A Brief Hello for the Month : What I have Learned This Month
New books : Latest Awards : Schedule for the next 12 Months
The June Garden
. What to do
. What to plant
. Winter apples
A Few Recipes using lots of Pumpkin
It rained and the lyrebirds went crazy.
I really do mean crazy. The ground has been baked hard and brown since the last rain in February, and the lyrebirds were looking scrawny and starting to lurk behind me when I took buckets of shower water out to the vegie garden.
Lyrebirds are good at lurking. Or they think they are. They hide behind a tree, then scuttle over to the next one, head and tail down in a sort of lyrebird arrow. They’re never quite hidden behind a tree - either the tail or the beak (or both) pokes out. Lyrebirds are still convinced they are the James Bonds of the bird world.
But this rain sent them wild. They ran around trees, across roads, chortling and gurgling – not chasing each other (males will take turns chasing each other for days) just skittering around with goofy looks on their faces, glorying in the rain.
I felt like doing the same.
150 mls in one week: the creek is gurgling – more tunefully than the lyrebirds – turning from the frothy chocolate milk of flood to clear water slipping between the rocks. The avocadoes have sent their leaves skywards again, instead of drooping dustily down. And I have been out picking the last of the tomatoes (hiding among the tea camellias) and the first of the sweet navel oranges, making grapefruit marmalade and breathing in that wonderful clear rain-washed air and draining the solar hot water tank every morning with a half hour shower. (It’s okay: Bryan showers first and by evening the water’s hot again.)
The only ones who don’t approve of the rain are the wombats. The grass is wet and tickles their tummies. The wet soil tends to close the entrances to their holes requiring immediate renovation. The wombats are annoyed.
Wombats usually sleep away the first rainy night, and the second. If it’s still raining the third night hunger drives them out to feed… or around here, to yell outside the door till a human comes bearing gifts.
Mothball – I think its Mothball – has also started to try to dig a hole up through the floor under our bed. She starts just as Bryan starts snoring – I’m usually still reading. Bryan has a very light snore – almost a snorelet, hard for anyone but a wife to hear… or a wombat with acute hearing who thinks she can dig a tunnel up to our bedroom and demand food whenever she feels like it.
In this case, she isn’t going to win. We may need to put in a stainless steel reinforced floor eventually, but we are not budging from the policy that doors are for humans, holes are for wombats. And anyway, she is still plump, healthy and stroppy. She doesn’t need any extra feeding really. She just wants to show she is in control.
What I have learned this month
. The Sydney Writer’s Festival is glorious even if you don’t have time to go to any of the sessions because you’re giving workshops. The combination of rippling harbour, lots of laughter and happy book-buzz type conversations is unbeatable. It was good just to be there. Would have been better to have heard some of the sessions of course. But good none the less.
. Salvia cuttings, i.e. a stick of wood thrust into the soil, will root even if they don’t get any water from me or the sky from August to February. Now, in June, they’re small bushes – or 25% of the cuttings are, anyhow.
. Choughs may fly to water in desperate times, but if they possibly can they’ll fly back to roost in their favourite trees.
. Hand-reared wombats appear to have fewer young, or breed less successfully, than wild ones, even if they survive for more than a decade and are healthy and well established. This observation is just from here of course – it may be different elsewhere. And I have nothing but vague theories as to why it is. But it seems to be the case with both males and females.
. If you get a cold, flu or gastric bug you will get better much faster doing the things you love most – the less active ones, that is. Two days of sci-fi movies got rid of my cold; three days of the new Elizabeth George novel, the Connie Willis and a few others got rid of the gastric bug picked up in Sydney.
. There is nothing quite as good as tomato soup from tomatoes that are still warm from the sun, with torn up fresh basil leaves, even if both are a bit nipped and squishy from the frost.
. It is impossible to look at a waddling wombat and not grin, even if you have the gastric bug above.
New Awards
‘Baby Wombat’s Week’ has been short-listed for the ABI Awards (Australian Book Industry) – many, many thanks indeed to the wonderful people who voted for it.
‘Baby Wombat’s Week’, ‘The Donkey Who Saved the Wounded’ and ‘A Nation of Swaggies and Diggers’ have all been made Notables in the recent Children’s Book Council Awards, Wombat in both the Younger Readers and Picture Book categories. ‘The Shaggy Gully Times’ has just been short-listed for the Yabba Kid’s Choice Awards- and many, many thanks to all the kids who voted for it!
Recent Books
Coming soon: ‘The Underpants that Changed an Empire: Queen Victoria’s Underpants’, co-created with the magic Bruce Whatley.
‘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!
 Boo’s back… in another crazy adventure of Heroes, dinosaurs and the most fearsome weapon in the universes… the zombie sausage!
Boojum Bark, werewolf puppy and student Hero, is about to do what no Hero has done before – go into the scariest universe of them all, the Ghastly Otherwhen, rescue his mum and come back alive.
And he’ll need help from his friends: mysterious Yesterday, gorgeous Princess Princess Sunbeam Caresse of Pewké, Mugg, the down-to-earth Zombie, and Squeak the warrior mouse.
But the Ghastly Otherwhen isn’t what Boo expects! And his friends start acting strangely, too…
What is the bond between Yesterday and her dinosaurs? Why won’t she let Boo rescue her from slavery? Can Mugg really be as dumb as he looks or are Zombies smart in Zombie ways? And could Princess Princess be an actual Hero underneath her cowardly exterior?
The bogeys are scarier – and the food is grosser than ever!
And illustrator Andrea Potter’s dinosaurs are the best in the universes.
‘The Night They Stormed Eureka’
A fresh look at the history we thought we knew.
Are the history books wrong? Could the rebels have succeeded? Could we too have seceded 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 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, Queensland bookings by Helen Bain at Speaker’s Inc, Victoria by Booked Out, simon@bookedout.com.au, 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 and queries on how to get books published on the website and answers to all gardening questions so far received are in my books.
April onwards: Sue de Gennaro’s artwork for ‘The Tomorrow Book’ will be at the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre. Contact the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre for more details.
June 18-19: NSW Children’s Book Council Conference, Sydney. Session with Bruce Whatley, the genius who created those incredible images of the wombat in ‘Diary of a Wombat’ and ‘Baby Wombat’s Week’. There is also a regal cocktail party to launch our next joint book, ‘Queen Victoria’s Underpants’, the almost entirely true story of how Queen Victoria revolutionised women’s lives. (It is rumoured that Victoria and her Albert may actually appear at the cocktail party, but I don’t know about the underpants).
Saturday 19th June, 10 a.m., SYDNEY
Story-time author event with the magic Bruce Whatley at The Children’s Bookshop, 6 Hannah Street, Beecroft, NSW 2119 (Tel: (02) 9481 8811)
And another talk with Bruce at Shearers Bookshop, 99 Norton Street, Leichhardt at 2 p.m. the same day (tel: 1800 442 935).
June 29 Sustainability seminar and workshops at Queanbeyan, NSW. Contact Geoff Pryor at Queanbeyan City Council for more details.
July 7: Sydney, National History Conference.
July 14-17: Whitsunday Literary Festival, including a public gardening talk, Mackay, Qld.
July 30: Seymour Centre, Sydney. Opening night of Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People’s incredible play of ‘Hitler’s Daughter’. I’ll be there, with knobs on.
August 2-7: Talks and workshops at the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre, contact the Centre for details or bookings.
August 18: Abbotsleigh Literary Festival, Sydney.
September 7. Talks at Wollongong NSW. Contact Di Bates and the Wollongong Children’s Book Council for details.
August 26: Moruya, launch of the fundraising wombat calendar. More details next newsletter. Free session, open to the public.
September 1 and 2: Melbourne Writer’s Festival, 11.15 a.m.
ArtPlay, Birrarung Marr.
Topic: Did you know that Queen Victoria had some very special special underpants indeed? Bestselling author Jackie French takes us on a journey through time as we explore historical secrets that changed the world!
Event 2 Wednesday, 1/09/2010, 12:30 p.m., BMW Edge, Federation Square, What Makes a Hero?
Topic: Ned Kelly, Simpson and his donkey, the pioneering women of the first world wars... Australia's history is full of people who've done extraordinary things. Join Jackie French as we explore what the stories of our best-loved ancestors have in common and try to answer the tricky question – what really makes a hero?
Thursday 2/09/2010, 12:30 p.m., ACMI 1
The Horse That Bit the Bushranger
Roaming the bush and terrorising the gentry, bushrangers were an unmissable feature of rural Australia for a hundred years or more. Hear the stories of our most famous bushrangers and how their unique way of life came to an end, with best-selling historian Jackie French.
September 18: Talk to Friends of the Botanic Gardens, Canberra, 12.30 in the auditorium. All welcome, adults and kids.
October 2,3,4: Talks each day at Floriade, Canberra.
October 10: Talks at Floriade, Canberra.
October 27: International Children’s Day. I’ll be speaking at the awards in Canberra in my capacity as ACT Children’s Ambassador, and probably giving a talk or two somewhere else in Canberra that day too, if previous years are anything to go by.
November 6 and 7: Open Garden workshops at our place. Contact the Open Garden organisers for bookings, act@opengarden.org.au. If you want to make a weekend of it, there are lots of places to stay, from cheap pubs to luxury B&Bs close by. Look at the Braidwood web site.
November 20: Eurobodalla Slow Food Festival at Moruya, NSW. I’ll be giving a series of talks during the day, on everything from fruit trees to wombats, and launching the festival once again as its patron.
March 19, 20, 21, 2011: Keynote address at Wombat Conference, Albury.
May 18, 19, 2011: Talks at Gold Coast Schools. Contact Helen Bain, helen@speakers-ink.com.au
July 18, 19, 2011: Talks at Brisbane schools. Contact Helen Bain, helen@speakers-ink.com.au
July 20, 21, 2011 Cairns: Cairns Writer’s Festival.
June Garden
What to plant:
June is the time that you just have to BELIEVE that those dead looking sticks in the garden centre will grow into stunning shrubs and trees next spring!
Cold to temperate areas: Onions, artichoke, asparagus and rhubarb crowns if you're desperate to plant some veg, and any flower seedlings in the nursery (seed planted now may rot). If you really have the planting bug, go for lots of trees and shrubs instead of flowers and veg.
Frost-free areas: Go wild with any flowers you fancy! Plant seeds or seedlings of Asian veg, beans, beetroot, broccoli, cabbage, capsicum, carrot, cucumber, eggplant, garlic, parsnip, potatoes, radish, rocket, rosella, spring onion, sweet corn, sweet potato and tomato. Plant pumpkin, melons and zucchini if they have time to mature before the humid weather arrives.
What to do
. Mooch around garden centres sniffing at camellias (sweet scented ones do exist) or choosing the most wickedly pink and ruffled.
. Plant spring onions. The clumps just keep growing. Pick a few when you need onions for a salad or soup
. Water! Indoor heaters dry out pots and cold winds and frosts dry out plants far more than most people realise.
. Buy pots of bloomers like pansies or cyclamen for bright flowers for the next three months.
. Plan for summer shade: a shade sail for a quick fix, a few deciduous trees for decades of coolness.
. Look for Open Gardens in your area to see how inspiring mid-winter gardens can be!
Winter Apples
Saying ‘I like apples’ is a bit like saying the Titanic had a bit of a problem on her maiden voyage. I LOVE apples – and winter is the most stunning time for eating them.
We grow about 120 different sorts of apples here, which Bryan says is just a bit much now there are just the two of us at home. But for me an apple tree is one of the backbones of the garden. It’s fast growing, drought resistant, has glorious spring blossom and yellow autumn leaves, not to mention fruit to crunch eleven months of the year…
In fact there is only one problem with growing apples – those little wriggly grubs in the middle from fruit fly or codlin moth.
Which is why winter apples are so wonderful. In climates like ours that have frosty winters fruit fly and codlin moth stop flying about the beginning of April (you can buy fruit fly traps that will tell you if there are any around). This means our late-maturing apples are still too hard for them to infect.
This won’t work in all climates, of course, especially sub-tropical ones where you can really only grow the warm climate apples anyway. But if you get enough winter chilling to grow say, a good Cox’s Orange Pippin, the chances are that your late apples will be pest free – especially as by then the tomatoes and stone fruit where the fruit fly may be breeding will have long been picked.
Winter apples have one other stunning advantage too. They are overwhelming more luscious than the early ones. Basically the longer a fruit take to mature, the richer its flavour is. And most winter apples store well too – we still have apples wrapped in newspaper in our larder when the earliest apples, the Irish Peach, are ready to pick in December.
Which apples?
Note: Ripening times are for our climate – very cold areas may be a month later, or a month earlier in more temperate areas. Most apples need another variety to set fruit (a few are ‘self fertile’ and will fruit by themselves). Jonathon suits most apples, but it’s best to ask where you buy your trees for their suggested cross pollinators.
Granny Smith
This is Australia’s most famous apple, bright green skin with very white flesh grown from a seedling that popped up in an orchard gully near Sydney in about 1870 and now one of the great apples of the world. Many apples taste a bit mealy if they are grown in hot summers, but Granny Smith stays crisp and stunning even in the hottest drought. It ripens here about April – not really late enough to miss the pests.
Granny Smith is what’s known as dual purpose apple – you can munch it fresh, but it is also good cooked. (Some ‘fresh eating’ apples like Gravenstein turn into apple glug when they’re cooked.)
How to locate: Any good nursery will sell you a Granny Smith, or a dwarf Granny too.
French Crab (no relation to crab apples… or me, either)
French Crab is probably one of Granny Smith’s parents. Our tree is about 12 years old now and it’s fruited well even in the hottest driest weather. The green-skinned apples are a bit smaller than Granny Smith and they mature much later – in fact if the birds don’t get them you can still be picking them in late August. They’re okay eaten fresh – good cookers, but the flesh is a bit coarser and not quite as sweet and lush as Granny Smith. And I now feel guilty running the poor thing down… a good French Crab is still roughly 10,0000 times better than any apple you’ll buy in the supermarket.
Bess Pool
Bess is one of the latest ‘dessert apples’, maturing about May here, good to eat fresh. Very crisp, dry flesh, absolutely delicious. She flowers late too so she’s great in frosty areas.
Where to locate: See specialist nurseries below.
Sturmer Pippin
Large yellow green apple best eaten after it’s been stored for at least a month or two. It turns even more yellow and bit wrinkled and looks most unattractive… till you bite into it! Ripens here in June/July but hangs on the tree till August.
Lady Williams
An Aussie-bred, very late, hard apple, with rich red skin, also at its best after a month or two’s storage. It’s my favourite salad apple, thinly sliced in dressing, and great cooked. Ripens here late June/July, but we’re still eating them in December.
Where to locate: From any good nursery.
Pink Lady
Daughter of Lady William and Golden Delicious, a crisp, large, pink-skinned, sweet eating apple, not nearly as hard textured as Lady Williams. Ripens May/June. Pollinated by Granny Smith.
Where to locate: From any good nursery.
Democrat
Very hard, rich, red-skinned fruit, like Granny Smith a seedling found on a Tasmanian farm. Great in tarts but a bit hard to eat fresh if you value your teeth. Stores even at home for a year or more.
Where to locate: Some nurseries, or specialist suppliers.
There are many nurseries that sell old varieties now, but I can personally recommend this one. Happy crunching!
Bob Magnus, PO Woodbridge 7162 Tasmanina 03 62674430
A Few Pumpkin Recipes
Pumpkins are at their best now – rich orange, sweet and full of flavour, and also very, very cheap – or free of course, if you grow your own.
I love them plain baked in the oven, or blended with ground almonds and mascarpone cheese, chilli and a dash of cumin. But these are good too.
Good Pumpkin Scones
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup mashed pumpkin – as orange and sweet as you can get it
1 well-beaten egg
Half a cup of milk
2 cups self-raising flour.
Mix the orange zest with the flour, work the butter and honey in with your fingers. Add the milk and egg and pumpkin – work as little as you can at this stage. Now cut into thin rounds – about as thick as the width of your thumb. Brush with milk or beaten egg, bake in a hot oven for 10-15 minutes.
These scones should be eaten fresh. If there are any left-over, toast them for breakfast (toasted breakfast scones were a feature of staying with my Grandmother) or cut them into slices and bake in the oven till crisp and crush for very superior 'breadcrumbs'.
Pumpkin Curry
Pumpkin is both sweet and meat in a curry – and good.
Ingredients:
1 teaspoonful: cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, chilli to taste (I use two chopped red chillies for a medium hot curry)
2 cups peeled chopped tomatoes or 1 can tomatoes
2 cups chopped pumpkin – choose a firm, finely grained one (like Queensland Blue or its rellies – definitely not Jap)
2 onions, chopped
12 cloves garlic, chopped
3 tablespoons olive oil
Cook the onions and garlic slowly in the oil till soft, add the spices and stir well for a few minutes. Don't let them burn. Add the other ingredients and simmer till the pumpkin is cooked.
For the best flavour leave the curry in the fridge overnight and reheat the next day.
Baked pumpkin
This is of course exquisite with roast lamb or beef –the top is caramelised and the bottom absorbs some of the meat juices but it's also good fried both sides till brown in a teflon frypan (no fat, few calories) then baked till tender.
In the absence of a lump of roast meat I often cut up the pumpkin, sprinkle with sea salt and chilli powder and crush several garlic cloves over them. Sprinkle the bowl with olive oil and then spread out in a baking pan and roast until caramelised to your taste. Delicious as is and great as an accompaniment to a curry.
Pumpkin 'Ovens'
In colonial days a stew was often put in a hollowed-out pumpkin if you lacked a pot then put beside the fire to cook slowly or buried in hot ashes. You can also use this method in the oven. The pumpkin 'reseals' itself and the effect is a bit like a pressure cooker, or a very well sealed casserole. The result is extremely good, as none of the flavours can escape.
Cut the top off your pumpkin – large for a family, small for individual serves. Fill with your favourite casserole – or even stock for a good soup. Replace the lid exactly as it was before; cook SLOWLY and eat hot.
Pumpkin Soup
Mash two cups of cooked pumpkin into four cups chicken stock, or vegetable stock enriched with tomato purée. I like to add an onion and six cloves of garlic sautéed in a little butter too.
Blend the whole lot. Add cream if you feel like it and perhaps a sprinkle of nutmeg, cinnamon, parsley or even finely grated orange zest.
Spiced Pumpkin
Cut pumpkin (or sweet potato – yellow or white) into small cubes. Place in an oiled baking tray. Sprinkle on the mixture. About 1 tsp does 3 or so cups of veg.
Bake at 200ºC for about three quarters of an hour or till veg are light brown and the kitchen smells almost unbearably delicious. Stir a few times while cooking. Eat hot.
Spice Mix:
2 tsps coriander seed – powdered/ground or whole
2 tspz cumin – powdered/ground
Half tsp fenugreek – powdered/ground
3 tsps turmeric – powdered/ground
Half tsp cardamon – whole seed
1 tsp dried garlic
1 tsp mustard seed
1 dried small red chilli, crumbled to bits
Blend roughly – not too fine – or just press with the back of a dessertspoon till they crumble a bit. Store in a sealed jar. Don't use for 48 hours so the flavours can blend.
Basic Pumpkin Fruit Cake Mix
1 cup mashed pumpkin
125 gm butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
500 gms sultanas, or mixed fruit (I prefer just sultanas)
2 cups self-raising flour
Line a large tin with two layers of baking paper.
Cream butter and sugar; add eggs one by one; then pumpkin, vanilla, fruit, then the flour.
The mixture should be quite moist, but if it seems too dry (which it may be if the pumpkin is dryish) then add a little milk or water.
Pour the mix into the tin; bake at 200ºC for one hour or till it's brown on top and a skewer comes out clean.
This cake is rich, moist and very, very good.
Pumpkin Rock Cakes
Place spoonfuls of the above mix on a greased baking tray. Scatter on castor sugar thickly so they get a crunchy glaze. Bake for 10-15 minutes. Half a cup of mixed peel or 2 tbsps of grated lemon or orange zest are good additions.
Pumpkin Muffins
Bake the mix above in patty cases, or a muffin tray. Again, a little orange or lemon zest are good additions, or a tablespoon full of marmalade
Pumpkin and Turmeric Risotto
Half cup Basmati rice
3 teaspoons turmeric
1 Spanish/red onion, very finely chopped
1 cup pumpkin, peeled and cubed (tiny cubes)
5 tbsps ghee or margarine
juice of half a lemon
2 cups chicken stock or water
Salt if necessary; black pepper
Melt butter in pan on VERY low heat; add onion and rice; stir till onion is soft (add more ghee/margarine if necessary); add turmeric and stir for another three minutes. Add other ingredients and simmer till rice is soft; add more stock/water if necessary. Add salt (if desperately needed only) and pepper when you take off the heat.
This is excellent.
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