Jackie's update July 2011

Jackie French

July 2011

There are baby wombats frisking all over the mountain, all brown, all winter fuzzy and none of them quite sure what to do when approached by a car or a human and two legs, or rather two and half legs as I have a bung knee and I am using a stick for a while.
The babies were a surprise, as none of the ones here I’ve been keeping notes on had babies in their pouches. But they are all elderly, like Mothball, who is 16 years old now, or male, like Bruiser and Bounce. I didn’t realise that the wombats really had been turned on by the last twelve months of good grass till the babies began racing all over the place.
After winds with snow in their bite a few weeks ago winter has settled down to blue skies and dark shadows. The navel oranges are ripe, cold sweet flesh and surprisingly sweet skins; the limes are soft, the medlars turned into jelly, the chestnuts and pecans still falling from the trees.
The spinebills are looting the purple sage, dipping their beaks into the flowers, and darting around the winter-blooming red-hot pokers too. And I’m finally managing my morning walk again, or at least a morning hobble, as the torn ligament slowly repairs.
(The bung knee is my fault – I thought I saw a rare plant and climbed down a cliff without a guide rope, which would have been dumb when I was twenty and was even dumber now. And to add insult to injury, it wasn’t a rare plant at all – just a Hymenanthera violacea that the wallabies had nibbled to an interesting shape – and I ended up with a bung knee. And – maybe – I have learned not to clamber down cliffs without a rope.)
An apology, too, for no newsletter last month. My father died two weeks ago. He left the world a better place because he has been in it, with his loved ones around him. He helped reform the Queensland Police service, was Deputy Chairman of the Criminal Justice Commission, but the obituaries remembered him for his work with Queensland and Australian Rugby football, which probably explained the number of very large, fit, young men at the back at the funeral.
It was a good celebration for a good man. But it will take a while, I think, to realise he has gone.

Mothball News
Mothball is annoyed. While I’ve been away two other wombats have learned that if you bash the front door a human will bring out wombat nuts and put them in the dish. So Mothball has been arriving to find small brown wombats eating in HER place.
She is not amused.
As I watched yesterday she lunged over the back of one of them and bit its neck. The two brownies scuttled into the wombat hole under the bedroom, and didn’t emerge for two hours, or until Mothball had eaten, prowled back and forth for an hour, then stalked off again.
Mothball lives across the creek now, in a palatial complex of wombat holes that are at least fifty years old and maybe many hundreds, and run for at least half a kilometre, but again, maybe more. Mothball is Queen of the Valley.
The little brownies both seem to share the hole under our bedroom, a most inferior hole that Mothball dug when she was young and that filled up with water whenever it rained (see Diary of a Wombat).
It only became habitable when we built our new bedroom over it, which kept the rain off and provided a nice big back verandah and front porch for wombats to sleep on, too.
I hope Mothball has calmed down a bit by tonight. She tried to bite my leg yesterday, just to show she was annoyed. I’m wearing thick and very old jeans today, just in case she tries it again.
And in case anyone is wondering why I risk my ankles, not to mention a bung knee, feeding a stroppy wombat who bites the leg of the one who feeds her… if it hadn’t been for Mothball there’d be no Diary of a Wombat, Baby Wombat’s Week, or Christmas Wombat which Bruce and I have created for later this year. We owe her.
And actually, stroppy, grey and scarred as she is, she’s pretty lovable too.

2011 Australian Literacy Ambassador
      Have a look at the great new web site for news, competitions, video clips and what’s on next year. It’s https://www.literacyandnumeracy.gov.au
      This year’s message is that Fundamentals can be Fun. Which is why I have roughly 20,000 books, including the three boxes of books in the bedroom that I’ve promised Bryan I’d put away… tomorrow.
      Simon the Numeracy Ambassador has almost convinced me that numbers can be fun, too. I’m dyslexic and have always regarded numbers as, well, okay, close to torture. But I found myself doing a maths puzzle last week. And, no, I didn’t get the right answer… or rather I got eleven answers that I thought COULD have been right but none of them was the answer they wanted.
But it WAS fun.
PS it was one of those puzzles that asks you to find the pattern in a group of numbers. I still think some of my patterns were a lot more interesting than theirs.

Mine News
The Dargues Reef mine that has been proposed upstream of us is still being considered by both Federal and State Departments. Actually, it’s not the mine we’re worried about as much as the water they want to take for processing, and the chemicals they’ll use aren’t exactly something you want to wash in, much less find in your swimming hole. But we can buy water. The animals, the fish, the frogs and the birds can’t.
This is for them, too.

Latest Awards
The Tomorrow Book, with Sue de Gennaro, has just been awarded the 2011 Wilderness Society Award. Natalie Winter, the book’s fantastic designer, also won the Best Designed Children's Picture Book for the Australian Publishers Association and A Waltz for Matilda, Oracle and Queen Victoria’s Underpants were all listed as Notable Books for 2011 by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

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, Matilda 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
The (almost) true story of how Her Majesty’s underpants led to freedom for women.

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 the 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 the 2011 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.
This year is especially crammed, as I’m the 2011 Australian Literacy Ambassador. Mostly I can only do one trip away from home a month, and that includes trips to Canberra, so I usually only speak to groups of more than 200 and when it will take no more than four hours travel each way (except Western Australia). I’ve also stopped doing breakfast and after-dinner talks (pre-dinner talks are still fine).
      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 (helen@speakers-ink.com.au) Victoria by Booked Out, (simon@bookedout.com.au); SA bookings by Carol Caroll (c.carroll@internode.on.net); WA bookings by the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre; and for other bookings contact me at jackiefrench72@gmail.com.

July 17: Old Cheese Factory, Reidsdale, NSW (via Braidwood). Lunch talk: Bushranger's horses, Captain Cook's Goat, and the women behind Waltzing Matilda, and how to grow avocados even at -9º C.
Monday 25 July: Free talk at the Brisbane Sate Library ‘Once a Jolly Swagperson… the women lost to history’. We’ll also launch Nanberry: Black Brother White, the most unexpected novel I’ve ever found that I was writing. Contact Booklinks at elizabeth_green@bigpond.com.
July 18 and 19, 2011: Talks at Brisbane schools. Contact Helen Bain, helen@speakers-ink.com.au
July 20 and 21, 2011: Cairns Writer’s Festival.
August 8-10: Talks in regional SA, some at schools, some for the community. Contact Megs Bookshop, mar23373@bigpond.net.au for details.
August 23, 24 & 25: Talks in Melbourne. Contact simon@bookedout.com.au for bookings or details.
August 30: Adelaide, talks at the S.A. Literacy and Numeracy Expo.
National Literacy Week, 29 August to 4 September: Talks and activities Australia wide for National Literacy Week as the 2011 National Literacy Ambassador.
August 31: National Literacy Day, which will involve something, probably in Canberra, with Minister Peter Garrett.
September 8: Annual Dymphna Clarke Lecture at the National Library, Canberra, ‘Once a Jolly Swagperson’.
September 28, 29 & 30: Talks in northern Tasmania.
October 1, 2, 8, 9, 10 & 16: Talks in the Victory Garden, Floriade, Canberra.
Friday October 21st: Youth Literature Day Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre).
Saturday October 22nd: possible PD Workshop Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre
Monday October 24th: Youth Literature Day (Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre
Tuesday October 25th: Albany, Youth Literature Day.
Wednesday October 26th: Albany Young Writers’ Day.
Thursday October 27th: Youth Literature Day Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre
November 12 and 13: Open Garden workshops at our place. Contact The Open Garden Scheme at act@opengarden.org.au for bookings.
November 19: Picture Book workshop at the Sydney Writer’s Centre. Contact the Writer’s Centre for details (20 places only).
November 30: Eureka Day Dinner and Talk at the Irish Club, Canberra.
December: Free writing workshop here in Araluen, NSW. See September or October newsletter for the date. Numbers limited.
2012
May: Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain for bookings.
July 22-25: Curtis Coast Literary Carnivale, Gladstone, Q’land.
August 22, 23 (Book Week): Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain.

The July Garden
This is the time of year I hated when I was younger and in a hurry to get the garden growing, bare trees and nothing much to plant.. .
I love July now – it’s a chance to catch up on all the hacking back I didn’t manage to do in summer, and to get rid of a few weeds too, as well as get around to mulching everything.
Of course the mulching stops the soil from warming up as fast in spring, so if you’re in a hurry wait till then to bung the mulch on. But for us, now, getting all the trees mulched once a year is a triumph, no matter when it’s done.
Once I’ve written this I’m heading out into the garden again. Not to weed or mulch, just for a mooch, to pick the last of the chillies sheltered by the lemon tree, perhaps, a few limes to add to the soup and for syrup for the lime and poppy seed cake I’m going to make for Noel and Geoff’s visit tomorrow (as Bryan and I can no longer eat an entire cake I mostly make cakes only when we expect visitors now, though the chooks happily eat the leftovers. On the other hand, they eat stale bread with as much glee as a carefully made lime syrup and poppy seed cake.)
The avocadoes are shiny and heavy on the trees; the tamarillos are deep red, finally frost resistant after twenty years of breeding frost-resistant survivors. I need a few oranges for breakfast, some spring onion tops and I might just make some cumquat jam… which is different from the mid-summer feeling of ‘must make apricot jam before they rot’.
It’s a meditative time in the garden now – for humans, anyway (see the wombat wars above). And the lyrebirds compete over who can sing the loudest/longest/most inventively. I love winter now.

Plant: Most plants sown now won’t do much until spring — and spring-sown plants will soon catch up with them anyway. Onions are still an exception though.
Frost-free climates:
Passionfruit vines and seeds of mixed salad leaves, apple cucumbers, butter beans, huge New Guinea beans, coloured capsicum, Chinese cabbage, chillies, chokos, sweet potatoes, long oval eggplants, melons, okra, rosellas, pumpkin, shallots, sweet corn and tomatoes. Try deep pots of parsley- the roots may rot in hot damp soil. In warm areas, try potatoes in late July. They will take at least a month to shoot anyway and by then days will be warmer.
Cold to temperate climates:
In very cold areas, stick to onion seedlings, rhubarb crowns, strawberry runners, asparagus and artichoke crowns, bare-rooted trees, shrubs and roses.

If you’re not in thermal undies and two pairs of socks, try:
Seeds of radish, onions, winter lettuce, silverbeet, spinach, broad beans, peas, snow peas, winter lettuce, spring onions, parsnips, fast maturing Asian veg like tatsoi, pak choi and mitsuba. Seedlings of beetroot, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, chicory, leeks, lettuce, leeks and spinach.

Winter storage
Don’t keep carrots near fruit: the skin may turn bitter as ethylene is released from the fruit. Don’t store spuds with fruit either, especially apples, or they’ll sprout earlier. If you can be bothered, wrap fruit in newspaper – it’ll keep longer – or fill the fruit box with clean, dry sand. Root vegetables need some humidity or they’ll wither (ever wondered why shop-bought carrots look lush while yours start to shrivel?). Keep them in plastic bags with air holes, or in damp sand. Tomatoes ripen best in crumpled newspaper – and if any of them rot, the newspaper will absorb the juice, so the rest won’t be affected.
Beware of codling moth breeding in your apple store – more apples are infected with codling moth in storage than on the tree. It’s worthwhile leaving small open jars of sweet port (or molasses and water if you have an alcoholic cat) near stored apples to trap the moths. Try pasting a few sheets of newspaper over the apple boxes to stop codling moth and fruit fly getting in.
Fruit:
Apples (Lady Williams, Sturmer Pippin, French Crab), feijoa, navel oranges, kiwi fruit, limes, mandarins, citrons, grapefruit, bananas, avocados, late passionfruit high on the vine, banana passionfruit, guava, strawberry guava, pomegranates if the birds haven’t eaten them, lillypilly in warm areas, citron, medlars, olives, late tamarillos above the frost, winter rhubarb, chilacayote melons and a very few late raspberries. Keep shelling walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, pistachios etc. Pick coffee berries.
Pests:
Mid-winter is the classic time for preventive spraying with bordeaux against curly leaf (pinkish raised blisters on peaches and almonds), rust, shot hole (small holes in leaves, most common on apricots), brown rot (exactly that: a brown, soft rot on fruit, sometimes with a furry outside), black leaf spot, bacterial blight in walnuts, and other fungal and bacterial conditions.

Warming Recipes
Buckwheat Pancakes
2 tbsps buckwheat flour
6 eggs
1 cup milk
butter
The night before you want the pancakes, mix the flour with milk. Place in a sealed container in the fridge for at least 12 hours, preferably 24. This lets the flour swell and thicken.
Beat the eggs till frothy. Mix in the milk and flour.
Heat a thick-based frying pan. When very hot lower the temperature to medium; add a knob of butter, spread quickly before it burns then pour in 1 tbsp batter. Spread it around the pan with a spatula. This may take a few goes to get right – you need to spread it out till it’s as thin as possible. When bubbles form use the spatula to lift and cook the other side briefly. Place on a plate. Cook the rest.
You can now warm them again in the oven, and eat with brown sugar and lemon juice, or spread with jam and eat with cream. But try this one instead:
Spread each pancake thinly with mascarpone cheese, then spread that with hot chilli jam. Roll. When all are filled reheat and eat.
These can be kept in a sealed container for 24 hours and reheated.

The Ultimate Chicken Noodle soup
This recipe veers dangerously into the 'food as medicine' area.
1. Anything that makes you feel good helps get your better... I could start using terms like 'endorphins' here, but won't, as I can't spell them.
2. Equally vaguely, many, many years ago I saw the results of a trial that claimed chicken soup did help people recover faster than a placebo… though I have no idea how you can have a placebo that mimics chicken soup...
3. This soup has good stuff in it... celery, parsley and chilli, that help reduce inflammation and blood pressure... don't stop taking your medication though, anyone, as you'd need either a semi-tanker full or a lot more changes in your diet than just drinking a few bowls of soup.
4. When you have a cold or ‘flu or anything gluggy you need to drink LOTS – and this is one way of doing it
5. Hot steamy stuff doesn't do any harm when you're all clogged and snotty either.
6. This soup is soothing to sore throats, woozy tummies… and when you feel sad and sorry for yourself a little cossetting goes a heck of a long way.

Recipe
Serves: About 10 bowls full
Ease of making: Simple
Time taken: 3 minutes to make, two hours too cook

Take a very large pot and add:
1 kg chicken wings
6 carrots
1 bunch celery, well washed (leave on the leaves)
6 red onions, cut in half – leave the skin on
1 bunch parsley
1 fresh chilli

Cover with water
Boil 2 hours.
Strain off the liquid. it will keep in a sealed container for up to a week, possibly longer. It may also solidify into lovely jelly-like aspic.

To serve: take out as much as you want; toss in your favourite noodles; cook till they're soft.
If you want to jazz it up, add 1 tbsp chopped coriander OR a squeeze of lime or lemon juice AND/OR finely chopped capsicum and grated carrot
OR
Just as the noodles are softening, the lemon added, and the soup is on the boil, stir in a beaten egg.

Grandma's scones
      Scones used to be one of the basics of Australian life. You served them with jam at afternoon tea (which was a great excuse to show off your different varieties of jam – one jar of commercial not-quite-apricot jam is life at its most basic. Twenty pots of six different sorts of jam, to be dipped into in turn, is luxury).
      Scones were also served with stews, to sop up the gravy, they make great dumplings with some finely chopped parsley added to the dough and then tossed into a goulash or other wet casserole and Grandma always had toasted scones at breakfast, which were almost better than when they came fresh out of the oven. (To really appreciate a toasted scone you do have to have good jam.)
      Scones were one of the great standbys. If unexpected (or even expected) guests came, you could whip up a batch of scones before they'd taken their hats off – one minute mixing, fifteen in the oven, and by the time the cosy was on the teapot and Aunt Delilah had finished explaining about her hernia operation the scones were steaming on the table.
      There is nothing quite as inviting as food that is still steaming. A scone must be fresh if it's to be good (unless of course it's toasted) and I mean steaming fresh. Those nuggety doughy things in cake stores and supermarkets are probably the reason we no longer eat as many scones.
      And scones are infinitely variable. Grandma usually added chopped dates to hers, or sometimes a few sultanas or currants, and you could add half a cup of dryish mashed pumpkin too (preferably not butternut – it's too fibrous for good pumpkin scones).
      I've also come across scones with grated orange zest (a particularly good addition to pumpkin scones), cheese scones (add a little grated cheese to the basic mixture, then scatter just a bit on top), parsley scones (add chopped parsley) and walnut scones (add walnuts).
      If scones were fashionable today someone would probably have added chopped black olives and sundried tomatoes – and, come to think of it, they'd go rather well with the basic scone taste and texture too. I'd serve them with soup though, not with jam and cream.
      This is Grandma's recipe, verbatim. I'll expand on it once you've read it.
      '1 and a half cups flour, small piece of butter, small pinch of salt, small pinch of sugar. Mix together well, with knife. Add 1 cup milk with a wee pinch of baking soda, dissolved. Roll lightly, bake at once, 15 minutes.
      A little cream will improve scones. Use self raising flour.'

      Grandma, of course, assumed that anyone reading this – including herself – would have seen scones being made a hundred times and just wanted reminding about the proportions.
      To elaborate on Grandma's recipe: you can use half cream or even sour cream or even left-over yoghurt instead of half the milk for richer scones; you can omit the baking soda if you don't have any, but it does make the scones lighter. I use icing sugar instead of granular sugar.
      MAKE SURE THE OVEN IS HOT – otherwise you get leaden scones. And make sure too that the tray you put them on is well greased and floured or they'll stick – and very, very solid, otherwise they burn or turn into steel on the bottom before the top is brown. Most baking trays nowadays are made from too-thin aluminium. I put one inside another when I make scones, to provide more insulation, otherwise the scones can get overcooked on the bottom and too chewy.
      Use a high-sided tin too, for higher moister scones. You CAN make them on a baking tray, but they spread and aren't as moist.
      Make sure you knead scones well too – unlike Grandma I use my fingers. They should be smooth on top. I brush the top with beaten egg or milk before cooking to make them glossier.
      When you stick your scones in the dish, make sure they almost touch. This helps them to rise and stay soft.
      I use a glass to cut out my scones ... nice neat circles, or an asparagus tin – the only good reason to buy a tin of asparagus spears.
      And MOST IMPORTANT (this was Grandma's secret) – as soon as you take the scones out of the oven, cover them, dish and all, with a tea-towel for five minutes. This keeps the steam in and softens them slightly, so you get that true scone like, almost doughy texture.
      Serve the scones just before they are going to be eaten. (they'll stay warm under the cloth for about 15 minutes). Break them open with your fingers – you should never cut a scone.
      They're good just with butter, as long as they're hot enough for the butter to soak into the scone; or jam and of course, jam and cream, which is a true joy, the basic bread-like scone, the sweet jam, the soft cream on top, so the whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts.
P.S. Whipped cream – or even better, light sour cream – has fewer calories and fat than butter, or even margarine. Not that cream is exactly GOOD for you – but it is better than the more solid spreads – and much more luxurious.