Newsletter
July 2012

        It’s scone season. Pumpkin scones eaten with soup, full of nutty barley and vegetables and good things, or warm soft scones with loganberry jam and cream. Peg and I tucked in to a plateful yesterday. We have decided that everyone needs to eat scones at least once a fortnight in winter, with friends as well as jam and cream.
           A good crisp apple is best crunched by yourself- or maybe with an equally good book- so no one else hears the munching or get sprayed with apple juice. Mangoes are best slurped alone, too. But scones with jam and cream should be eaten with at least one friend, so you can encourage each other to eat them all.
    Grandma made the best scones I have ever eaten. Two minutes after the wonderfully Grandma scented hug (part talcum powder, part Pear’s soap, part fresh scone or apple tea cake an cinnamon) she’d ask ‘Now, would you like a scone?’ Grandma could see the car drive up, turn on the oven, whip out the mixing bowl, and as she said ‘have the scones cooked by the time the tea brewed.’
     No one ever turned down one of Grandma’s scones. I remember one boyfriend (who I eventually married) bringing me home after a visit to the ballet and expecting a long good night kiss at the door. Instead he was confronted by a small round woman with brown hair faded to gold, saying firmly ‘now, would you like a scone?’
     He ate six, and two small sandwiches. 
      It is the most beautiful of winters now, made even better by a good meal of scones and plans to indulge again regularly until the valley warms up again. This winter maybe the coldest I’ve ever known, but the summer was so lush that even minus 6.5º C hasn’t burnt off the red salvias, and the great hedge of purple ones. Even the bananas are still ripening, getting fatter each day. Turns out they wanted water more than warmth – and poor things, they probably won’t get a watery summer again for about five years.
     But just now it’s magic.

What I have learned this month
1. Young lyrebirds get hooked on one song. We have a young male near the house who has been a chook all this month. He strides up and down outside the living room going ‘took, took, took, took’ and sometimes crowing like a rooster. Hopefully he’ll have learned a few more sounds to imitate by spring.
2. Many frost sensitive plants cope with frost better after a summer with lots of water. I’d have thought it was just the opposite – that lots of soft sappy growth would mean that they’d turn black or even die in a frost. But as I mentioned above, despite the coldest winter I’ve known, the sages are still blooming, there are still some (admittedly limp looking) tomato plants in the vegie garden and even the bananas are still getting fatter in temperatures that range from 10º C maximum to -6.5º C minimum.
3. My hair really does look better with the expensive shampoo bought at the hairdresser. Sigh. But then again, a $25 bottle lasts me four months, as it’s so concentrated, compared to two bottles at $5.99 in the same time, so it’s a cheap luxury and smells divine.
It’s a bit like really good tea – a few dollars extra gives you a large number of delicious pots.

Wombat News
     Wombats are boring in good seasons. They eat and then go back to sleep. They don’t even scratch much. Maybe that’s the real difference between humans and wombats. A wombat would never fly to the moon, unless they thought there were carrots there.
      Still no Mothball, apart from the one night when I think I heard her. But as a test bore was put in between the hole where I last saw her and the house a fortnight ago in preparation for the gold mine and processing centre upstream of us, I didn’t expect her to come over. A lot of the wildlife vanished during the eight days they were drilling. We expected that, and thought it worth it to get accurate data in the future about any impact on the water table.
     So we may yet see Mothball back – and blaming us for everything, from noise to a cold nose.
       Meanwhile Bounce, Mothball’s son, is happily back in the first hole he ever knew, with no Mum around to bite his nose and tell him to move back to the decidedly inferior hole by the bathroom.
    He’s a sweet wombat. He takes after his dad, Totally Confused, not Mothball.  No one would ever call Mothball ‘sweet’. At the moment Bounce is a large rectangle of dark fluff, with four paws and a nose. Most of the animals here turned fluffy at the beginning of autumn. There’s been a glorious fluffy red fox with a white tail after the chooks and a wallaby with a fluffy tummy eating the pelargoniums now that drilling has stopped.
      I wish my hair grew fluffy in winter – especially over my ears. Or maybe we should all grow fluff on our ears in cold weather, like hobbits. But then there wouldn’t be a good excuse to eat hot scones.

Other news.
My ears are ringing. I don’t mean from a nice bit of gossip, but after an especially loud or high pitched burst of noise while a the test bore was being put in by the mining company to measure any effect on the water table. They did the work incredibly carefully, but suddenly when I was out in the garden there was a change in the noise. It hurt. I ran back to the house. Bounce the wombat was out in the sunlight, screaming. I felt like screaming too. The company has refused to give me the noise records, as that ‘isn’t part of the conditions of approval’, but I have asked them to reconsider, as I would like to have the records just to see what I was exposed to. If anything like it happens again, others should also be able to check how loud the noise was, or what kind of noise it was.
The ringing isn’t nearly as bad as it was now. I hope the wombats are okay, as well.

Book News
       Pennies for Hitler has just been released. It’s about a boy called Georg, who lives in Germany in 1939 and idolises Hitler. But when a graduation ceremony he is attending with his parents is interrupted by a gang of Brownshirts he must be smuggled out of Germany to England to survive. In England, however, he is German and an enemy, and must become George, not Georg. When he is evacuated to Australia during the Blitz he must still pretend. He is the boy who isn’t there.
       But in Australia he is adopted by the Peaslakes and the girl next door, Mud. He even finds an enemy that isn’t him, with the threat of Japanese invasion. He also discovers that while hatred is contagious, love and kindness can be too.
The first two reviews have been wonderful and the book has already been reprinted, but there are always those few months of terror waiting to see how a book will be received, especially one like this, where so much of my heart is in it.
Pennies for Hitler is the companion book to Hitler’s Daughter, now in more translations than I have tried to count, and with awards both in Australia and from overseas. Usually when I write a book I put aside those themes and that time, and go on to a new subject. But watching the brilliant team at Monkey Baa rework and rethink the book in their two productions of the play, as well as the powerful and extraordinary workshops they did with students, discussing and working through the themes, meant that the themes of Hitler’s Daughter stayed with me.
I wrote Pennies for Hitler last year, when much that I love was threatened and in the weeks following my father’s death – and I think that somehow both of those have come to be in the book too. But the book also follows up the themes of Hitler’s Daughter.
Sometimes many stories come together and become a book. More than ten years ago a story told in my childhood by a man – a kind man – who had once been a guard in a concentration camp, became the book Hitler’s Daughter.
       But there were more stories of that time – the whispered memory of a friend’s father, who had watched his fellow students thrown out of a high window at a graduation day by a band of Nazis; the oral history of a Jewish boy who was told he had the ‘most Aryan head’ in the whole class; a neighbour who had escaped Nazi persecution in Germany as a small child, but had then become a German enemy in England, before finally – unexpectedly – discovering love and happiness in Australia.
       They are all in Pennies for Hitler, though all changed too. But mostly, Pennies from Hitler came from a letter by a fourteen-year-old boy.
       He was in a special needs class. Hitler’s Daughter was the first book he and his friends had ever read, maybe because they’d seen Monkey Baa’s Hitler’s Daughter: the play, and so found the book easy to follow.
       His letter said:
       Dear Jackie French,
       What I have learned from your book is to be very wary of anyone who tries to make you angry.
Yours,
James.
I had never realised that message was in Hitler’s Daughter, but perhaps it’s the most important one there is.
So this book is for James. It is about a boy who isn’t there, who can’t be anywhere, because wherever he goes he is the enemy. It is about how hatred is contagious, but it is also about how kindness and love and compassion are contagious too. In a world where there are still destroyers, like the Nazis, there are also loving people like the Peaslake family of Pennies for Hitler, and indomitable friends like Mud.
You never know quite what you create when you let stories loose. Pennies for Hitler is an adventure and a love story in a strange way too. But I suspect that readers will find more in it than I knew I’d written, just as with Hitler’s Daughter.

Other books
Dingo: the dog who conquered a continent has been released too. It is the story of a ‘rubbish dog’ who may be the ancestor of all Australian dingos, and the boy who survived storm and shipwreck to discover what a partnership between human and dog can be.
It was a challenge to recreate that time, using both the indigenous stories from the past, DNA and RNA studies, ethno botany- the study of ancient plant residues- archaeology, plus my own memories of living with dingos for a while in my childhood. But hopefully readers won’t notice the research, just enjoy the adventure of a time that is so different from our own, or even the Australia of 200 years ago.
       A Day to Remember, created with Mark Wilson, tells the history of Anzac Day decade by decade, which in a way is the history of Australia too.
       Mark’s work is always extraordinary. This time it was so powerful that when I received his first thoughts I was unable to work on the book for three days, till my eye and heart was used to them. The faces of the children as they look at the Memorial, of the old man and his grandson, the despair and memory on the face of the woman in 1930 so that you just know she has lost lover, brother, father perhaps, the image of the man in body armour cradling the body of a child.
   Most audiences this year have wanted me to talk abouttheCBC-shortlisted, Nanberry: Black Brother White – the story of four extraordinary people in the early NSW colony: Surgeon White, who hated Australia and loved a convict girl, a loyal father not just to his white son but to the black one he adopted; Rachel, who escaped the gallows to become the richest, most loved woman in NSW; Andrew, their son, who became a hero of the Battle of Waterloo, finally coming back to Australia; and Nanberry, orphaned by the smallpox, who would stride between the white world and the black, as a sailor in the Merchant Navy and a Cadigal warrior and leader of his people.
It’s as accurate as I can make it, two hundred years after it all happened. But it did. They were heroes, incredible people and they need to be remembered.
A Waltz for Matilda (perhaps my favourite book) came out about eighteen months ago. I’ve just finished writing the sequel: sorry, correct that, I’ve just done version #2 of the sequel, with more work needed before its final editing. It will be out on December 1st, for Christmas. I’ll write more about it closer to the release date.
It is, I think, the best book I have written, just as Pennies for Hitler manages to go beyond the books of mine published earlier. It is as though in the last eighteen months I have finally learned enough craft to (almost) create the stories that almost seem to have created themselves, waiting to be told. There will be another two books in the series in the next two years. 
        

Schedule for the Year to Come
It’s unlikely that any more talks can be fitted into 2012, unless they are next to somewhere I’ll be already, and a large part of next year has been pencilled in too. It may look like there are gaps where I can give more talks, but there are other commitments not listed, like writing books, sleeping, birthday parties, weddings, watching wombats and having lunch with friends- though not much of any of those till the end of November.
                
Monday 9 July: Keynote lecture at the Australian Literacy Educators Association Conference, Sydney.
July 21-25: Curtis Coast Literary Carnivale, Gladstone, Queensland.
August 12: In Perth/Fremantle for the West Australian Association of Teacher Assistants Conference.
August 20-24 (Book Week): Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain at Speaker’s Ink.
August 25-30: Melbourne Literary Festival, including two family days on the 25th and 26th, and talks to two Melbourne schools.
31 August-1 September: Talks at Bairnsdale, Victoria.
September 3, 4 and 5: Three days’ talks in Melbourne. For details or bookings contact Simon O'Carrigan at Booked Out simon@bookedout.com.au.
September 15,16: Talks at Floriade, Canberra.
September 22, 23: Talks at Floriade, Canberra.
October 13,14: Talks at Floriade, Canberra.
October 2-4: History Teacher’s conference in Perth.
October 24: Children’s Day, ACT, and a literacy workshop at Marymead, ACT.
October 25-27: Fremantle, WA for the Fremantle Literature Centre’s Celebrate Reading Conference.
November 17 and 18: Four Open Garden workshops here, on the Saturday and Sunday morning and afternoons. Bookings are essential and booking and details are through the Open Garden Scheme. (We leave it all to them – I’m not even sure how much they charge. Participants are brought here by bus as there isn’t room to park here.)
November 21 and 22 talks in Lithgow, NSW. Contact the Lithgow Library if you or your school would like to be part of the visit.

2013
February 20: Literary lunch Narooma, NSW.
February 21: Talks at Moruya High School.
March 12- 16: Somerset Literary Festival, Queensland.
Late March onwards: Hitler’s Daughter, the play, by the wonderful Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People tours the USA and Canada. At this stage I don’t know which openings we may go to.
July 23-25: Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen at Speaker’s Ink for booking and details.

The June Garden
About now I get planting withdrawal symptoms. The first one is buying plants we really don’t need, just for the joy of planting them, like another ten rhubarb plants. And more asparagus crowns, but then we do need more of those because Bryan accidentally weeded out most of our asparagus last autumn, thinking it was fennel.
I’ve just bought more peppermint too, which we really don’t need. But I forgot to dry enough for winter herb tea – I love  a pot of peppermint tea at night – which is probably why I bought the new plant on impulse. And peppermint plants do vary in taste sometimes. Black peppermint is the best for peppermint tea, but even then cultivars vary, just like tarragon plants do, and thymes. Always sniff before you buy.
By the way, if you have only ever drunk teabag peppermint tea, do try a pot of the dried or fresh leaf with no paper taste to get in the way, and make sure the dried herb is fresh-ish, not crumbly but still like a dried leaf. It should be clear and fragrant and wonderfully comforting on a cold night. It’s like chamomile tea – fresh chamomile flowers really do taste of flowers, not like the vaguely bitter, somewhat dusty flavour of chamomile tea bags.
And next autumn I really will dry a lot of peppermint and store it in a thick brown paper bag, which seems to be the best way to store it to keep the flavour.
What else to plant: bare rooted trees- lots, because I think a dry few years are coming, in our area anyway, and this spring may be the last one for a while with lots of water to get trees established. And plant onions – a home-grown onion is a lovely thing, berries, especially a loganberry for Christmas berries on pavlova or trifle; also rhubarb, for rhubarb upside-down cake or rhubarb and mascarpone tart; asparagus and artichoke crowns, and dig up the carrot bed for spring, so it will be weed free – unless you have a crop of autumn radishes in already to let go to seed, pull up and dig and keep the plot weed free or let in the chooks, to scratch and feed the ground. But only two of our six chooks are laying now, so I don’t want to upset them by throwing them in the veg garden in the morning.

A Few Recipes
The Best Date Scones Ever
(but not Grandma’s recipe- the magic was in her fingers, not the ingredients)
Ingredients

¼ cup orange juice
¼ cup dates, finely chopped.

Soak the dates in the juice overnight, or even in the fridge for a day or two. When you are almost ready to eat the scones, turn the oven on to 200º C, line a tray or lamington tin. Rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips, so its like tiny breadcrumbs; mix in dates and liquid. Mix till it’s all together; pat each scone into shape with your fingers flat on the top. Place side by side so they rise up, not out. You should get about twelve scones, big fat ones. Bake 20 minutes. By then they will be brown on top.

Rhubarb and mascarpone tarts