intimidating and contrary experiences. I guess the point of today's blog post is to illustrate the problem with blogging is not having something to write about but being disciplined enough to decide that today, or on any given day, one must simply write. Decent ideas and coherent strands of thought deserve time and attention. In the end writing is a discipline, not a gift.

My 'must blog about' list

2010-07-01T17:15:00.004+10:00

I don't have to write a blog post today. I don't have to because I made no promises to myself about blogging in July. But I can't help it. There were so many things that I didn't blog about in June, ideas that flitted through my mind, notes that I scribbled on the back of envelopes or in my diary under the title 'Must blog about this...'

So here's the list of things I hope to blog about in July:

1. Working with my 'Pigeons' partner, Fred on a story about Iwo Jima
2. Feedback from writing workshops - the good, the bad and the hilarious
3. Vulture's Gate/Vulture's Wake in the USA (I know, I know, I keep saying I'll do this one)
4. Everything Beautiful and Diamond Star Halo - there's a connection there that I love
5. Enid and the colonisation of the young imagination
6. Writers' Festivals - MWF, PIAF, SWF - all those acronyms but best of all UBUD!
7. Writing poetry (on request from Penni Russon of Eglantine's Cake - this one will be hard)
8. What I'm going to wear to the Allen & Unwin 20th Anniversary Bash (Penni again)
9. Studying writing from Wales to RMIT and beyond (Penni was full of ideas)
10. Punch on the Road and our not so secret plans for 2010
11. 'Working With Children' police checks - we are all guilty until proven innocent
12. The process of researching a scene from one of my books and an excerpt of the scene
13. Indonesian puppet masters and the puppets guests in our hallway
14. Stories inside objects - occasional posts about STUFF in our house
15. The comfort of Catherine Bateson (why I can't resist rereading her books)
16. The many lives and launches of India Dark
17. Books, books, books - bought, read, devoured.

So that's my list for July. No promises but plenty of possibilities, especially when you consider that it doesn't include all the notions for blog posts that will flit through my mind as I move through a wintery month of reading and writing. Watch this space.

Six short of target - Twenty-four under the belt

2010-06-30T23:45:00.003+10:00

So I'm six posts short. It should have been thirty days and thirty posts but somewhere, in transit, I lost a week. Attempting to write a blog post every day in June has taught me a lesson in my limitations and those of the internet, particularly when touring.

But the best thing about setting myself the goal of writing a post a day has been that it has forced me to exercise writing muscles that were at risk of growing flabby during a hectic month of gadding across the country. It's also expanded my understanding of what blogging is all about - its strengths and its weaknesses. I suspect blogging is ephemeral in every sense of the word. A month of playing with the craft of fashioning blog posts - and I've written some fairly mediocre ones this month as well as some that I'm proud of - has convinced me of the importance of story.

Good stories endure and convey meaning for thousands of years. They can deliver satisfaction to both the writer and readers like no other literary form. So perhaps my July commitment should simply be to get back to the desk and give some deep and serious attention to the thick files of unfinished projects that litter every surface of my office. There are twenty-eight of them at the moment - and 31 days in July! If only writing stories was as straightforward as blogging...

Best of the West

2010-06-30T19:16:00.004+10:00

This was the view from my bedroom window - minus the iron bars - while I was staying in Fremantle. It's a vista that gives you reason to reflect on your own good fortune.

Most mornings that I was a guest at the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre I would get up early and take an orange from the fruit bowl in the kitchen and wander out to sit on the verandah. Some mornings, if it was too cold, I'd put on my thick purple and black wool cape and cradle a hot cup of tea while I sat in the early morning chill and watched the day rise over the old prison. Apart from the odd stray cat (one, Tripod, that was particularly odd with his three legs and slightly shortened/cropped tail) I was alone. Which led me to reflect upon how many other people over the years had gazed at this vista and had been much less fortunate than me.

I have always liked my own company, which has meant that being a full time writer has been a viable lifestyle. It's not a livelihood that suits everyone, financial issues aside. But human beings are social creatures by nature. We build cities and institutions that bring people together because we crave each other's company. After a long season at the desk, the three weeks I spent in WA was a soothing balm after an intense period of writing. All those faces, all the conversation, all the laughter and good company!

So here's my list of the Best of the West:

Lesley Reece and all the staff of the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre who took such good care of me during this visit - Mailee, Jenny, Sacha, Margaret and Sally. Affirming, compassionate, supportive and good fun. (And Bob Reece for his superb fish pie!)
The kids in the workshops - the thousand or so young faces that wrote like fury and put up with me for long hours while I tried to cram about a million ideas about writing into their brains.
Frane Lessac, Mark Greenwood, Katy Watson-Kell, Julia Lawrinson, Patricia MacMahon, Ann James and all the other extremely funky SCBWI members that partied and played on Rottnest Island for the SCBWI Retreat.
Jon Doust in Albany, Deborah Lisson in Bunbury, Glynn Parry in Geraldton and the many other warm and welcoming WA writerly types that were so generous and hospitable as I wandered around the west.
Marina Baker, painter and keeper of many of my oldest secrets, who cooked me the most perfect risotto while we revisted old conversations on a cold Geraldton evening.
Ron & Wendy Gorman for a perfect last supper in Freo and a chance to discuss everything from workshops to world politics.
Blue skies, balmy days, chill nights and time alone to contemplate what's it all about.

Home again, home again, jiggedy - freeze

2010-06-28T21:19:00.003+10:00

I'm home again, back to the deep chill of a Melbourne winter. Though it was cold at night in WA, the days were gorgeous. High, balmy skies and mild, sunny afternoons. Sigh.

It's a little sad to be writing about the weather when I'm finally back home and excited and a little gob-smacked by everything that changed while I was away. (A new laundry, two girls have moved out into the own homes, and so much furniture rearranged in our house that I'm a little bewildered and confused). But perhaps weather affects us more than we know. The only thing I felt like doing today was staying in my warm bed or hiding out in my cosy office. Perhaps it partly accounts for why so many authors are Melbourne based. There's nothing you can do but write when the weather is so inclement.

Finite nights and infinite verbs

2010-06-27T00:53:00.006+10:00

It's my last night in Fremantle. The end of my three week residency. This evening, I had dinner with friends and then keyed myself back inside, stepping through the thick prison wall, into the inner sanctum of the Children's Literature Centre. One more sleep before I can cuddle up in my own bed once again.

Today I worked with a small group of big thinkers on aspects of writing with a particular emphasis on editing. Amongst other things, I gave the participants a list of 'common errors' as outlined by the American novelist John Gardner in his 1983 publication The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. One chapter in Gardner's book is entitled 'Common Errors'. It's a chapter I've studied more times than I can count. Over the years I've picked it apart slowly and painfully, applying the ideas to my writing and learning how to analyse flaws in my prose.

Unfortunately today, halfway through explaining 'excessive use of passive voice' I drew a blank, unable to conjure enough appropriate examples to illustrate the point. After converting 'I have been bitten by a rabbit' (passive) to 'The rabbit bit me' (active), my weary brain stopped providing me with convenient phrases to demonstrate exactly why overuse of the passive voice is tedious. A big FAIL to me on both the grammar and teaching front. Sigh.

Here's a condensed version of John Gardner's list of common errors:

Inappropriate or excessive use of passive voice
Inappropriate use of introductory phrases using infinite verbs
Shifts in diction and distracting diction
Lack of sentence variety
Lack of sentence focus
Faulty rhythm
Accidental rhyme
Needless explanation
Careless shift in psychic distance

There's a lot more of John Gardner's very sound advice on good writing contained inside the pages of The Art of Fiction. I review his chapter on 'Common Errors' periodically to refresh my understanding of my own, and other writers' work.

But sometimes, when I'm fumbling for the right grammatical terms to explain to myself why something isn't working, I like to remember the first time I sought the advice of my brother on grammar. He is a whizz at Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac and his understanding of the grammatical structures of European languages is fantastic. He laughed at my anxiety about whether my writing was grammatically correct.

'Only dead languages have inviolable grammatical rules,' he said. 'English is a living language and when a language is alive, it grows and changes. Rules that applied two hundred years ago don't necessarily apply now. If it sounds good, makes sense, and your meaning is clear to your reader then there's no point in being obsessive about grammar.'

Tonight, my last night in Western Australia, probably isn't the right time to be rattling on about grammar and the finer points of good writing. I'm almost incoherent with tiredness. It's after midnight here in the west and after 2.00 am in Melbourne. That means that later today, I will be home. In approximately 18 hours, I will be able to write "I'm home!" and at last it will be in present tense. Yay!

Ocean Roads, Midnite and Merry-go-Rounds

2010-06-26T01:08:00.006+10:00

I'm bone-tired. The week has been action packed and so, though I've wistfully thought of posting blogs, I haven't even attempted to write an update. On Wednesday, after a full day of Youth Literature Day workshops at the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre, I flew from Perth to Geraldton. This evening, I was on the plane yet again heading back to Fremantle to wind up my residency by spending tomorrow working with teachers, librarians and writers in a full day of writing and editing activities.

On Wednesday night, Glynn Pa r ry, author of the lyrical novel Ocean Road, picked Lesley and me up from the airport in Geraldton and drove us to our accommodation. Glynn was there for us again first thing Thursday morning to drive us to Geraldton Secondary College for a full day of working with students enrolled in the Youth Lit Program. I love the regional tours. The kids' are so animated and excited about the workshops and it's fascinating to observe their different perspectives on the world that are influenced by local landscapes and varying regional cultures. When you live in a big city it's easy to assume that Australia has a homogenous, uniform, largely urban culture but there are many facets to the way people in this country interpret their place in the wide brown land. The kids in Geraldton have a distinctively different voice to the kids of the south, the city, or the Eastern states.

Randolph Stow, the brilliant Australian novelist who died last month in Britain, was born in Geraldton. When I was a kid, I loved his novel Midnite. I remember being strangely excited by Midnite. There was something in the humour and the magic that made me feel quietly thrilled to be Australian. There weren't many books that had that sort of impact on me. I haven't been able to find a copy of the cover art of the version that I read. It was white with a finely drawn black ink sketch on the cover. I remember loving the simply aesthetic pleasure the book gave me and understanding, on some deep level, that Midnite wasn't a conventional children's book. There was something darkly comic about it, a sense of embedded irony, a depth in the writing that I even felt a little suspicious of at the time. I haven't reread it as an adult but being in Geraldton made me think of Stow, the melancholy voice of his adult novels and the strange trajectory of his life.

Down on the recently remodelled foreshore, the 'Merry Go Round by the Sea' that he wrote of in his novel of the same name is still there, though not in quite the same condition as it was in Stow's childhood. It does make you wonder what aspect of the town will be captured by the young writers living there now, what vistas and moods will find their way into their stories

Puppets and Masters and Servants

2010-06-22T00:42:00.007+10:00

It's not so late in the West but close to midnight in Melbourne. I'm just back from a festive evening spent with the principal and two teachers from Bold Park Community School where Ken and I will be doing a joint residency in September. We had a delicious dinner and bounced around ideas as to how to plan for the residency. Bold Park CS is a hugely creative school inspired by the Reggio-Emilia schools of Northern Italy. The principal had just returned from a visit to Reggio where she attended a story-telling festival. At one stage, the Reggio-Emilia schools had a resident puppeteer who worked (played?) with the children over the course of many years. I'm looking forward to mucking about with the Bold Park kids in September. It will be fun for Ken and I to spend time in a school environment that celebrates both our crafts.

We talked a lot about Ken's workshops in comedy and how he teaches the comedic principles of master-servant relationships. I missed Ken being there. He understands the ideas behind slapstick and comedic narratives so well and can explain them much more succinctly than me.

In the taxi on the way back to Fremantle, the taxi-driver and I started chatting about India. He was from the Punjab and he asked me if I had visited the Taj Mahal. I was a little embarrassed to admit despite the many months I've spent in India, I've never visited the iconic landmark. When he asked if I knew the story of the Taj Mahal, I said I understood it to be the tomb of the wife of the great Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child. But the taxi-driver said that was not the story that made it famous. He said that the true story is that makes it a landmark is that the thousands of architects and craftsmen who worked on the building had their hands chopped off when it was completed so that they could never create another building like it.

So I told him about the beautiful Prague Orloj (Prague Astronomical Clock) that was built by the master clockmaker Jan Růže. Legend has it that when the clock was finally completed, the town councillors had Jan's eyes put out so that he could never make another clock for anyone else.

The weren't really comforting stories to be sharing before being dropped off to spend a night alone on the grounds of the old Fremantle Prison. There are some pretty tragic stories embedded in the walls of this place. Though both the story of Jan Růže and the craftsmen of the Taj Mahal are legends rather than verifiable fact, they each reflect a truth about the master-servant relationship.

We are all servants (and often masters) at some time in our lives and for many that can have tragic consequences. Mr Punch knows all about servants and masters and how to beat the devil at his own game. And I love how Mr Punch can turn that scary dynamic on its head. It's why the kids love him too. He is the ultimate bad servant. Even as you disapprove of him, you can't help but be a little dazzled by his sheer front.

Perfect answers to impossible questions

2010-06-20T12:31:00.000+10:00

Michael Morpurgo is one of my heroes. I love his books. They are full of courage and warmth and tenderness. I also love the answers he gave to the 'Five most asked questions' in this clip. Every children's author is asked these questions at some time or another, and usually on a regular basis.

Of the five questions that Morpurgo answers in this clip, only one answer - the one where he describes how he writes- differs to the reply I'd make to the same question. I especially like what he says about truth in fiction and which is his favourite book.

Launch Trifecta!

2010-06-19T22:38:00.004+10:00

I always get a knot in my stomach at the thought of my latest book being launched into the world. Doing nothing to mark the release of a book can feel horribly anti-climatic. Yet book launches can feel like throwing a surprise birthday party for yourself. What if no one comes and I'm left clutching a bunch of balloons and feeling unloved? Maybe I'm just like all those girls in my workshops who feel shy about sharing their work. I can get ridiculously squirmy about my book launches (yet I love other people's book launches!).

India Dark was such a massive, protracted, complicated work. From when I first heard the true story on which it was based back in 2001, through to the first serious notes I made about fictionalising it in 2005, the countless hours in the SLV pouring over dusty scrapbooks and peering at microfiche in 2006, the long, hot months in India in 2007, right through to the final round of proofs that I marked up last month, this novel has been a long time coming.

So I think it deserves some celebrating. Thanks to serious encouragement from many quarters it looks like India Dark will have three official launches; one in Melbourne and one in Canberra in August, and, hopefully, one in Western Australia in September. There will also be a special event held in Eltham on Indian Independence day, Sunday 15th August, hosted by the wonderful Meera Govil of Eltham Books.

Brenda Niall, author of many brilliant biographies and also two of my favourite books on the history of Australian children's literature, Australia Through the Looking Glass and Seven Little Billabongs will be doing the official honours for the Melbourne launch. It will be hosted by Asialink at the Sidney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne on 5th August from 6-7.30 pm. There will also be a short Q&A session with the publisher Kabita Dhara who has recently founded Brass Monkey publishing house. And there will be wine and yummy things and lots of good chat too. Readings will be selling books and I'll be signing them and blushing and fretting and hoping that my new baby will be loved and appreciated as it heads out into the world.

Anthony Eaton, YA author extraordinaire, will be launching India Dark for me in Canberra on 19th August at Asia Bookroom. Anthony lectures in creative writing at Canberra University and did a Phd on YA fiction. Asia Bookroom is one of the most impressive bookshops that I've ever visited. I'm stoked to have such a brilliant combination for the Canberra event.

The WA launch will be in September but is yet to be confirmed, depending on whether a free date can be found on the crowded calendar of the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre.

Now all I need is a Sydney and Adelaide launch and I'd have a Quinella. But what about Brisbane? I'd love a Brisbane launch and one in Darwin too! Is there a word for that? Sept-something-or-other? Maybe slightly delusional and over-excited is the phrase that best describes me at the moment as I contemplate the release of India Dark into the wilds of the big, bad reading world.

Pride and Prejudice

2010-06-19T21:13:00.004+10:00

I now have a list of seventeen things that I'll be writing blogs about in the next few weeks, not taking into account the fact that new inspirations turn up every day. I missed posting a blog yesterday as work, travel and internet problems conspired against me. After a three hour drive back from Bunbury to Fremantle, a late dinner with the charming Reeces (Bob Reece makes a mean fish pie) and unpacking my bag once again at the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre, I lost another day of blogging. Sigh.

The Bunbury kids were fabulous. They were bright, focussed and full of good ideas. The sixty-five Year 7 and 8 kids who turned up on Friday for their writing intensive were particularly impressive.

At the end of every day, when they each have a draft of a story underway, an assortment of the students get up in front of the group and share their stories. It's a nerve-wracking exercise for many of them but one thing that always strikes me as worrying is how few of the girls are willing to risk reading their work in public. Though the majority of the participants in the workshops are girls, out-numbering the boys by two to one, most of the boys are keen to share their work while the girls sit back, their hands folded in their laps, watching and listening politely but shyly refraining from going public. It drives me crazy.

It's not to say there aren't forceful, confident girls who have no reservations about putting up their hand for attention. But in general the girls need more cajoling than the boys. I rarely have to cajole boys into sharing their work and more often than not, when I call for volunteers to read what they have written, half the boys raise their hands enthusiastically while only a tiny proportion of the girls are willing to overcome their self-consciousness without prompting. I love the boys' enthusiasm and confidence. Sometimes, I feel guilty choosing a girl to do a reading when there are six boys waving their hands for attention, busting to share their work. But on the rare occasions when the situation is reversed and the boys are silent while the girls are forceful, I always try and balance the representation. I want to hear stories from both genders, from both male and female perspectives.

Some people argue that girls are more confident in single sex situations. But the world is made up of two genders. If girls can't feel brave enough to be heard in a safe environment where they are in the majority, in an environment where only a handful of bright, literate and sympathetic boys are present, what hope do they have of being heard in the wider world? I don't believe it has to be this way but passivity is deeply enculturated for young women.

This morning, my daughter, Ruby, had an opinion piece published in the Melbourne newspaper, The Age. I'm very proud of her. I was proud of her on the cold Sunday mornings when she ran out onto a muddy field to play soccer as a teenager and the way she was never shy of participating on debating teams, in musical bands or any public forum. But I saw the ways in which she was subtly discouraged too and I have felt that same discouragement myself.

I've lost count of the number of literary events that I've attended where the men on stage outnumber the women two-to-one, or the literary festivals where only a third of the writers on the program are female while the audiences consist almost entirely of women. As often as not, at least in literary circles, it's not a conscious prejudice. It's a subtle, insidious and pervasive assumption that the way things are is the way they should be. So little pride and so much prejudice.

Too much and not enough

2010-06-17T23:19:00.003+10:00

The problem with writing a blog post every day is not having nothing to write about, but simply deciding on what is THE thing that you should write. It's a little like cooking dinner. You could make a pasta dish, you could do a stir-fry, or you could cheat and order in take-away. There are a lot of options.

Last night, I sat up late writing a letter to my Pigeon post partner, Fred, nutting out the beginning of the story we will write together in the course of the next six months. Fred wanted to write a story about US Marines on Iwo Jima which was a pretty big challenge.

At first, I thought I'd write a post about the process of working up a reply to Fred and the beginning of our story writing project, but by the time I'd finished his letter I realised I also really wanted to write about all the exciting new plans for launching my new novel, "India Dark". But then there were so many things that had happened in the workshops over the course of the last few days I had a great idea for a blog post about the narratives that are out there in the ether that so many young writers are plugging into, and then there were the conversations at dinner at Deborah Lisson's house about grammar (yup, writers do talk about grammar for fun), or the very overdue blog post I've been meaning to write about the Americanisation of Vulture's Gate/Wake, and the mind-boggling plans that Mr Punch and I have been cooking up for a mega adventure next year. Hyperactive or what.

So at the very end of a very long day, I opened up this blog to write a post and realised my brain was so jammed full of ideas and yet so short on sleep that I couldn't decide which to write first. So I am now two blogs short of target for my month of daily blogging and no more clear about what today's post should be about. But maybe, a post about being stuck with too many ideas is more than enough blogging for one day.

Apart from my idea overload problems for this blog, I currently have 28 ideas in various states of development and I can't decide which one of them to dive into next. Deciding what to write blog posts about is a pretty small problem.

PS. Any suggestions/preferences for the next blog topic are most welcome...

It's all about reading

2010-06-15T23:36:00.002+10:00

My favourite part of any school visit is talking about books - not just the one's I've written, but the many, many books that I've had the pleasure of reading.

This photo was taken at Mossfiel Primary school which I visited last month as an Ambassador for the Victorian Premier's Reading Challenge. The kids and I were walking across the schoolyard for a photo shoot in the gym but several of the students simply couldn't stop reading so the photographer decided to take advantage of the moment.

Today, when I was working with young writers at the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre, a student asked me to sign her copy of 'The Secret Life of Maeve Lee Kwong'. She said she loved to read and re-read it even though it always made her cry. I was so touched and very honoured.

I remember when I was a kid looking up from the pages of a novel and thinking that there would be nothing more wonderful than to give someone the pleasure, the depth of feeling, the emotional buzz, that I found in the pages of a good book. It was those moments of connection that made me want to write. There's nothing more affirming than to know that you've managed to pass on your heartfelt love of words and stories from one generation to the next.

Ned Kelly & The Green Sash Launch

2010-06-14T00:42:00.001+10:00

Tonight the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre was bustling. A huge crowd turned up for the launch of Ned Kelly & the Green Sash by Mark Greenwood and Frane Lessac.

Lesley Reece mc'd the evening, Janet Holmes à Court did the official send-off and a young reviewer/blogger, Esme Stubbs, gave an eloquent summary and review of the book. Both Mark and Frané spoke beautifully about their work and the inspiration behind the book. An exhibition of the original artwork lined the walls of the centre. Afterwards, the crowd lingered to toast the book's success and talk. It was possibly the smoothest book launch I've ever attended.

Sigh. I wish I was a picture book writer and/or illustrator. There's something so accessible, so immediate and delicious about picture books. I love the way they work on so many levels and how much they can convey. When I grow up, I think I would like to be a picture book writer and illustrator. I would like to be Frane and Mark rolled into one. Though I suspect that first I'll have to spend a decade or so learning how to draw and then figure out how to write in a completely different style.

Late in the evening I sat chatting with a couple of other authors, talking about the sort of writers we had become. One of the authors, who writes in many forms, including picture books, chapter books, short stories, journalism and the odd novel said that writing was like a form of play, like rolling in mud and loving every minute of it. The other writer said it was a form of dreaming where you look at the stars and contemplate the universe. I felt a bit appalled to realise that for me, some days, writing is like marching up and down in a trench and that as I march, the trench grows deeper. I feel that it's important to defend this trench that I have dug for myself. It has nine novels lining its walls. I've worked hard to make it deep, so deep that I can hardly see over the side. But perhaps it might be time for me to climb out, splash about in the mud for a while and gaze at the stars.

Quokkas and Scooby-Dos

2010-06-13T00:42:00.002+10:00

Rottnest Island is a tiny, car-free, quokka infested island a twenty-minute ferry ride from Perth. I'd never been there before but on Saturday morning, at 6.45 am(!), WA author Katy Watson-Kell picked me up from outside the Fremantle Prison and we drove down to the docks together to sail over to Rottnest Island for the SCWBI WA 2010 retreat.

Over forty authors, illustrators, and a stray publisher had been on the island since Thursday. Illustrator Ann James ran a fantastic workshop on illustration for writers, there were sessions on various aspects of writing and publishing and a lot of cheese, wine, cake and good company. And there were quokkas.

Early Dutch sailors had mistaken quokkas for huge rats, hence the island was named 'Rottnest' but the little critters are much prettier and sweeter than your average rat. They're endangered marsupials so dogs and cats aren't allowed on the island as there are no quokkas in the wild on the mainland.

A minor character in 'Vulture's Gate' was named Quokka but now that I've seen a real, live quokka, I'm surprised I haven't read more books featuring them as characters. They're incredibly cute.

Julia Lawrinson and I went cycling around the island and stopped to pet the quokkas, check out the beaches and contemplate the sad little island cemetery which is peppered with century old tombstones. I managed to fall off my bicycle while it was pretty much stationery which was vaguely humiliating and surprisingly painful. But it all felt like the sort of adventure I used to love as a kid (minus the accident - I was much better co-ordinated when I was little). I couldn't stop thinking about Enid Blyton's 'Five on Kirrin Island' and episodes of Scooby-Do, which is very appropriate as there wasn't an author on the island who wasn't familiar with Blyton's work and 'scooby-dos' strikes me as a better handle for adventurous kid's authors than 'scwbi-dees'.

The Wild West

2010-06-12T00:04:00.001+10:00

My camera can't capture it: the quality of the light, the spectacular depth of colour, the height of the skies a true vault of heaven.

These shots were taken late on Friday afternoon when Lesley and I had finished a long day of Youth Literature Day activities. Author Jon Doust met us at a cafe in Albany and took us on a drive along the coast to admire one of his favourite beaches. It was exquisite. The sky was awash with pink, mauve and soft purples. The beach seemed to stretch forever in all directions.

This is the southwest of WA where many of Tim Winton's novels are set. It's a landscape that lends itself to story - dramatic, magical, full of light and air and energy.

I've featured WA in two of my novels - Zarconi's Magic Flying Fish and A Prayer for Blue Delaney. I first travelled through WA in 1980/81. I was barely out of my teens and in a way, I took all the majesty of the landscapes for granted. But years later, when I sat down to write them into Zarconi's, they were seared into my memory. It's easy to see how some immigrants come to WA first and never bother to go further to the eastern states.

In some ways, the photo of Jon and Lesley gazing at the view speaks more to me of the intensity of the seascape's beauty. No single photograph of the sea and sky can illustrate how such a vista commands a response of both serious concentration and deep wonder. Perhaps, along with the vision and commitment of people like Lesley, and the energy and intense love of words and stories of writers like Jon, these landscapes help to explain why WA produces a disproportionate number of poets and writers.

Frogs and moths and ghosts and picture books

2010-06-11T09:55:00.007+10:00

At Louis' second birthday party last month, as tiny, costumed kids dressed as frogs, zebras and moths raced around the yard, my husband Ken sat down to browse one of the books that Louis had received for his birthday. Within minutes, five little boys swarmed around him, demanding to know the story. Maybe it was Ken's silvery moth antennae (which made him look more like My Favourite Martian than any member of the Lepidoptera order), maybe it was his easy-going grandfatherly vibe or maybe it was that they are all book lovers but it was a magic moment.

I'd meant to post these images along with yesterday's blog but knocking up posts at midnight isn't really conducive to coherent thinking. It's late on Friday night in WA but it's already Saturday in the eastern states. I've just returned from Albany on an evening flight. The day was full of discussions of books and stories, intensive writing workshops with Year 7 & 8 students, then a good dose of the best coffee in Albany, a visit to the 'sock fence', the beach, and Jon Doust's garlic patch. Action-packed.

Back in Fremantle, the old prison hospital is making its usual creaky midnight sounds - probably the ghosts settling in for the night, wandering through the galleries and hallways lined with books and illustrations. Do ghosts flock to stories in the same way that children do? I might just have to pull out a good book and find out.

Whoops

2010-06-11T00:24:00.005+10:00

So I missed a day. It's still Thursday in WA. Already Friday in the eastern states. Yesterday, despite a full day of workshops, racing to the airport and catching a plane, I thought I'd still be able to write a blog post.

I'm down in Albany, a gorgeous deep water port in the south of WA. Late last night, when I tried to connect to the internet in my cozy accommodation, the internet was down. Suddenly, the notion that June was a good month to post a new blog every day seemed crazily ambitious. I'll be scooting all over WA in the course of the next few weeks so perhaps some days will have to just slip through the net.

Today I spent all day working with some very inspiring young writers from across the region. One of the criteria for joining the writing workshops is that you be an avid reader so the sessions always start with the students talking about what they've been reading and discussing new discoveries.

When Lesley Reece, the FCLC Director, asked the group if any of them remembered being read to when they were younger, nearly all of them put their hands up. When she asked how many had mothers who read to them there was the same response. When she asked how many had fathers who read to them there was a slightly smaller show of hands, but interestingly, nearly all the boys put their hands up. Do readers breed readers or is a love of books and stories something we learn in our parent's arms? Perhaps it's simply as powerful as growing up in a house in which books have a place, in which they are loved and appreciated.

Zeitgeist

2010-06-08T17:56:00.006+10:00

Today I spent the day teaching in an intensive writing workshop with young West Australian writers. They are in their second year of a four year creative writing program that the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre runs for secondary school-aged writers. Each term, young authors from schools across WA engage in a whole day of creative writing workshop with an Australian author.

The kids today were mostly in year 9 and 10. They were sharp, funny, passionate, readerly and obsessed with writing. Every time I set them a task they wrote like fury. It's such a treat to be able to work with young people who share your excitement for words and stories.

The students have been selected for their love of the written word and must be avid readers to take part in the program. I spent two weeks working with FCLC talented writers in 2008 and it refreshed my enthusiasm for writing and my admiration for the young. A day spent with these students gives you a real taste of the zeitgeist. Although there were a solid group of committed fantasy readers and writers amongst today's cohort, the tone has shifted. It's less important that the characters in their stories be endowed with magical powers than have an organic ability to shapeshift. Other students were more interested in realist fiction, still others in philosophy and a number of kids expressed a fascination with horror writing. The fictitious characters that they conjured ranged in age from 8 to 84 and represented a huge cross section of human experience.

Crime is on the rise - or at least the characters in many of the young writers' stories are more likely to be caught up in situations that are laced with menace. And there were a whole crowd of girls with very gorgeous, stylish boots. One day, these young authors will be formidable as they stride across the stage at writers' festivals around the world.

Was Aesop a Tortoise?

2010-06-07T21:33:00.002+10:00

There is a certain type of reader who assumes that every novel they read is auto-biographical, that all authors can only draw on personal experience to construct the characters if they are to write good fiction. It's a horrible inversion of 'write about what you know'. It makes people distrust work written by someone who doesn't resemble the protagonist - it implies that men can't write about women, women can't write about men, that different races and cultures can never understand each other enough to write about each other.

That's not to say that life expereince doesn't affect and form a writer. But one of the greatest pleasures and challenges in writing fiction is to use empathy to enter other people's lives and attempt to feel what they experienced. Too often, we are encouraged to distrust authors if their names and cultural backgrounds don't mesh with our idea of who should write about certain subjects. It's an idea that fosters fake memoirs and encourages people to lie about their past in an attempt to persuade readers they have some sort of authority to tell a story. But story telling isn't about ownership. It's about sharing.

The process of entering the lives of others is the whole point of both writing and reading. In one life, we can only do so much. Through fiction, we can live other lives, and for a moment, understand what it is to be in someone else's shoes. It's a gift and a birth right that we should use our imaginations to live beyond the limitations of our own, singular existence.

Is Harry Potter less of a boy because the author of his story was a woman? Are Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary unbelievable female characters because they were both created by men? Did Aesop need to be a wolf, a hare or a tortoise in order to tell his tales?

Back in Prison

2010-06-06T18:08:00.003+10:00

This afternoon, I was given my keys to the door in the wall and now I'm settled on the big leather couches inside the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre. The Centre is housed inside the old prison hospital in the top corner of the old Fremantle Prison. The hospital has been converted into galleries, offices, classrooms and a residential area for visiting authors.

During the week, the building hums with the voices of hundreds of visiting children who come to see the artwork, attend creative writing workshops and meet visiting authors. But it's incredibly quiet in here today. Not a soul in the building except me and the ghosts. The thick stone walls keep out the sound and the world.

The first time I stayed here was in 2000 when I came over to receive my first WA Premier's Award for Zarconi's Magic Flying Fish. It was during school holidays so I had the whole building to myself. It used to spook me being alone here at night. When the wind comes up off Fremantle Harbour and rattles the windows, it's easy to feel unnerved. But since then, I've stayed here on many occassions. A few years ago, the fearless Boori Pryor was also staying in the Centre during one of my visits. When I complained about the ghosts, he said 'Just you let me know if those ghosts bother you and I'll get out there and give them a talking to.' Boori reckons you just need to have a firm word with the ghosts and they clear off and leave you alone. I suspect he's right. Today the silence seems companionable.

I love the welcome I get when I come to the West - there is a powerful culture of hospitality in this state. Tonight I'm having dinner with Lesley Reece, the Director of the Centre, her husband Bob (a fabulous historian) and the author/artist/musican Matt Ottley at the Reece's home. The Centre is Lesley Reece's brainchild and her passion. Her drive and spectacular energy have seen this building transformed from a lonely place of suffering into an inspirational hub for young readers and writers. You can feel the energy of the building has been re-energised and the dark past exorcised. Or perhaps the ghosts simply rest easy these days after seventeen years of being soothed by stories and the presence of children. It's good to be back.

Have books, will travel

2010-06-05T13:56:00.008+10:00

Tomorrow morning I'm heading out to Tullamarine airport to fly to Perth. The next three weeks look like they'll be action packed. I will be 'in residence' at the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre, conducting workshops and meeting hundreds of keen young writers on the Centre's Youth Literature days. During the course of my residency, I'll also visit Albany, Bunbury and Geraldton.

I love Western Australia. It has a distinctly different flavour to the eastern states - even the quality of the light is different. Its landscapes are hauntingly beautiful and hum with a deep magic. I've set several books in WA including 'A Prayer for Blue Delaney', which won the WA Premier's Book Award for YA writing in 2005. It's a book that has travelled in its own right.

Last year, excerpts from the novel were published in a German textbook for students of English as a foreign language by Cornelsen. The textbook has a huge print run because English is a compulsory subject for German high school students. Not only do they learn the English language but they also study the history and culture of English speaking countries. The volume that the 'Blue Delaney' excerpts appeared in is used in schools by 14-15-year-old students.

The editors and publishers were so pleased with the excerpts that they also decided to publish an abridged English language version of the book, for young readers who want to extend their understanding of English and Australia. I haven't seen the final abridged version yet but yesterday I replied to an email from Germany enquiring about the pronunciation of various Australian words mentioned in the novel, particularly place names in Western Australia and South Australia: Bindoon, Ceduna, Raukkan. Clontarf, Gnowangerup, Katanning, Kojonup and Pingelly.

It's not often that I stop to think about the different rhythms of Australian place names, the way we separate some syllables, merge others together and almost sing the vowels in the back of our throats. I sat at my desk reciting the place names out loud, testing them, weighing them, thinking about how to explain their pronunciation. I know, at its worst, the Australian accent can sound flat and nasal. But yesterday I heard the bouncy, snappy joy of the language and the twang in the vowels sounded musical. Maybe the landscape affects the inflection of our words. There's something about WA landscapes that sing so loudly it gets right inside you. No wonder the place names have such a fantastic rhythm. Can't wait to get there.

The Good, the Bad and the Best Intentions

2010-06-04T08:36:00.005+10:00

This afternoon, I spent an hour talking about 'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ' at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas with Sonia Orchard and Nick Gadd.

The Victorian Writers Centre have set up a very funky sort of writers' book club. On the first Friday of every month, a panel of authors discuss a recently released book to a lunch time audience (1.00 - 2.00 pm). The events are free and the conversation is lively. At least today felt pretty lively. Sonia and Nick spoke really well and there was some good input from the audience too.

I felt weirdly nervous when we walked up on stage. It wasn't that I was unprepared or didn't have anything to say but I didn't really want to admit that I hadn't liked the book. I love nearly all of Philip Pullman's other novels but this one left me horribly disappointed. Sonia and Nick didn't like it either. There were problems with the structure, the prose and the character development. If it had been about someone other than Jesus, it would have made very little sense. Though perhaps the fact that I had a good Biblical education made it hard for me to read it without sighing in irritation. Great big slabs of it were simply paraphrased excerpts from the synoptic gospels, with a dash of bits from elsewhere including a big chunk of dialogue from 'The Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov'.

I wound up talking with some passion about how much I enjoyed 'His Dark Materials' - Pullman's YA fantasy trilogy about alternative realities, the magic of myth and the wonders of the physical world.

'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ' is not a children's book, nor, do I imagine, will it hold much interest for YA readers. One member of the audience said it had a lovely resonance for him as it connected with his childhood Sunday school experiences that he had lost touch with and he enjoyed revisiting some of the stories from the Gospels. I think for some readers, it will bring that sort of connection and I know Philip Pullman said he hoped it would send people back to the Gospels to re-examine the contradictions in the different Gospels. But frankly, if you're simply looking to revisit the stories of the Bible and to make up your own mind about their significance and their beauty, to understand the good, the bad and the fallacious, you're probably better off getting a nice edition of a Children's Bible with the stories told in crisp, clean prose.

Recently the children's author Duncan Ball, who has a voracious appetite for great fiction, gave me a copy of "The Summing Up" by the English author, Somerset Maugham. It's a sort-of memoir in which Maugham wrote about his experiences of a lifetime of writing fiction. His understanding of language and its uses is impressive. Maugham wrote:

"To my mind the King James Bible has had a harmful influence on English prose. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty and it is obvious that there are passages in it of a simplicity which is deeply moving... Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence became part and parcel of the national sensibility. The plain, honest English speech was overwhelmed with ornament. Blunt Englishmen twisted their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets. ...the fact remains that ever since, English prose has had to struggle against the tendency to luxuriance."

When it comes to a good story, nothing serves it better than the plain, honest English language.

Pigeon Posts

2010-06-03T15:19:00.002+10:00

Today a big, fat, juicy envelope arrived in my letterbox. It's the start of the Pigeon's season and the envelope was full of information about the 2010 Pigeons' project. Soon there'll be letters flying back and forth between my house and the Pigeons mail centre.

Pigeons is a community based group created by two dynamic young pioneers of goodness, Jenna Williams and Lachlann Carter. Last year I had the privilege of working with them on their first school-based creative writing project. It was a letter-writing, story-making adventure. I was partnered with a young writer in Grade Six at North Melbourne Primary school, Hector, and together we worked up a story through an exchange of letters, words and ideas. At the end of the year, all the stories that grew out of the project were published in a very gorgeous book.

I'm looking forward to receiving the first letter from my partner for this year, Fred, from Footscray City Primary School. Over the course of the next few months, we'll create a story in tandem. It's a great initiative and if last year is anything to go by, I'll learn as much as Fred from the creative journey we're both about to set out upon.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, small exchanges between writers can be unforgettable. I learnt from working with Hector last year that even pigeons can make a mark on history. Come to think about it, pigeons often leave a mark in very public places on great figures of history. But lets not think too literally on that tangent. Pigeons is a great initative and I can't wait to hear from Fred and to start the process of giving wings to his ideas.

The best laid plans

2010-06-03T07:55:00.007+10:00

Sometimes, it’s harder to keep a promise than you’d planned. Last night, when I went to upload my second promised June post, my internet connection went down. But it seemed appropriate that when I had written about the illusory nature of time, that my plans of controlling my time should be defeated, yet again. It was too late to resolve my technical problem and so I went to bed to dream of burning buildings and harps.

So here’s yesterday’s post, a day late:

Six weeks ago, the Australian poet Peter Porter died in London. He was 81 years old. He had led a rich and full life though he suffered his share of tragedies while producing a huge body of published work. When I read his obituary in The Age newspaper I felt stricken. I’d never written to thank him for some advice he once gave me. It was only when I saw he had passed away that I realised how valuable his words had been to me and recalled the afternoon we had spent together.

I can’t say I knew Peter Porter, though I admired his poetry. My uncle, the painter Arthur Boyd, had illustrated some of his books and I knew of his work from when I was quite young, though I didn't meet him until I was an adult. Once, on a cold winter afternoon, we went for a long walk together.

The photo on the left is of me when I was twenty-six years old. That’s my daughter, Ruby, on the left, cheeky as ever even at age four. Billy was not quite two, a blur of movement on the right, and newborn Elwyn was protesting loudly at being bathed. Even as a tiny baby, he had a big personality.

Several months after this photo was taken, in April 1988, my father died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack. I was grief stricken. A few weeks after the funeral, I packed a bag and with my three tiny children in tow, I climbed onto a train to Moss Vale to visit my cousin. It took over ten hours and then more than an hour by car to reach the house on the Shoalhaven River but I figured it was easier to make the trip with only two toddlers and a baby. Once Elwyn started moving, I feared I might never be able to travel anywhere. Time seemed to be disappearing, my life was racing away from me. I dreamt of writing but could barely find time to brush my hair. My days were consumed with the demands of three tiny children and the weight of grief.

My cousin, Lucy, also had two small children. She was staying on a property near Nowra that belonged to her father, my uncle. One afternoon we took our five tiny children on a picnic on the banks of the Shoalhaven river. Lucy made tea in a billy-can on the campfire and stirred it with a twig from a gum tree so the brew tasted of the bush. The children played in the sand and we skimmed stones on the river. Late in the afternoon, Lucy’s parents came down to the river with some friends, a little concerned that we had been away from the main house so long. Lucy and I had walked through endless paddocks with our tribe and the children were too tired to walk back so they clambered into the car. But that meant there weren't enough seats for everyone who'd come down to the river.

As there was no baby seat for Elwyn, I decided to walk back carrying him in a sling. Peter Porter, who was staying with my uncle, volunteered to give up his seat and accompany me. I've never forgotten that walk. As the shadows grew longer, we talked about books and poetry, writing and children. His daughters were close to my age and he talked about how much he was looking forward to grandchildren. When my pace slowed because I was tired from carrying Elwyn, he took him from me. In the absence of my father, it was lovely to know there were other grandfatherly figures in the world.

When a car was sent to collect us we decided to keep walking. Peter was happy to carry the baby and we were both enjoying the conversation. I told him how one day, I hoped to write something other than a shopping list. He told me to be patient and that time spent with small children was too precious to wish away, that children were a wonderful expression of creativity. He said that in the course of an ordinary life there was time for many words, poems and stories but that everything happens in its own time. And he was right.

Peter Porter went back to England and I returned to Melbourne and we never met again. He published many more poems and became a grandfather. Eventually I began to write and have my work published too. I wish I'd sent him a card to tell him that I'd taken his words to heart, though perhaps I have repaid his kindness by trying to encourage other young writers, as he once encouraged me.

Today I spent much of the afternoon playing with our two-year-old grandson, Louis, and tried not to fret about the unanswered emails and paperwork littering my office. When we walked up the street we had to stop and admire a circle of mushrooms. At home, we re-read a Dr Seuss book five times and drew pictures of ducks and bears. It was time well spent. Everything has its season.

New beginnings, old promises

2010-06-01T16:54:00.006+10:00

When I woke up this morning, it felt like more than a new day, or even a new month. It felt like a new beginning. And there's nothing that can get me scribbling down lists of resolutions and ideas like a new beginning. This morning I vowed that this month, I would write a blog post every day. I can't believe I've promised myself that. I'm possibly doomed to failure but that's the writing life - trying to force yourself to finish what you've started, to fulfill promises you make yourself and do the best you can to give wings to fledgling ideas.

Yesterday, I finally kissed goodbye the third round of proofs of my new novel, 'India Dark'. Now it's really gone there's no going back on a single word. Scary. It was so many years in the making. At one stage, I felt it was a promise that I couldn't keep, that I was never going to pull it all together and make the story work on paper. It was a big idea, a huge adventure and the most difficult book that I've ever written.

I'm not sure what lies ahead for my writing, which is partly why this morning I set myself the challenge of posting a blog everyday. It's frightening how quickly the last couple of months have flown past. I can't believe it's over six weeks since I last posted anything on this blog. I've been to Byron and to Sydney since then, spoken to hundreds of people about books and writing, read dozens of novels, started and abandoned half a dozen short stories. Life is crowded. But what I like about both keeping a journal and writing a blog, is that it gives you a sense of the passage of time. I often promise myself that I'm going to be more disciplined about my writing. It's an old promise that I've broken more times than I can count. But it never hurts to try again, to take a deep breath and begin a month with a new promise. Fingers crossed, I'll have something new to write about tomorrow.

JIMMY DURANTE - 'The Day I Read A Book' - 1947

2010-04-18T19:28:00.001+10:00

I loved Jimmy Durante when I was a kid and this song of his was one of my favourites.

I would put on the old 78 rpm records and sit on the floor in the living room listening to this and his other big hit 'Inka Dinka Doo'. It always made me giggle . I think you actually have to love books to understand the humour.

What my garden yields

2010-04-15T18:51:00.003+10:00

It's Autumn in Melbourne. Our garden is yielding pumpkins, basil (too much pesto!) and other goodness.

Today Ken planted winter crops of broccoli and garlic. When you are obsessed with words and stories, it's easy to forget that there is a whole silent world of plants and their stories that unfold without worrying about narrative structure.

In the midst of our garden, Leda (the mother of two sets of twins - Helen of Troy & Clytemnestra and Castor & Pollux) wrestles with a swan as lemongrass and rhubarb grow tall around her. She's cast in bronze so can weather both the seasons and the threat of being engulfed by plants.

On a rock beneath the eggplants, is a small stone sculpture of the Indian elephant-headed god, Ganesha, surrounded by blue glass pebbles. At the moment, he's overshadowed by a spreading eggplant bush that has huge, glossy black eggplants hiding amidst the leaves.

I love this time of year in the garden. The weather is cool enough now that you can sit in the sunshine for ages and simply admire the plants and the comings and goings of small creatures.

I'm pushing around ideas for the next novel and a clutch of small projects. It's a good time for sitting and contemplating the world.

The End of a Favourite Haven

2010-04-10T11:45:00.004+10:00

It's closing! City Basement Books, one of my favourite second hand bookshops in Melbourne, if not the world, is having its final, end of everything sale and will close its doors at the end of April.

I've spent so many hours in their basement bookshop, sitting on a stool, scanning shelves, making little 'must have' piles beside me, lugging more books than I can afford up to the front desk and then reluctantly leaving some behind for my next visit.

When my kids were small, it was one of our favourite city haunts. We could easily lose an afternoon wandering from the classics to the kids books with a long detour past the travel and reference sections. We loved the musty, dusty odour of the basement, the piles of unshelved books that teetered at the end of the aisles and the life-size cardboard cut-out figure of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that stood behind the counter.

Trips into the city just aren't going to be the same. I'll have to develop a whole new travel routine, which is going to be really hard. Any time I went into town, City Basement Books was always the last stop-off before I jumped onto the train home, a favourite haven at the end of a long day.

Light and Dark

2010-04-10T08:40:00.005+10:00

Writing fiction is a peculiar way to spend your time. Engrossed in your own thoughts, in a world of your own invention, it's easy to lose perspective on the ordinary world. When you step out of a period of intense writing, it's like stepping off a yacht after a long sea voyage. It can take a while to regain your equilibrium. So after sending off the final, copy-edited manuscript of my new novel a couple of weeks ago I felt I little shaky. I haven't posted a blog since then. After a few days of excited euphoria enjoying being out of my office and back in the world, I lost my balance and stumbled into a dark hole. I probably should have started on another book immediately. But perhaps that's just putting off the inevitable, because there has to balance in life, work and writing. There's been days of darkness around here and then sunnier, cheerful days too.

On Wednesday this week, the shortlists for the NSW Premier's Literary Award were announced and it was a thrill to find Vulture's Gate nominated for the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's literature. I'm very honoured to be considered for an award named after one of the most important Australian children's writers of all time and impressed by the quality of books on the lists. 'Vulture's Gate' has also been released in America this week too so it's having a very jolly April out in the world.

Soon my new novel, 'India Dark' will be off to the printers. I'm marking up the proofs at the moment and getting that slightly breathless feeling of excitement and dread that happens just before you release a book, knowing that all the work, worry and wondering is almost over. What happens next is up to its readers and you can only hope that the story will find people who will love it and understand it. A little like what you hope for your children when they leave home.

I'm not sure what the next project will be. For the first time in over ten years, I don't have another major project which I have to immediately turn my attention towards. I've been pulling out files and riffling through notebooks in search of the next story. Perhaps I need to simply sit outside and savour the autumn sunshine for a while. The best stories always strike a balance between light and dark.

A Sapphire for September

2010-03-15T21:00:00.000+11:00

I wanted to write a decent post about A Sapphire for September but I haven't been able to find a copy. There are a few available on line - often misleadingly listed as being circa 2008 when the last reprint was actually in 1970.

A Sapphire for September was a book that had a serious impact on me when I was thirteen. I enjoyed it just as much as the only other work of Hesba Brinmead that is still in print, Pastures of the Blue Crane. Perhaps it wasn't as complex and was less concerned with issues of racism and identity, but it was rich in detail and was underpinned by the key element of all successful YA literature - the struggle towards independence. I no longer have book on my shevles but I can still recall the cover of the edition I once owned. I haven't been able to find a version of that image on the internet and there is scant information about the book on the web. And yet, in my mind's eye, I can still see the main character, Binny.

Binny was sixteen years old, worked in a coffee shop in Sydney (wow! Australian urban setting!) and joined a 'rock hound' group in the course of the novel. There was a dash of romance between the teenagers in the group but I remember the book more for the details about lapidary work. The metaphors of adolescence and polishing gemstones resonated and even though I last read it in the early seventies, I can still recall somes scenes from it with clarity. I think one of my key life philosophies grew out of it.

At some point in the novel, Binny placed a handful of raw gemstones in a tumbler and spun them until all the rough edges were removed and the gems began to shine. I'm not sure if Brinsmead made the allusion or if I read it into the text but I always imagined that it was a metaphor for living; that when you allow yourself to experience life, to be thrown into the rough and tumble of being in the world and dealing with other people, you become shinier, more valuable, more your true self.

I don't know if I want to go back and re-read Sapphire for September, though writing this post makes me feel I must find the book and discover what it was that made it important. In the early 1970s, it spoke so clearly to me, though I'm nervous that it may not live up to my glowing memory of it. I also feel terribly sad that when my own kids were teenagers, I couldn't find a copy to give to them and it's still not readily available to contemporary generations of Australian teens. It's the sort of book that should be read as a classic that revealed a time, a place and a way of experiencing the world. Binny presented me with an idea of what was exciting about entering the adult world - skill, knowledge, gemstones and romance . What more could you want from a YA novel?

Whispering Memories

2010-03-13T09:33:00.000+11:00

Oh how I loved this book when I was eleven years old. It spoke to me in a way no other work of fantasy could because it was such an unashamed blend of Australian folklore and European mythology. The blurb read:

"Once upon a time, beyond the Tin Shed and the other side of the Black Stump, there lived an old man, Crooked Mick, and a boy, Peter. One day, Peter left his home on his white pony, Moonlight, on a search through the Land of Clutching Grass, over mountains and through the Watchful Forest, for the last surviving Beautiful Princess."

I own a copy of the original hardcover but it has long since lost its slip cover. But the image of teenage Peter riding with the magical kangaroo, Greyfur, by his side is fixed in my memory, as is the illustration from inside the book in which Greyfur whips an elephant out of her pouch. She was a kangaroo of many talents.

Alan Marshall was one of Australia's great 20th century writers. He is mostly remembered for the memoir he wrote of his childhood in rural Australia, I can jump puddles. He was crippled by polio as a child but though it limited him physically, he had boundless energy and a fierce committment to his writing. I read most of his work when I was a teenager and enjoyed his clean, direct prose.

Perhaps there are aspects of Whispering in the Wind that would sit less easily with contemporary readers. Marshall's vision of a mythological Australia is populated by anglo-celtic settlers - a very mid-twentieth century take on our cultural make-up. But the book is a fantastic romp full of magic, humour and fable, witches, giants and bunyips. Peter is a perfect hero and the Beautiful Princess is a much more modern girl than your conventional B.P.

Whispering in the Wind is out of print but I periodically go searching for it in second-hand bookshops so that I can find copies for younger friends - usually without much success. It's one thing that makes me particularly excited about the advent of e-books. If e-books can successfully rescue novels like this from obscurity, it will be a great day for Australian literature.

Climb a Lonely Reading List

2010-03-09T18:09:00.003+11:00

I spoke at six different sessions at the Perth Writers' Festival. Each session challenged me to think about my work and this whole messy business of being a writer. One of the things I value most about attending festivals is that they force you to reassess everything from your wardrobe to your reading habits.

On the last Sunday evening of the festival, when I thought I had finished all my sessions, I was asked to be a last minute ring-in on the 'adult' program (not sexy, just grown-up). Ross Rossiter, the author who had been programmed to speak on the panel, had fallen ill. The topic was 'The Writer as Reader'. Three Australian authors were put on stage to discuss their reading habits: Craig Silvey, Judith Lanigan and me. Gail Jones, a fabulous novelist herself, was the chairperson. It was a great panel but as I'd only had twenty minutes notice before sitting down in front of the microphone, I hadn't really thought about what books I'd talk about. There were so many that I wish I had mentioned, books that I have loved and continue to treasure but for some reason the titles slipped from the front of my consciousness as I talked about the books from childhood to the present that have formed me as a writer. But when I was asked about Australian fiction, one of the first titles that leapt to mind was Lilith Norman's Climb a Lonely Hill.

Then, in one of those weird moments of serendipity, a couple of days later I read Anna Ryan-Punch's blog post about her ten favourite teen reads and was stunned to see she'd listed it too. You can read Anna's list on her 'Reading your Favourites' blog.Her list was inspired by a call from Viewpoint magazine for readers to nominate ten must-read teen novels. I don't think I could stop at ten. But when I read Anna's list, I was struck by the fact that she also listed Climb a Lonely Hill as a significant book from her youth, even though we belong to different generations. One of the sad things about this important book is that unlike the other nine books on Anna's list, Climb a Lonely Hill was the only title that Anna couldn't link to Wikipedia.

Climb a Lonely Hill was first published in 1970 and commended by the CBCA in 1971. I paid $3.50 for my hardcover copy with a combination of birthday money and pocket money that I had saved in the course of the year. Considering that I received 20 cents a week in pocket money back then, the book was a major purchase. It was printed in Great Britain because in the 1970s few Australian children's books were actually published inside Australia. The reviews on the back cover are a testament to its international success:

"A remarkable first novel..." The Sunday Times

"... the children are real children, frail and recognizable, and one cares about their fate." The Times Literary supplement

Climb a Lonely Hill was a book that actually made me feel oddly uncomfortable when I read it as a child. Yet, for some reason, the story of two unhappy children having to survive in the Australian desert against terrible odds, struck a deep chord, even though my own childhood was deeply suburban. It was about surviving the elements and the complex feelings that Australians have always had about the vastness of our desert landscapes.

Australian fiction, whether written for young or old, faces serious challenges if it is to be enjoyed from one generation to the next. Climb a Lonely Hill was last republished in 1995 so now it can only be bought secondhand. Too many fantastic Australian classics are lost because, with such a small population, it's difficult for Australians to keep many of our best books in print.

So expect a run of posts from me about lost classics and childhood favourites. If we keep talking about books we've loved we help to keep them alive.

Vale Ruby Hunter

2010-03-05T16:10:00.005+11:00

I've been meaning to write a post for weeks. I've finished a novel, been to the Perth Writers' Festival and back and thought of dozens of topics to write about. But ever since Ruby Hunter died two weeks ago, I've wanted to write about her passing. And every time I've opened this blog, I've felt so overwhelmed with sadness that I couldn't bring myself to write. Ruby Hunter was a great soul and the world is a more melancholy place without her.

Ruby Hunter is a musical legend in Australia. When she sang, her voice came out of the rocks and rivers of this country. I didn't know Ruby personally. I met her once, briefly. But I interviewed her via phone on a number of occasions and I included a story about her childhood in my book Tough Stuff, a collection of stories about heroic kids. Although Tough Stuff was published in 1999, it has been continuously reprinted so Ruby's story has been read by more than a generation of Australian kids, as well as young readers from around the world. It's a story of injustice and courage and of a small girl's ability to rise above the most difficult challenges.

Ruby was one of the stolen generation, who as a child, was taken away from her family home in the Coorong when she was eight years old and forced to spend years in institutions. I'd read a brief version of her experiences in a newspaper and knew that I wanted to include her story in Tough Stuff. But in the same week in 1998 that I was meant to meet her for an interview, my twelve year old son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. I phoned Ruby from the hospital to say I couldn't make it. I can still remember her voice on the other end of the line, rich and warm and full of sympathy. By the time I was ready to write again, Ruby was on tour so we spoke again on the phone and emailed and faxed versions of the story to her agent until Ruby felt I'd managed to capture a small, true snapshot of her childhood.

Years later, when I was working on A Prayer for Blue Delaney, Ruby helped me again. I had invented a character called Rosy in the novel, largely because Ruby's story had never left me, who is taken from her grandmother. I wanted to include a brief telling in the book of a legend from the Ngarrindjeri people of the Coorong, where the old grandmother tells a group of children the story of the Mungingee. Ruby knew exactly who I needed to talk to get permission to use the story and to make sure the details were right.

There must be thousands of people around the world who were touched by Ruby Hunter, through her music, her story and her personal genoristy. Her influence stretched beyond her much loved family to people that she would never meet. In conversation with her, she struck me as someone of unstinting generosity, a woman with a huge heart. She was only fifty-four years old when she died on 17th February. Today she was laid to rest in the country of her mother's people in the Coorong. She is deeply mourned by more people than she ever knew. Go well, Ruby Hunter.

Fulcrum

2010-02-11T21:51:00.006+11:00

This afternoon Ken invented a game to play with Louis, our grandson. He called it "Fulcrum". As I pounded away at the keyboard out in the office I could hear Ken call out "Fulcrum" and then there would be a thump, a giggle and a splash.

Louis is not quite two years old and every Thursday, he comes to our house to spend the day mucking around. This morning, we (Ken, Louis and I) went on an adventure up the street to buy him new sandals but the deadline for India Dark was calling so once he was asleep in his pusher, I ran out to the office and buried myself in the manuscript again. When Louis woke up from his nap, Ken pulled out the paddle pool and though I could hear Louis asking 'Where kirrsseee?' I had to keep working. I longed to go and muck about with water and bubbles and stories as we usually do on Thursday afternoons but the impending deadline kept me tethered to the keyboard.

When Bella, Louis' mum, turned up to collect him, I slipped out of the office for a cup of tea and discovered exactly what 'Fulcrum' means. Louis was sitting beside the paddle pool with a giant wooden mallet, a metal spatula and a blue building block. Carefully, he balanced the spatula across the building block, set a plastic animal on one end of the spatula, and then pounded the other end with his wooden mallet so the plastic horse/pig/zoo animal flew into the air and landed 'splash' in the paddle pool. The 'fulcrum' was the blue building block, the pivot of the see-saw that made it possible to send the plastic animal on its spectacular trajectory.

It's hard to remember to put the blue building block in place. Those wonderful, carefree moments when you fly through the air are only possible if you remember the fulcrum, the pivot of existence that makes balance possible.

I can't wait until India Dark is winging its way to my editors desk. Perhaps, sometimes, we forget the fulcrum at the expense of all those precious things that make a creative life worthwhile.

The first line

2010-02-09T22:56:00.004+11:00

Early this evening, as I was driving home from Northcote, I listened to Nick Earls on ABC Radio's The Bookshow talking about 'first lines'. It's taken me many books to fully understand the impact of the first line. When I was ten years old, a not very literate nine-year old friend told me if a book didn't grab her in the first line, she tossed it. I remember feeling slightly outraged and a little alarmed at the prospect of showing her one of my stories.

All these reflections on first lines reminded me of a meme that was floating around last year that was posted on many of the writerly blogs I follow. So, belatedly, here's a list of first lines from my novels, some which I like better than others:

Gus lay listening in the dark. Zarconi's Magic Flying Fish
It was three o'clock in the morning. Market Blues
Pauline finished colouring in the centre of the last 'o' on page 26 of her English book and looked up as the classroom door swung open. Walking Home with Marie-Claire
'Bad scran to you, evil prince,' said Bridie, thrusting her stick at Brandon. 'Pick up your weapon and I'll kill you three times over!' Bridie's Fire
Paddy opened the carriage window and stuck his head out, feeling the cold wind whip his face. Becoming Billy Dare
Colm took the stairs two at a time, his feet pounding on the dark timber. A Prayer for Blue Delaney
So - time to talk to the dead!' said Maeve. The Secret Life of Maeve Lee Kwong
Callum felt the rumble of roadtrains, and froze. Vulture's Gate

But perhaps my slickest opening line is from my ninth novel, India Dark:

Daisy opened her mouth and lies flew out.

I think it might just be my favourite.

Perth Writers Festival

2010-02-01T21:25:00.002+11:00

Three weeks to go until the Perth Writers Festival

I felt all squirmy with pleasure when I read their description of me as 'much-loved'. I am a sucker for a compliment.

Here's what I'll be getting up to:

EVENT SCHEDULE Perth Writers Festival
School Sessions

Vultures Gate with Kirsty Murray
Much-loved Australian writer Kirsty Murray’s latest’s novel, Vulture’s Gate, is a gripping,
fast-paced adventure. With a vividly realised setting in futuristic Sydney, it is a provocative
page-turner with a chilling sociological twist. This riveting read explores ideas originating in
popular science, including biotechnology and genetic science, as well as timeless questions
about courage and survival.
Upper Primary / Lower Secondary Afternoon Session 1
Venue: University Club Theatre
Thur 25 Feb, 12.55–1.40pm

Dark Futures: Kirsty Murray and Patrick Ness
Imagine a world with no women, a place of disturbing secrets and life-threatening
discoveries. Kirsty Murray and Patrick Ness’s new novels both explore futures with a twist.
They discuss their highly original new novels.
Upper Secondary Morning Session 1
Venue: Dolphin Theatre
Thur 25 Feb, 10.50–11.35am

Perth Writers' Festival Weekend Sessions
Adult Session
The Magic of Storytelling
Superb writers for children Angie Sage, Mark Walden and Kirsty Murray take us inside their
imaginations as they share the stories that make young readers wild with excitement.
Chair: Julia Lawrinson
Festival Tent
Sat 27 Feb, 11 – 12pm

Family Day Session

Writing Workshop with Kirsty Murray
1.30–2.30pm
Arts Lecture Room 4
Ages 10+
Perth Writers Festival precinct at The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA

Music and memories

2010-02-01T19:16:00.005+11:00

The office door is open to let the morning cool inside and I'm looking forward to making a big leap forward with the manuscript.

I've sorted my notes and have put a CD into the player - Arvo Pärt's Fratres. I love the strange moodiness of the compositions. For some reason, they suit this novel.

Every book I've written has a soundtrack associated with it. Sometimes a scene and a song fit together so perfectly that whenever I hear the song again, sometimes years later, it will conjur the scene. There's a particular scene in Market Blues that always comes to mind when I hear Van Morrison's Brown-Eyed Girl. When I wrote my first novel, Zarconi's Magic Flying Fish, I was obsessed with the Dirty Three's album Ocean Songs. It became so intrinsically linked with the whole book that I thanked them in the acknowledgments.

My viola-playing son, Billy, introduced me to Arvo Pärt. He lives in Berlin where he studies music at the Universität der Künste. That's him in the photographs, practicing on the balcony of his sister's apartment in Jakarta. (Yes, all my kids suffer continental drift.)

Music is important to the creative process but it is also something that is lovely to share. My desk is littered with CD's - much of it music that my children have introduced me to. It makes me feel a little closer to them when they are far away. And sometimes, it takes me closer to the heart of a story.

Tomato City

2010-02-01T17:00:00.003+11:00

We've been eating tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

While I crawl up and down the pages of my new novel, Ken has been bringing in the summer harvest. Ten kilos every day. Now the freezer is full of different versions of tomato sauces and the fridge is jammed full of jars of tomato chutney. Next, he'll be pulling out all the spices for tomato kasundi.

Meanwhile, I'm out in my office stewing on all the various problems that a final draft can present.

Writing and cooking have a lot in common. Sometimes you just have to let an idea simmer for a while until it grows sweet and tender. And other times, you throw a whole heap of ingredients together and magically, they turn into something delicious. Or collapses into an indigestable lump.

American Cover for Vulture's Wake

2010-01-30T08:00:00.001+11:00

In a few weeks time, Vulture's Gate will come out in its American incarnation as Vulture's Wake.

Yesterday, I was sent the cover by the US publisher, Holiday House. I like the dry, golden effect. It's actually very Australian with its parched landscape and reminded me of one of the Australian classics from my childhood that I own in hardback Lillith Norman's Climb a Lonely Hill.

These days, not many Australian children's books are published in hardcover so it's a little bit thrilling that in the US, books come out in hardcover first and then are released in paperback later. I can't wait to get my advance copies in the post.

Reasons to be Cheerful - Part III (With thanks and apologies to Ian Drury)

2010-01-29T09:18:00.007+11:00

I'm not feeling particularly cheerful this morning. I have two weeks left to my deadline and there's still so much more I'd like to do to the manuscript of India Dark that a weird paralysis has set in. I'd like to get back into bed and give up on the day before it's properly started.

I'm also feeling pretty grumpy about the fact I've scored a big 'FAIL' on my new year's resolution to be more diligent about blogging. But maybe that's why today is a good day to write about cheerfulness because it's the opposite of what I feel. Writing isn't always a cheerful business. It's so easy to lose perspective, to lose confidence in your ability, to worry that you can't maintain your stamina to the end of a long piece of writing.

This morning, I found myself muttering the lyrics to Ian Drury's 'Reasons to be Cheerful - Part III. I loved this song when it first came out in 1979. It's a perfect antidote to gloom.

You can find a short version of 'Reasons to be Cheerful - Part III' that Drury performed on Countdown with good sound but terrible visuals. Or if you’re a hard core Ian Drury fan, you can watch the long version from a gig at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1985.

Writing a great novel or winning a marathon are worth celebrating but cheerfulness is a pair of yellow socks. Days like this, I have to remind myself of that fact. That joy is in the little things - like the gorgeous cherry tomatoes that are clustering on vines outside my office.

Maybe I'll just have to go and grab a handful of them to make the writing morning sweeter.

The write tools

2009-12-21T08:36:00.005+11:00

I've followed Damon Young's blog avidly ever since I read his book Distraction, which I reviewed here. Damon has a clear, sharp way of thinking and writing about the world. When he recently asked me to write about my favourite writing tool, to cross-post on his blog, I was stumped. All I could think of was chocolate. Or was it coffee? My lap top? My note book? Then I gazed up at the wall above my desk and realised my favourite tool was right in front of me. Damon has managed to convince some fabulous writers to discuss their favourite tools in a series posted on his blog called 'The Write Tools'. You can find this blog cross-posted at 'That Young Philosopher'.

When I was seven years old my younger brother accidentally slammed a car door on my right hand and severed the tendon between my middle and ring finger. As a result, I have such appalling handwriting that I’m in awe of people who can write elegantly with authentic writing tools, such as fountain pens. Perhaps I was always destined to have illegible handwriting but I have been able to justify my addiction to keyboards on the tiny purple scar on the back of my right hand.

But it’s not my keyboard that I’d classify as my favourite writer’s tool. In terms of writing novels, my dependence on the keyboard is second to my dependence on the big scarred, canite pin board that covers the wall above my desk. Without it, I don’t think I’d be capable of writing another book. Having just found my way to the end of my ninth novel, the board is in a state of semi-undress. It grows organically across the course of a year until the visual clutter becomes overwhelming and I’m forced to spend an afternoon fiddling with all the images and notes that cover its surface. I use it every day, to review materials, to visualise the tasks ahead of me, to secure stray documents, and it provides a method for holding and accessing all the disparate threads of a major story without having to resort to endless flicking through notebooks and files.

Before I turned to full time writing, I worked in visual and graphic arts. I have always been deeply visual in how I experience time, place and narrative. For me, a story is a series of images that grows into a canvas strewn with words. I see the story played out in my mind long before the words come to make the novel.

My first novel, ‘Zarconi’s Magic Flying Fish’ was roughly 55,000 words in length but the greatest challenge was not simply producing the words but creating a structure for the flow of the imagined events. At that stage, I hadn’t discovered the beauty of the pin board. I wrote an outline of each chapter on a continuous roll of computer paper and wallpapered my office with it so I could walk around the room and visualise the sequencing.
In writing my second novel, ‘Market Blues’, I discovered that the entire premise of time travel is structurally flawed. The computer paper method didn’t work. When I was at my lowest ebb, my husband, a playwright and puppeteer, explained the virtues of storyboarding the scenes and I adapted this to the novel with liberating effect. With the aid of my first pin board and a stack of index cards, I broke the book into its parts and moved the scenes up and down the board until I had a satisfying sequence. Since then, this method has become an intrinsic part of the process of structuring every novel. If you think visually, containing tens of thousands of words and images inside your brain can be a tedious business. Allowing them to spill out onto the pin board frees up so much headspace.

If you look at the photo of the pin board, you’ll notice a stack of blue index cards to the right. They are the chapters of my latest book. They move up and down the board depending on how each chapter is reshaped, rethought and repositioned in the manuscript. Above the computer are roughs for the new cover. Above and to the left of the screen are maps of India at different times in its history. Then there are lists of characters, images relevant to the pivotal scenes, notes, publishing schedules, chapter summaries, calendars from 1909 and 1910, edifying slogans of encouragement and visual prompts and references for various scenes.
In another month or so, when I’ve finished the rewrite of this novel, the board will look completely different again. My pin board is an organic, ever changing landscape, a background to my writing days. Like the shelves of a pantry of essential foodstuffs, it is constantly in need of maintenance. In any given week twenty things are stripped from it, consumed, digested, passed into the recycle bin and another generation of images, ideas and notes come to take its place. Sometimes they lie one atop the other until the detritus becomes unbearably deep and I’m embarrassed by the state of the wall.

Frankly, photographing it for this blog post was traumatic. It probably looks scrappy and cluttered to everyone but me but that’s my writing life – mess, clutter, words, images, the endless battle to impose some order on the whole explosive mess and then, finally a new novel.

Reasons to Cheerful - Part II

2009-11-05T18:50:00.006+11:00

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 be Cheerful - Part I

2009-10-31T14:17:00.008+11:00

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

2009-10-27T15:55:00.002+11:00

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

--

Collected Works from Collected Works

2009-09-19T21:17:00.004+10:00

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

2009-09-15T09:07:00.009+10:00

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

2009-08-20T15:09:00.002+10:00

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

2009-08-18T18:00:00.000+10:00

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.

The vanishing art of reading

2009-08-17T18:55:00.007+10:00

In a recent conversation with a young friend I made a comment about the 'art' of reading and my friend scoffed. He felt there was no art to reading and it required no particular talent - it was simply decoding text and once you knew how to do it all readers were equal. But I believe that just as musicians become more skilled through practice and commitment to their art, so do readers. Just because you've mastered chopsticks, doesn't mean you can play Rachmaninov. There is no plateau, there is always more to know, more to understand.

I am still learning to improve my skills as a reader, despite the fact I have read thousands of books in myriad genres. I have a number of books on my shelves on 'how to read a book'. Not all of them are great reads but many of them have added to my understanding of what it means to really get the most out of my reading. Reading widely requires both energy and patience. Sometimes it requires the same sort of compassion that you must have when listening to someone speak with a very heavy accent. You have to let your mind attune to the rhythms of the language before you can fully grasp what the speaker is trying to communicate. It's a skill that is particularly important to develop when reading work written in other eras, works in translation or books from other cultures.

Last month I attended the AATE/ALEA conference in Hobart, Tasmania where Professor Barry McGaw from the University of Melbourne presented a fascinating paper on Australian reading standards. He is also the Chair of the National Curriculum Board so, ostensibly, he was discussing the outline of the plans for the new curriculum but he also talked about where Australia fits in the OECD in terms of literacy. Apparently, Australia's standards of literacy have been slipping for the last decade but, surprisingly, it's not because there are more illiterate students but because our top readers, the students scoring at the highest end of the scale for comprehension and language skill aren't attaining the scores they used to a decade ago. The slippage in standards is amongst the talented readers.

Professor McGaw explained it wasn't clear why the best readers have fallen in their standards but he noted that the countries that have attained the greatest improvement in literacy skills, like Korea, have focussed not only on working with readers who are struggling with literacy but have extended their top-end readers as well. There is always more to learn about reading.
You can download Professor McGaw's materials from the conference website. His power point presentation incorporating the graphs he used to illustrate the changes in reading standards are compelling.

I hate snobbery about literature - there is a place for every kind of book. But I'm not a fan of the pervasive idea that simply being able to read a book is enough. All books are NOT of equal merit. Good books are not always easy. Just because they are difficult doesn't mean they are not well written or not worth reading. I've noticed a certain smugness among some readers who feel if they can knock over a book like 'Twilight' or one of the Harry Potter titles in a weekend then they have learned all there is to know about reading. It's like assuming that because you can scoff a bowl of ice-cream, you are a master gourmet. Some books are more like artichokes - you have to peel back the layers and savour each mouthful.

Sometimes I worry that the sheer volume of easy-to-read novels that are available to young readers is deterring them from making an effort to wrestle with more difficult books. Reading widely requires support from parents, librarians, booksellers, teachers, friends and the wider community. And it also requires readers to take reading seriously, to celebrate all the diverse voices of the literary world, and to develop the reading skill and stamina to persevere with complex stories and difficult prose.

Rights, Rites and Getting it Right

2009-08-13T21:02:00.009+10:00

I've been getting through a lot of fiction this week though not a lot of my own in terms of writing. But one of the great pleasures of being a writer is allowing yourself the time to indulge in plenty of serious reading. One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I first started out writing was to consider reading a part of my working day, not simply a leisure activity or a guilty indulgence. So I try and set aside a slab of time in any working day to read and I know that doing so strengthens my writing and enriches my world.

Last night I bought two new books from Leesa, one of the fantastic dynamo booksellers from The Little Bookroom. One of them was Siobhan Dowd's award winning novel Bog Child and the other was Free? Stories celebrating human rights. I'm only half way through Bog Child but loving its richness. I finished Free? early this morning. I'd read most of it before I switched off the light the night before but felt compelled to finish it before I got up. Some of the stories are brilliant, some more ordinary but each addresses one of the thirty Articles in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not every article is covered but some of the ones that are dealt with are handled so beautifully that I found myself feeling very moved by the sheer integrity of the stories. Particularly outstanding are the first and last stories in the collection - David Almond's Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads and Michael Morpurgo's No Trumpets Needed. It seems neither of these authors can write a story that isn't utterly perfect. Other authors who contributed to the book include Ursula Dubosarsky, Margaret Mahy, Eoin Colfer, Malorie Blackman and Jamila Gavin who all rate among my favourite writers for younger readers.

What I took away from this is book a reinforced sense of the powerful way that stories explore what is important about being human; our rights, our responsibilities and the rites of passage that lead us into the wide world.