Christmas greetings- and another plea for help
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The December garden
Two Good Christmas recipes:
Flourless Christmas cake and
Moist Rum and Raisin Pudding Cake

Christmas Greetings, and another plea for help….

Christmas Greetings
This is where the wombats and I should be wishing you a  ‘Merry Christmas’, except wombats don’t do Christmas or merry either. (Though they do give a small wombat type grin of triumph sometimes.)
       So this is ‘Merry Christmas’ just from me and may the New Year bring peace and joy and rain and green grass… or at least large portions of all four.
       It’s been a complicated year, part wonderful, part hard, including the threat of a goldmine just upstream from us. (See below.) But the good bits have been very, very good – including the extraordinary support from many countries when I appealed for help about the mine. There is no way I can thank everyone enough for passing the message on and for the submissions made in such a short time.
       Christmas here will be quiet, filled with family (both acquired as well as family by genes and marriage). There usually isn’t much wildlife about on Christmas day – too hot, and this year the animals are so fat they just munch a bit near dawn then go back to sleep. Fabia will probably renew her friendship with the sugar gliders by torchlight… nicely tubby sugar gliders they are too. They’ve decided that avocado blossom is even better than grevilleas, and have been tucking in all spring and early summer as one variety after another bloomed.
       The tree will be a N.S.W. Christmas bush – not native to here and they won’t survive in the garden either, so this will be a potted indulgent one, just because I love them. Christmas dinner will contain the first fruits of the vegie garden – the first zucchini, tomatoes, frilly lettuce, beans and just maybe corn. It will also feature some of the last crop of avocadoes of the season, home-grown cherries, stuffed eggs and tiny pikelets or potato fritters because you can munch on them while opening presents instead of having breakfast, and eggplant parmagiana because it is one of my favourite foods just for one. 
       And this year I will cherish the thought that on this day, at least, we are all safe – family, friends, wildlife and the valley.
Mine News
The proposed Dargue’s Reef mine is just four kilometres upstream from us, and one and a half kilometres upstream from the Majors Creek National Park Reserve. The mine will be half a kilometre deep and with an 800,000 cubic metre tailings dam.
`       We are scared by the sheer size of the mine, and it’s effect on the water table- even a small drop might mean all plants and animals here die. We are scared of any leak from the tailings dam, especially from the Xanthate used in processing. The chance that the dam may fail is remote- but if it does, it will mean our house and all we have worked for and loved may be swept away, as well as the orchards of Araluen.  We are scared about plans to mix concrete when soil is returned to the mine, and the effect that massive amount of alkaline material will have on the ground water.
       We are terrified at what might happen to the extraordinary range of species that are sheltered by the gorge, directly below the mine.
       The Dargue's Reef Mine proposal has been referred to the Federal Minister for the Environment. The public has only ten days to comment from the date it has been posted on the web. (It's not on the web yet, but probably will be posted there sometime in December.)
       As I understand it, once the mining company has responded the public will have another ten days to comment.
       The Federal Government has a duty under international agreements to protect threatened, endangered and critically endangered species. The mining company will need to show that their operations will either have no effect on the species immediately below the mine or that they have taken steps to protect them. Note: None of these species were mentioned in their Environmental Assessment.
       As I write this, the mining company concerned, Cortona, have just publicly stated that they plan to mine three times the amount stated under this present proposal and that all material from their new sites will be processed at the Dargue's Reef site.
       This is a far larger development than the present proposal allows for. It means that Cortona have effectively applied for a far smaller development than will actually happen. It is far easier to get approval for a small development and then apply to make it bigger, than it is to apply for a massive development to begin with.
       ALL existing plans for mining and processing need to be assessed at this stage, rather than have a far smaller development approved and the other developments approved piecemeal as mere additions to an already approved development. But I very much doubt that will happen.
       Ten days isn’t time to do a survey of the species that exist below the mine site: I’ve surveyed some of them, but have no expertise with orchids, bats or insects. Over the years various experts have said that endangered orchids, bats or insect species exist here, but I failed to take a note of what they were at the time.
       There are also other species here that I suspect don’t occur elsewhere – the steep and inaccessible nature of the gorge means that many areas have never been damaged by sheep, cattle, earlier gold mining or even feral goats and the isolated nature of the gorge with its many microclimates means that there are an extraordinary number of rare species, or even ones that only exist here.
       But they have never been listed or investigated by the Federal Government. And if the water table is lowered or contaminated by mining, they may vanish, like the rest of the wildlife here.
       Please – if you have any knowledge, interest or expertise in the area, could you urgently add your comments when the matter is posted on the web site? If you care about the animals of this earth, make any submissions, however small. As one boy wrote to me a few weeks ago ‘wombats are worth more than gold.’
       And to everyone - many, many, many thanks…

The Aquatic Wombat
        Mothball has learned how to swim. Or possibly this is something that wombats just do instinctively, although I have known a wombat who just walked into the water and kept on walking ie began to drown till we hauled her out.
       Mothball lives across the creek now, in a palatial warren of holes that are at least several hundreds years old. The first wombat hole I ever crawled into is part of the complex- it stretches for at least a hundred metres in several directions.
       This means that Mothball has to cross the creek if she wants us to feed her. The creek has been dry for years, or at most a small trickle through the pipe under the causeway. But this year it’s been flowing well- even a few small floods.
       But every evening, flood or shine, Mothball is still at the front door- damp and annoyed but unstoppable. Even when the flood was a couple of metres high, a rush of chocolate froth and driftwood, Mothball still appeared, drenched and extremely annoyed that we hadn’t turned the flood off for her.
       I wouldn’t try to wade through the creek when it’s like that- I’d be afraid of being swept away It isn’t so much the height of the water, as it’s strength- the gorge here slopes so steeply downhill that even a three metre high flood has extraordinary force and can toss boulders in its foam.
       But somehow one stroppy wombat still gets through. And no, I can’t stop her. Mothball is a wild animal, not a pet. Plus by now I suspect she knows what she can handle.
       Which includes us. Mothball’s latest trick is learning how to open and shut our front door. She doesn’t want to come inside – just to make the maximum amount of noise. Banging doors is even better than bashing up a garbage bin or climbing up onto the garden chair to try to dive in the living room window.
       I know she doesn’t need any food, physically, anyhow. She doesn’t eat much, anyway – just a few mouthfuls. But she does need to know that she can still dominate us. She’s getting old now. The other wombats don’t always run away as soon as she lets out that peculiar Mothball odour that used to terrify them all. (Wombats communicate mostly by smells… I’m rather glad I don’t know exactly what that scent means. On the other hand, maybe I’m subconsciously obeying a wombat scent that says ‘Get me food. Now. ).
       So Mothball can still manipulate us. Or me anyway. The grass may be lush enough to almost make icecream without passing it through a cow but Mothball still needs that sense of power as much as she needs grass.
       And maybe she needs the extra energy, too, to swim through the flood.
Wombat Calendars
       Our local Wildlife Care Association makes most of its money for food and medicines by selling gorgeous wombat calendars each month. They are stunning pics, make great Christmas presents – and help a very, very worthy cause. If you’d like to order one, contact Philip at: machin4@bigpond.com
They are only $10, plus postage and adorable photos – very, very good value indeed.
Latest Awards
The Night They Stormed Eureka won the NSW Premier’s History Award for Young People.
Baby Wombat’s Week, co-created with Bruce Whatley, is on the ‘long list’ for The Kate Greenway Awards in the UK… wombat paws crossed that it makes it to the ‘short list’.
       The exhibition, ‘The Tinytoreum’, that Bruce Whatley and I created based on the characters from The Shaggy Gully Times has won the IMAGinE Museum Award.
       Baby Wombat’s Week, also created with Bruce Whatley, also won this year’s ABIA (or Australian Book Industry Award) for younger readers, too. 

New Books
A Waltz for Matilda.
       This is, perhaps, the best book I have written. It wasn’t quite the book I thought I was going to write, either. Other voices kept intruding, more whispers from the past. Finally the book was twice as long as I had expected, more saga than story.
       With the help of Aboriginal elder Auntie Love, the ladies of the Women’s Temperance and Suffrage League and many others, she confronts the unrelenting harshness of life on the land and the long-standing hostility of local squatter, Mr. Drinkwater. She also discovers that enduring friendship can be the strongest kind of love.
 Set against a backdrop of bushfire, flood, war and jubilation, this is the story of one girl’s journey towards independence. It is also the story of others who had no vote and very little but their dreams.

Drawing on the well-known poem by A.B. Paterson and from events rooted in actual history, this saga tells the story of how Australia became a nation. It is also a love story – about a girl, and about the land.

Queen Victoria’s Underpants should be back in the bookshops – the first printing sold out faster than anyone thought it would.
       The revised Chook Book is in the shops too now – twice as big as the original edition and much changed and updated. It’s all you ever wanted to know (and probably a bit more) about how to keep chooks in your backyard or at school.
       The last in the Animal Stars series is The Horse That Bit a Bushranger – the true as I can make it account of a few of my ancestors and bushranger Ben Hall, the story of a young convict who rode a giant brumby stallion no one else could tame; who won a race, a farm and a wife… and of what happened next.
       Oracle is out, too. It’s the most exciting of all of my books so far; set in ancient Greece at the court of Mycenae, where Nikko and his sister Thetis are acclaimed as the greatest acrobats in Greece, so valued by the High King that they are even sent on embassies to other kingdoms. But Thetis has both a curse and a gift – if she speaks at all, she must tell the truth. And when the walls of Mycenae fall in an earthquake Nikko and the wild horse dancer Euridice must follow Thetis as she finds her true place – as the first of the oracles of Delphi.

Other new-ish books
A Year in the Valley
This is a reissue of Seasons of Content, with a new introduction, as well as a new ‘What Happened Next’ section about our lives in the Valley since I wrote the book – more than twenty years ago now. I wrote it mostly for my own pleasure then and only hauled it into publishing shape on an impulse many years later and sent it to HarperCollins. It is about the Valley – the wombats, our lives and the dances of the lyrebirds. It is also very much about food: the growing of it, the cooking, the sharing with friends, human and otherwise.

The Tomorrow Book
Illustrated by Sue de Gennaro… a look at the paradise we could create, maybe just tomorrow.
       This is a special book. It’s closer to my heart than anything I’ve written before and Sue’s work is inspired: funny, whimsical and extraordinarily beautiful. It’s what happens when the King and Queen retire and go off in their campervan, leaving the kids in charge and they find the solution to each of the world’s major problems in their library and create… tomorrow.
       Every one of the solutions really does exist – and the possible tomorrows are very, very good indeed.

P.S. Sue created the extraordinary artwork in collage, using materials she found in her kitchen, from tea bags to labels. It is too magic to even have words to describe it.

Dance of the Deadly Dinosaurs
The sequel to Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior continues the crazy adventures of Boo, werewolf and hero-in-the-making!

The Night They Stormed Eureka
A fresh look at the history we thought we knew, and winner of this year’s NSW Premier’s History Award for Younger Readers
       Are the history books wrong? Could the rebels have succeeded? Could we too have declared independence from Britain, like the USA?
       This is the story of Sam, a modern teenager, thrust into the world of the Ballarat goldfields, with the Puddlehams, who run the best cook shop on the diggings and dream of a hotel with velvet seats, ten thousand miners who dream of gold and rebellion, and Professor Shamus O’Blivion, who tries not to dream at all. But there is a happy ending for Sam, who discovers that when you stand together, you really can change the world – and your own life, too.

Schedule for the Next Few Months
I’m sorry I can’t accept every invitation – there are often two or three invitations to talk somewhere each day and, much as I’d love to, there is no way I can do them all, or even most of them. Basically, I can only do one trip away from home a month, and that includes trips to Canberra, so I mostly only speak to groups of more than 200 and when it will take no more than six hours travel each way (except Western Australia). I’ve also stopped doing early morning and after-dinner talks.
       But as I have friends and family in Brisbane and Perth I always love an excuse to travel there... or anywhere that might involve a stopover in Perth, too.
       New South Wales bookings are done by Lateral Learning (bookings@laterallearning.com.au), Queensland bookings by Helen Bain at Speaker’s Inc, Victoria by Booked Out, (simon@bookedout.com.au), SA bookings by Carol Carralloe (c.carroll@internode.on.net), WA bookings by the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre, and for other bookings contact me at jackiefrench72@gmail.com.  
       But please don’t use any of these addresses for help with school projects, help in getting a book published, or just to have a chat – again much as I’d love that too, I can’t manage to answer more or, truthfully, even the number I get now. I already spend half my day answering queries and, despite having help in the office, am not quite sure how to cope, as questions come from overseas as well as Australia these days.
        There are answers to nearly all your project questions as well as queries on how to get books published on the website, and answers to every gardening question so far received are in my gardening books, which should be in most libraries.

The December garden
       Don’t bother. It’s too hot and too busy.
       Throw ripe fruit in the freezer, pour mulch on weeds and turn your back on all the rest, except the vegie garden, which should hopefully provide you with most of Christmas dinner.
Most Impressive Christmas tree
       For small but gorgeous, go for a N.S.W. Christmas bush with its red calyxes – it just needs tinsel and you have instant Christmas. But for a BIG tree – and if you have kids they’ll want it GINORMOUS – then it’ll be the tallest pine tree you can find. Just keep the pine needles out of the vacuum cleaner by putting it in a bucket and topping it up with fresh water every day.  Christmas trees need a drink, just like cut flowers.
Christmas Disasters or What Not to Buy for Christmas (even though they look good)
. Bonsai, except for an experienced bonsai grower. Bonsai need care and cosseting.
. Anything that needs planting at once… it’s too hot, too dry and too busy.
. Any strongly perfumed plant that might cause asthma, eczema or sinus. (A friend declares her Chrissie present shrub has given the whole street sinus. She reckons it was an anonymous gift from the chemist… )

What else do in December
. Water the kids when you water the garden at night- it’ll cool you all down.
. Add some iceblocks to the dog’s water.
. Top up fresh cool water for the birds.
. Mulch all bare dirt to stop it washing away in wild summer storms.
. Short of cash? Paint cans bright colours – divide one mint bush into many branches and plant them. Water well and in a fortnight they’ll have roots – and you’ll have half a dozen useful and stylish Christmas presents.
. Ask Santa nicely for a new garden seat, so you can enjoy the beauty you’ve worked at all year… or the garden you’re going to get around to next year.

Two Christmas recipes
I have also almost accidentally made the best Christmas cake I've ever eaten, using ground almonds in my favourite recipe instead of flour. I wanted a gluten-free cake. Most gluten-free cakes are dry, but this one is a stunner. Have just eaten about half a fruit cake...

Rich Almond Fruit Cake (gluten-free)
500 gm mixed fruit
500 gm chopped crystallised fruit, including cherries: I leave them in pretty big chunks, especially the pineapple
150 gm crystallised citrus peel
4 tbsps golden syrup
½ cup dark brown sugar
2 cups rum
2 cups water
4 eggs
250 gm butter
2 cups ground almond meal, but have another cup full on hand in case – I use the meal of unskinned raw almonds, but the white meal is good too, just not quite as full of minerals.
1 tbsp cinnamon powdered
1 tbsp mixed spice
½ tbsp powdered ginger
Optional: whole almonds to decorate the top.

Place fruit, water and half the rum in a big saucepan – the largest you have, or a casserole. Put on the lowest heat and cook for about an hour, stirring now and then so it doesn't stick. Put the lid on and leave overnight.
       The fruit should now be squishy soft and the liquid mostly evaporated.  Add sugar, butter, spices and heat gently till the butter is melted, stirring as you go. Leave to cool again.
       Add beaten eggs and almond meal.
       Line a large cake tin, or two small ones, or one small one and two big coffee mugs, with two thicknesses of baking paper. Spoon in the cake mix. Decorate the top with a pattern of whole almonds.
       Put the oven on to its lowest setting. Put a wet newspaper on to an oven proof tray. Put the cakes on this. Use two trays- and two papers- if necessary to fit them on.
       Cook for 2-3 hours (the time will vary with the size of the cake) till the top is firm when you press it.
       Take out of the oven.  Drizzle on the rest of the rum while the cake is still very hot.
       Leave cakes to cool in their containers. This is necessary as they will be fragile till cold. They take about six hours to cool right down.
       Cakes will keep 1 – 6 months in a cool dark place. Moisten with more rum every few weeks. I wrap ours up till Christmas to help keep them moist.
Note: You can substitute orange juice for the rum, or whisky or sherry, but the flavour will vary. If you use orange juice, boil one cup of juice with one cup caster sugar for a minute before pouring it on the cakes.

Rich rum and Raison Pudding cake
If you add plain flour to the recipe instead of almond meal you get a pudding cake – I bake it in a pudding mold (I hope that is mold, not mould), and the result is a rich moist and dark Christmas pudding that doesn't need to be boiled. Others baked in cake tins become cakes.