Introduction | Wombat News | Books for Kids
Recent Awards | Book News and Pennies for Hitler
Schedule for the next 10 months
The June Garden: Going nutty – the best of nut trees and how to live on them
A Few Recipes:
Eggs and Rice: a not quite paella or risotto
Stir-Fried Veg Soup and Eggs
Orange and Ginger Muffins
Ultimate Comfort Chicken Soup
I was walking up the mountain this morning, peacefully watching my feet on the wet clay, when suddenly I was in the middle of a thousand tiny silvereyes. Every tree was dappled with hopping bird shadows, so it was almost impossible to see what were leaves and what were birds.
Silvereyes graze here most of the year, hopping over the grass eating the seeds, or dragging long strings of bark about twice their length and weight up into the rambling rose bushes to add an extension for their communal nests. The nests get larger every year, then suddenly one year they decide it’s time to move house, and start again in another rose bush, while the old nest slowly decays, or we haul it out when we’re at last able to prune the rose bush, which we can’t do when there’s a silvereye nest in it.
But the birds this morning were coming from the south, flying above Baine’s Gully, resting briefly in the trees along the road, then flying almost due north, along the gorge, up past Major’s Creek …
I don’t know where they go after that. How far north do they fly? How can such tiny birds – smaller even than a baby’s fist – manage to fly so far, and for so long?
Our own silvereyes have joined the migrating horde, but they’ll be back in two and a half months, pecking at any grass seeds the wombats have left, inspecting their old nests, chirping and tweeting.
It’s impossible to describe the noise of a thousand silvereyes. Each bird makes such a tiny sound, but together they produce … not a roar, just, well, lots of sound, from every direction, up and down and all around, so for a few seconds I felt I was part of it too, flying through the winter leaves, above the still pools in the gorge, high above spotted quolls and feral cats, too small and too many for goshawks or eagles to bother carrying off, the sunlight so low that we become part of the shadows too.
Finally I remembered breakfast, which I hadn’t had, and started to walk back. There’ll be more tomorrow, probably, and maybe for a few more days too. I have no idea how may thousands pass this way each year, one of many bird migrations that use the gorge as their combination of highway and bird motel. But every year, it’s magic.
Wombat News
The wombat has returned. I think.
You never know with wombats. Three months ago Mothball marched off into the night. The creek rose and we didn’t see her for a few days … and then it was weeks, and I began to worry. After a month I was plain scared. She’s an old wombat – 17 years old now. Had she tried to cross the flooded creek and been swept away? She’s trudged through floods before – the only sign a large wombat dropping left triumphantly on top of a rock in the middle of frothing swirling water – but she was younger then.
Or was she just happy among the lush grass across the creek and couldn’t be bothered tramping over here?
And then on Friday morning there was the wombat dish bashed up again; great scratches dug into the dirt and a pile of droppings strategically placed around my study walls.
Was it Mothball? Or another wombat, who has somehow smelled the message, ‘Wombats fed carrots here. Bash up the doormat and they’ll get the message.’
For a second I did wonder if it was Mothball’s ghost. But ghosts don’t leave extremely large green brown droppings.
The creek flooded again yesterday from the wild storm that swept up most of the east coast. The creek is white froth and – I hope – even Mothball won’t try to come through it. But when the wombat bashes the door again, we’ll be waiting.
Books for Floods
Floods wash away so much that is loved. If you know a school, or a child, who has lost books in the recent floods, and think that a few books might help, please let me know at jackiefrench72@gmail.com and I’ll do what I can. Gifts can’t replace what’s lost, but they can sometimes help by letting people know that our thoughts and hearts are with them.
PS Please don’t use this email address for questions for school projects. I can’t answer them all, or not before the project is due, as emails can come not just from Australia but from where my books are studied overseas too.
Recent Awards and Short-listings
It’s been a magic year for short-listings – Nanberry: Black Brother White and Flood (with Bruce Whatley) have been shortlisted for the 2012 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year awards. Flood is in the picture book section, and Nanberry in the Younger Readers. Both Nanberry and Flood are Notables, too. Flood has also just been awarded an International White Raven Award. Bruce’s The Littlest Refugee was also shortlisted.
Christmas Wombat (with the glorious Bruce of course) was also short-listed in the Australian Book Industry Awards.
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 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, will be out on August 1st. 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.
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 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 about the CBC 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
This is what the calendar has so far, but there are already many more trips pencilled in, as well as other commitments. There are always last minute things I have to do too. It’s unlikely I can add in more school, library or community talks in 2012, unless they are near to somewhere I’ll be already. I’m also ACT Library Ambassador for the 2012 Year of Reading.
June 13 and 14: Adelaide Writer’s Festival, S.A. and other talks at schools in the next couple of days.
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 for bookings.
August 25-30: Melbourne Literary Festival, including two family days on the 25th and 26th, and talks to two Melbourne schools.
31 August-1 October: 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.
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. Bookings and details are from the Open Garden Scheme though, not us.
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.
The June Garden
I’m writing this after 120 km/h winds which miraculously passed over the ridges above us, leaving the last of the autumn leaves still on the trees and the tree dahlias still tall and blooming. (A slight breeze will topple a flower-laden tree dahlia.)
This is the month to gaze at garden catalogues, plant fruit trees, plan gardens, chook sheds, poly-pipe greenhouses for early spring, frost-protected plantings and make sure you wear a neck warmer when you go out. (A neck warmer is a round of knitting that fits snugly over your neck, doing the job of a scarf but not dangling and/or likely to get tangled in the lawn mower or other machinery.)
This is also the season to go nutty. In a world where six tonnes of topsoil can be lost to produce one tonne of wheat, where animals sweat in terror at abattoirs and asparagus flies from Peru to Sydney, growing your own protein makes sense. And if that protein comes from a nut tree in your back yard – well, going a bit nuts can be fun, productive and create shade in long hot summers.
Once established, nut trees are drought tolerant. Most are very long lived, as ‘very long lived’ translates to ‘grow huge roots that burrow deep into the earth and survive harsh climates.’
Some of my favourite childhood memories are picking backyard macadamias and bashing them open with a brick on the paving in our backyard. The paving was never the same again, but the macadamias were wonderful. If you’ve never eaten a truly fresh nut, straight from the tree, you’re in for a treat.
There is a nut tree suitable for any garden and any climate. Just choose exactly how nutty you’d like to be.
Which nuts to choose:
Almonds
I eat fresh, unsalted ‘raw’ almonds every morning in my home-made muesli and can’t think of any other protein that could start my day so well. Almond trees need full sun and a temperate climate: they don’t like the tropics or late heavy frosts. You’ll get a few almonds a year after planting a grafted tree, and at least a bucketful after three to five years. Stick to self-pollinating almonds – cross pollinators may not bloom together.
Bunya nuts
The Bunya pine is a truly magnificent, tall, wide, native tree, extremely imposing – and not suited to small gardens. It grows slowly, fruiting only after ten to twenty years, and may not fruit every year. It can be grown wherever you can grow a lemon tree.
The Bunya pine produces enormous pinecones, weighing up to twelve kilograms, with the nuts, up to thumb size, contained in the cone. You’ll need a hammer to husk them and probably gloves too, as the cones are sticky inside.
Cashews
These are a tropical tree, but have been known to grow as far south as the south coast of New South Wales, with care, in a very sheltered frost-free spot. They need plenty of sun and deep, rich, well-drained soil with lots of moisture.
The cashew nuts themselves will be produced covered in a fleshy ‘apple’. The apple is also edible, but its tastiness varies from tree to tree. Never try to crack unprocessed cashew nuts: the shells contain a bitter, caustic sap. Make sure you know exactly how to process them, as otherwise they can be extremely dangerous, and never touch your face or eyes while processing cashews. On the other hand, cashews are one of the great luxury nuts.
Chestnuts
Chestnuts prefer a cold to temperate climate, deep soil and lots of room – though you can prune them heavily to keep them small or hedge shaped. Grafted trees fruit in about five years if well fed and watered, or ten years if neglected. After about a decade of good treatment, a chestnut will give you several boxes of nuts – delicious boiled or roasted.
Hazelnuts
These can reach seven metres if grown by themselves – they are much smaller when planted thickly for a hedge. Hazelnuts will tolerate cold to temperate climates. Seedlings can take many years to flower: grafted trees produce better results. Two varieties are needed for pollination.
Macadamias
We grow hard-shelled or Macadamia tetraphylla here (southern NSW), with up to five degrees frost. The shells are too hard for white cockatoos to bother with – we use a nutcracker these days, rather than an old brick, to crack the hard shell open.
Macadamias tolerate cold conditions as long as they are surrounded by other trees – like ours are – to protect them from cold winds. Macadamias grow slowly from seed, or you can buy a grafted one. They prefer moist, fertile soil.
Pecans
A fresh pecan is delicious, without the slight bitter flavour of older nuts. These are enormous trees, but if you prune off the lower branches, you will have room for other plants below, or you can prune them to a lower hedge shape. Knock off the ripe nuts with a long stick. Pecans need deep, fertile, moist soil. Don’t grow them too near the house, in case the roots grow under the foundations.
Pistachios
For some reason few backyards grow pistachios, which is a pity – they are both easy to grow and very beautiful, with gold autumn leaves and bright pink ‘fruit cases’ when the nuts begin to form. Pistachio trees tolerate drought, frost and poor soil, although they grow better if they are watered and well mulched, although they hate humidity. Pistachios thrive wherever olives can grow. In good conditions the trees grow up to ten metres tall. You need at least one male to every six female pistachio trees.
Walnuts
Fresh walnuts are far milder than the ones you buy in packets. I love to grind them to make walnut ‘flour’ – good with any other nut, too – and use them as a substitute for flour in cakes and biscuits. Usually about a third of the flour can be exchanged for ‘nut flour’ and the result will be richer and more delicious. Walnuts need deep, fertile soil and a cold to warm temperate climate. They can grow to be enormous and aren’t really suitable for backyards, but they tolerate heavy pruning, so they would make great trees along a footpath. As well as the more common English walnuts, try black American walnuts too – they’re nor quite as meaty and have a different flavour. Again – don’t grow walnuts too near the house, as the roots can be as enormous as the trees.
Green Walnut Pesto
This is good, rich and oily, a good winter topping for pasta when the basil is just a happy memory and you've forgotten to buy pine nuts or the budget won't run to them. It's also good as a filling between lasagne sheets, with cheese sauce on top.
It's also lovely with boiled potatoes (Bryan being one of those inveterate Irishmen who will eat spuds 364 days of the year and mourn them on the 365th – when I make a pasta sauce round here part goes on my spag and the rest on his potatoes).
Blend:
1 large bunch chopped mixed greens
1 cup walnuts
6 cloves garlic
1 cup Parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons olive oil
This can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge, covered with a layer of olive oil. Unlike the traditional pesto that is made with pine nuts and basil, walnut pesto can't be frozen – the walnuts turn soggy.
A Few Other Recipes
Eggs and Rice: a not quite paella or risotto
(one of my favourites)
Ingredients:
4 tbsps olive oil or ghee
1 cup Basmati or other long grain rice, or brown rice
4 cups chicken stock or miso stock
half a cup parsley, chopped
6 tomatoes, peeled by covering with boiling water, then seeded then chopped
1 red onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 eggs
Method
Put a pan on low. Add oil or ghee. Sauté the onion and garlic till the onion is soft. Add the rice. Stir well on the low heat till the rice is well-coated and slightly transparent – about three minutes. Turn the heat onto high. Add a little stock at once, then the rest gradually, a bit at a time, so it never stops boiling. When all the stock is added, put in the tomatoes and parsley. When the liquid is nearly absorbed break the eggs onto the top of the rice. They will poach on top, with the whites firm in about two minutes. I prefer to eat mine with the yolks still liquid and the whites set, taking the pan off AS SOON as the whites are almost firm, as the eggs will keep cooking for several minutes in the heat of the rice.
Eat at once.
Stir Fried Veg Soup and Eggs
This is one of my favourite breakfasts. It can be as liquid as you like, a thin soup with eggs and veg or a slightly liquid mix of veg and poached egg. It can be as spicy as you like, too. On cold days the chilli and ginger is a great addition.
Ingredients
1 Chinese cabbage, wok bok etc. or
1 bunch English spinach, shredded
1 carrot or one seeded capsicum, grated
1-2 cups miso broth (made from water and a packet of miso concentrate. Miso is made from fermented soy beans or wheat).
Optional: ½ tsp grated ginger and/or 2 chopped cloves of garlic and/or 1-2 chopped and seeded red chillies
3 tbsps extra virgin olive oil
2 very fresh eggs- the whites of stale eggs will turn into shreds, but fresh eggs stay tidy when they are poached
Method
Place the oil in a frying pan. Heat till the air above it shimmers. Add the veg and seasoning; fry quickly till the greens turn dark; add the liquid. As soon as it boils add the eggs. Don’t stir now – leave till the eggs set, either three minutes for firm whites and soft yolks, or five minutes for firm yolks too. Serve and eat at once, as the eggs will keep cooking in the hot liquid.
Orange and Ginger Muffins
Ingredients
200 gm butter or marg
¼ cup milk
1 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp orange rind
1 tbsp powdered ginger
3 eggs
2 cups self-raising flour
½ cup almond meal
½ cup orange juice
orange syrup (see below)
Method
Beat butter, sugar, ginger and orange rind; add eggs one by one; add flour, milk, orange juice and almonds. Mix gently.
Bake in greased muffin pan or paper cases for about 35 minutes at 200º C till light brown on top. Remove from pan. Pour hot syrup over the hot muffins.
Syrup
1 cup caster sugar
2/3 cup orange juice
1/3 cup water
Combine all the syrup ingredients in a pan; simmer and stir till sugar dissolves.
Ultimate Comfort Chicken Soup
Take a very large pot and add:
1 kg chicken wings, chicken carcasses or one elderly chook
6 carrots, chopped
6 leeks, white part only, well chopped
1 bunch celery, well washed (leave on the leaves) and chopped
6 red onions, chopped
10 cloves garlic, chopped
1 bunch parsley
1 fresh chilli
¼ cup barley
Cover with water
Simmer 1 hour.
Remove the chook when cool and chop up the meat. Keep soup in the fridge for up to a week, or freeze for up to three months. You can omit the barley and add your favourite noodles when reheating.
You can also strain off the vegetable and chicken rich liquid; throw the old veg and meat to the chooks, and add freshly sautéed veg (your choice: chopped leeks, skinned tomatoes, chopped carrots or fresh chopped mushrooms with chopped parsley or coriander) just before serving. This gives you a rich stock plus the taste of fresh veg – more work but a far more delicious result. But the ‘all simmered together’ soup is wonderfully comforting too (if less haute cuisine).
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