Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot | And ‘Whomp’ said the Araluen Gum | Wombat News | Floods and Bushfires
Astrid Lindgren Award Nomination
‘Glug’ Award and the marvellous Monkey Baa
Book News
Schedule for this Year
February garden: Good smells
Recipes: Breads and not really breads but you can eat them for breakfast:
. pumpkin bread
. banana bread
. quick date and nut bread
. apple bread
Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot
The heat has been sitting on the valley like a large damp dog. Showers are ‘possible’ say the Bureau of Meteorology.
It’s ‘possible’ my Great Aunt Gladys might leave me a million dollars, if I had a Great Aunt Gladys. World peace and flying wombats are also ‘possible’. But just now wombats with wings seem as possible as decent rain and cool weather.
At least the heat has kept me working at my desk. I should probably dedicate the next book to ‘The summer heat wave of 2013’. Even the tomatoes have gone on strike. At times like this I am very glad that humans invented houses and that I’m living in one.
Twenty minutes later: apologies to the BoM and the rain clouds. It is raining ... and raining. Soft lovely rain and the air smells of leaves and mist and the clouds are touching the tree-tops. We should sleep long and deeply tonight, with the wondrous sound of rain on the roof, and tomorrow the pomegranates and dahlias et al will put out more flowers.
Will now keep a watch out for flying wombats or even an email from Aunt Gladys …
And ‘Whomp’ said the Araluen gum
The Araluen gum opposite the house dropped a great branch yesterday, the wood as thick as my waist. I’d just looked up from the computer as it fell, whomp. Luckily there were no humans, wombats or cars under it at the time.
Gums do drop branches in the heat, but I’ve never seen one do it so dramatically: a big green branch sticking out of the tree then all at once just letting go, leaving a great gouging scar on the tree. The branch isn’t rotten. It’s good solid wood (and will be useful firewood next year) with healthy green growth, or it was yesterday.
Araluen gums are rare and endangered, mostly because they are native only to this end of the valley, though the seed has been spread further by humans, including me, and seedlings have been planted along nearby roads. Their best quality is that they’re fast growing, especially after flood or clearing – they love disturbed soil, so you’ll usually find them growing naturally on new road verges or where a flood has passed.
After a few years of good water they rapidly become a massive tree, white trunked with drooping grey-green leaves and round blue juvenile leaves. But the wood is brittle – no good for timber, and not even very good firewood either.
And they get brittle as they grow older. Every tree I know that’s more than thirty or forty years old has had its top twisted out of it by wind or storm. It’s one of those cases were ‘rare and endangered’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘precious.’ The world – and even this end of the valley – would be much the same if all the Araluen gums vanished tomorrow. There are many other species here to take their place, including the ‘parent’ species Araluen gum is probably descended from.
But like many endangered species, their presence shows that the place where they live is valuable, resilient enough for ‘rare’ species to survive in this increasingly humanised world. No, aren’t long lived like their forest red gum neighbours, nor nearly as useful, except as a perching spot for currawongs and white cockatoos. They don’t even develop hollows for kookaburras and possums. Not valuable in themselves, but precious indeed as part of a much greater whole.
Wombat News
No wombat news: they mooch out, eat and go back to bed again, usually too late at this time of year for us to see much of them, especially with the recent heat waves.
But the rock wallabies have been seen several times – still surviving despite the illegal shooting of other ‘roos and wallabies near here. Someone has been leaving slaughtered wildlife on the road just down from our gate – not road kill, but shot, then draped like trophies across the track. Foolish and vicious, and one can only hope that some good thing whispers into the lives of the shooters, to wash away their anger and pointlessness.
Floods and Bushfires
It’s been a bad summer for so many. If anyone reading this knows any person or school where a book or books might help in the long recovery from natural disaster this year, please do email me at jackiefrench72@gmail. At least the loss of small things, like a much-loved book, can sometimes be replaced.
Astrid Lindgren Award Nomination
A second nomination for this most wonderful international award. I’m enormously grateful and honoured.
Glug! Award and the magical Monkey Baa
The wonderful magicians of Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People have just won the 2013 Glug! Award for Hitler’s Daughter: the play, which is now touring the USA. It will be back for a season in Australia next year, and their production of Pete the Sheep: the musical will too.
Book News
Dinosaurs Love Cheese
Nina Rycroft has done brilliant and hilarious things with this – a complete joy. Sometime in September or October the Lu Rees Archives at the University of Canberra will be featuring the book’s artwork in an exhibition as part of Canberra’s centenary celebrations, and Nina and I will talk about creating the book. It will be released next month, for everyone who loves dinosaurs. (and cheese).
The Girl from Snowy River is out – the sequel to A Waltz for Matilda.
The reviews of Pennies for Hitler are still coming in, and they’re good – it’s always terrifying till the first few reviews come in, especially for a book close to your heart. Later this year Diary of a Wombat will finally be released in paperback; A Day to Remember: the story of Anzac Day will be reprinted for March; there’ll be two novels, and two new picture books, including a new wombat one with Bruce which is possibly the funniest yet. There’ll also be the history book, a re-evaluation of many of the iconic incidents in our past, for adults this time, not kids: assuming that the draft I sent to the editor actually works. (It is never easy waiting for the verdict.)
Schedule for the Year to Come
This year is already pretty much fully booked. (This is only a list of the public events, not the many other commitments). A large part of next year is booked up already too. Many apologies for all the invitations I have to refuse – our house is too far from most places to just pop in for a talk.
February 20: video workshop on Diary of a Wombat. Contact Jackie Barton at Jacqui.Barton@harpercollins.com.au.
March 2: Talk at the Coastwatcher’s Meeting, 2.30PM CWA Rooms, Moruya, South Coast, NSW
March 12-16: Somerset Literary Festival, Queensland.
March 21-24: Children’s Book Festival, State Library of Victoria.
March 27: video workshop on a day to Remember and another on A Waltz for Matildas. Contact Jackie Barton at Jacqui.Barton@harpercollins.com.au.
Late March onwards: Hitler’s Daughter: the Play, by the wonderful Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People tours the USA.
May 20-24: School days at the Sydney Writer’s Festival.
July 23-25: Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen at Speaker’s Ink for bookings and details.
August 18: Talks at the Australian Jewish Museum, Sydney.
August 19, 20, 21: Talks at Sydney schools (already booked).
9-11 September: Ipswich Festival, Queensland.
13-14 September: Celebrate Reading National Conference (Picture Books), Literature Centre, Fremantle, WA.
October: Children’s Day, Canberra.
November 9, 10: Open Garden Workshops here. Contact the Open Garden, who organise it, for bookings.
The February Garden
If there is any area of Australia that is not parched, flooded, burnt or cleaning up the wreckage from a storm, someone, somewhere, may be gardening. You are a hardier creature than I. I’m bucketing second-hand water to the most parched and beloved shrubs, and waiting for next month, when the weather and even the light becomes softer.
So this month you’re getting a screed on good scents, not planning veg.
Human's sense of smell is possibly the least noticed of all our senses, and the most evocative.
I think some of the great joys in life, possibly because they are entirely unpredictable, are cool scents wafting through a window at night, or hot scents rising from the garden, when the bitumen is baking and all the world seems to be made of hot cement – except your garden.
Even if you only have a patio you can have good smells wafting in every evening. The trick is to make sure there is something good for every season of the year. Many plants have gorgeous smells, of course, but the ones listed below have a strong enough scent to float through your window.
Winter. This is the most important month to get right, as winter is a closed-up time – we're locked in our houses with the windows shut and no one is cutting their lawns so you don't get those good subliminal mown hay scents.
Luckily humans have hunted for good cold weather scents for ages (literally) so we have a lot to choose from: scented camellias (they do exist, but you may have to hunt for them), delicious daphne, Erlicheer jonquils, calamondins and cumquats with their rich ripe citrus scent as well as glowing fruit, gelsemium or yellow jasmine and many of the buddleias with their delicious honey scents.
If you can find pineapple marigolds do put them in – they grow thigh high with a stunning pineapple fragrance and small yellow blooms. Unlike ordinary marigolds they smell stunning, and are perennial – plant them once and let them grow.
Spring: Port wine magnolia, Pittosporum undulatum as long as it isn’t a weed in your area, hyacinths, old-fashioned freesias, sweet-scented pinks, the wonderful boronias, old-fashioned climbing sweet peas, and roses, roses, roses!
Hunt out some of the glorious hybrid musks – they really have the most well-travelled scent I know. I have a Berlina on my desk as I write this- not one of the most strongly scented, but still extraordinarily sweet. I think Buff Beauty is my favourite of the hybrid musks – her perfume seems to gather in odd places depending on the breeze, then hit you all at once. Now and then it even gathers in our bathroom when the window is left open, smelling like all those artificial scent doovers are supposed to, but never do.
Other good perfumed roses are Papa Meilland, Guinea, Mr Lincoln –never buy a rose until you've sniffed it.
Summer: Chinese star jasmine blooms and blooms and blooms. Ginger lilies are one of our joys of later summer here – extraordinary perfume that covers our three hectare garden. I have curry bush under my study window, which is a bit counterproductive as on hot days I find myself dreaming of a good vindaloo. And then there are lemon verbena, tuberoses, gardenia, frangipani, lilies (though some of these can smell a bit rank in the house). I also grow masses of tall Sweet William, for their impossible to duplicate clove scent. And I almost forgot English lavender ...
Autumn: Back to roses again, with their autumn flush of blooms, French lavender, early scented sasanqua camellias. A hedge of rosemary always seems to smell strongest in autumn, some of the chrysanthemums (again, smell before you buy – some are revolting).
How to have a house that smells good
Step 1. Plant at least one of the above for every season of the year
Step 2. Throw old joggers out the back door; remove that tin of the cat’s Fish Dinner from the fridge, wrap or wash empty cans of Doggie Dinner before throwing in the rubbish, or better still, feed them real food not canned
Step 3. Cook something – the sort of cooking where the smell lingers in the curtains and carpet so the house smells subtly good for days – like bread or buttery spice biscuits or long-simmered tomato sauce with basil.
Step 4. Bung some flowers in a vase – preferably not flowers from a florist. Florist’s blooms rarely smell good (perhaps they are afraid of persistent hay fever). Daphne, jonquils, young blue gum or peppermint gum leaves, branches of bay tree leaves, gardenias and lavender are good room perfumers.
Step 5. Polish wooden surfaces twice a year with something that smells good.
Step 6. Try to have a pleasant whiff from every cupboard.
It is my old-fashioned belief that cupboards should whiff of something good when you open them. Vanilla sugar, whisky-soaked fruit-cakes, sun-dried underwear that has been hung on lavender bushes instead of the clothes line. (Even if you don't have a garden, grow a couple of potted lavender or rosemary bushes to dry your underwear on. Scented underwear is a treat.)
Lavender is the classic herb for a linen cupboard or underwear drawer. You don't even have to dry it – make a bundle and stuff it in, either hung from a string or wrapped in an old pillowslip (I prefer the latter – the cloth seems to catch the scent and keep it). And pomanders of clove-studded oranges are fragrant too – if you have three hours and 100 cloves to spare and don't mind blistered finger-tips.
A cheat's method is just to scatter dried cloves at the bottom of drawers and cupboards or have a jar of them with the lid off. Add some dried orange peel too (scavenged from the kids’ lunch box and left in the sun for a few days, then crumbled) to add extra fragrance – or lemon peel or mandarin peel.
And for kitchen cupboards – a vanilla bean is the most luxurious; or the cloves and oranges as well. Or wipe out your cupboards occasionally with a Wettex dipped in vanilla extract.
Extremely Good Smelling Wood Polish
½ cup beeswax (from craft stores or your friendly beekeeper)
½ cup methylated spirits
4 cups linseed oil
1 tbsp lavender oil
Melt the beeswax, take off the heat and add the other ingredients. Beat for about ten minutes till it begins to set.
To use: Wipe on thinly, then buff to a shine.
Note: If it's too hard to spread easily, melt again briefly and add more oil and meths – about half and half.
A Few ‘Bread’ Recipes
Call a cake ‘bread’ and you can eat it for breakfast. Actually I prefer a slice of fresh good bread to any cake (except possibly sponge cake with jam, cream and passionfruit pulp, topped with lavish fresh strawberries). But these are not particularly sweet, and can be made high in protein and low GI.
Banana Bread
This can be frozen: an excellent way of storing bananas.
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 beaten eggs (can be omitted and more yoghurt substituted)
125 grams butter
2 cups self-raising flour
4 mashed, very ripe bananas
½ cup of sour cream/skim milk natural yoghurt
Otional: 2 cups chopped alnuts
Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, fold in other ingredients. Bake at 180 ºC for an hour, or until the top springs back when pressed. Lift out carefully – this cake has a tendency to break at the bottom.
Pumpkin Bread
This is moister than ordinary bread, a glorious colour and delicious.
4 cups plain flour – wholemeal or white
1 cup mashed well-drained pumpkin, preferably not butternut which can be fibrous.
1 teaspoon dried yeast
water
Place the yeast in the warm water with a little flour. Leave till it bubbles. Now combine the flours, add the yeast and enough water to make it bind. Knead for at least 20 minutes. Leave to rise in a warm place – I cover it with a tea towel and put it near the stove or on the windowsill. Punch it down, let it rise again to double its bulk. Bake in a hot oven till the top is brown and springs back when you press it. The sides of the loaf will have shrunk back from the sides.
Quick Date and Nut Bread
This is dense, moist and keeps well in a sealed container in the fridge or can be frozen. It’s high in protein and has a low GI, so you can – at a pinch – call it breakfast or lunch. Once the dates are soft, the cake doesn’t take long to mix i.e. the total preparation time is about an hour and a half, but you’ll only be making the cake for about two minutes of that.
250g (1½ cups) pitted dried dates, chopped
2 cups finely chopped nuts
½ cup ground nuts (almonds, hazelnuts etc)
1¼ cups water
½ cup brown sugar (optional – the dates are sweet)
3 - 6 tbsps butter or olive oil
1½ cups SR flour
2 eggs
Optional: ½ tsp grated nutmeg; ½ tsp ground cinnamon; ½ tsp mixed spice; 1 tsp ground ginger. You can also add ½ cup chopped crystallised ginger to this.
Simmer the dates and butter or oil in the water till the dates are soft. Cool. Stir in other ingredients. Place in a cake tin lined with baking paper. Bake for about 50 minutes at 200 ºC, or till the top is lightly browned and springs back when you press the middle of it.
Very Quick Apple Bread
1¼ cups olive oil
4 eggs
1½ cup plain flour
1½ S-R flour
3 cups grated apple, mixed with the juice of a lemon so it doesn’t go brown
½ tsp ground cloves, or whole cloves
1 cup brown sugar
Optional: 2 cups finely chopped nuts; halved hazelnuts or walnuts.
Mix everything except the halved nuts and whole cloves, if using them. Place in a cake tin lined with baking paper. If you are using the whole cloves and/or nuts, arrange them on top of the mixture. Bake at 200 ºC for about an hour or till the top springs back when you press it.
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