Introduction | Mine News |
2012 National Literacy Ambassador
Books for Vitcims of Floods and other Natural Disasters
Latest Awards | Latest Books
The May Garden
A Few Cold Weather Recipes: Winter Fruit Salad, Cherry Scones, Spiced Popcorn, Spiced Baked Pumpkin, warm Honey Sauce, Apple Pancakes from ‘Pennies for the Enemy’
Introduction
The wombats said it’d be an early winter.
Usually when there’s good grass around the wombats pick and choose: a munch here, a few mouthfuls there, and then back to their burrows. When humans have spare time we crate great artworks or sing karaoke. When wombats have spare time they sleep.
But about a month ago the wombats started to hoover up the grass as fast as they could. It was a dedicated type of eating, efficiently munching everything in reach before moving on.
Mothball has been bashing the front door most summer nights till we give her some wombat tucker, but till recently she only ate a mouth full or two before wandering off. A fortnight ago though she began to eat it all.
Then Bruiser turned up, not demanding food but just sitting staring at my study window in a dejected hopeful way and giving little baby wombat type ‘huffs’.
Long White turned up. Short Black arrived. Totally Confused has been lurking in the salvias, and so had Bounce. The whole wombat tribe, in fact, has been munching on the fertilised grass near the house, and hoping that food will appear I the wombat bowls. And every one of them is fat and fuzzy, as though sometimes a few months ago their bodies began to grow the winter coats that wombats in the valley usually don’t need.
So far the frost has just nipped the tussock tops. The days are all blue skies and red and gold trees, with frog croaks and thick gum leaves all around us. We haven’t even had our ‘average’ rainfall- average doesn’t mean much anymore- but there’s been enough rain for the world to become lush. Even the leeches have returned to the gorge.
The trees say it’s autumn, but my cold toes say winter is here already. The wood stove is lit in the kitchen, the soup bubbling very lunch time- pumpkin, at the moment, from a gorgeous monster a friend gave us. It was too cloudy down here in the valley for pumpkins this year. I’ve swapped summer flip flops for ugh boots, my old brown pair and a flashy long purple pair I saw at Muttons in town, and couldn’t resit. You can buy anything at Muttons, from a spot watch to a whoopee cushion or cotton nightie, if you rummage long enough.
The cold weather is fun now, all long cooked stews and hot scones. I’ll feel differently when the August gales are howling down the valley, but this year I’m cheating, and have accepted invitations to speak at nice warm places this winter, as well as Melbourne and north Tasmania, which may be cold but have central heating.
I won’t even have to take my ugg boots.
Mine News
The proposed Dargues Reef mine will take 230 megalitres of water from our creek and sit tailings dams with heavy metals lead, zinc, manganese as well as chemical residue 4 km above us and the endangered species of the gorge- as well as the species that aren’t legally endangered, like Mothball wombat, the wallaby clans and all the others of our extended family.
We hoped that the Federal Government would at least investigate the threat to the many endangered species here. Instead, they have said that all submissions are to be summarised and evaluated by the mining company- a company that has claimed that the mine will be good for sea eagles, as the dams will tempt them to come inland. I’m not sure how heading for polluted tailings dams helps sea eagles, but they claim it will.
They also claim that quolls don’t need surface water i.e. don’t drink. Do quolls sit with their mouth open, waiting for rain? They claim that eucalypts don’t access ground water. They claim...well, many things that are so bizarre that it is impossible to believe the department have handed responsibility for this extraordinary area to them
But they have.
We’re trying to appeal. We will keep appealing, and taking whatever legal avenues we can. This valley has given me the things I hold most dear, from my books to my family to the years of joy studying it, watching it, following the wombats, tracking quolls or snake tracks, watching the echidnas’ mating walk or feeling the fish nibble at my legs in the creek.
But when those who are supposed to protect the land fail to do so, it’s hard.
Online petition
Could you spare a few second to go to this link and sign the petition? And to pass it on to others to sign too?
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/rejectdarguesreefgoldleadmine
2011 National Literacy Ambassador
I have just been made this year’s National Literacy Ambassador, which means that things are gearing up for the National Literacy website and activities nation-wide in National Literacy Week, 29 August to 4 September.
Books for those affected by Floods and other Natural Disasters
The best way to help those you don’t know who have suffered from disaster is usually to give money, and I do that too. But if you, or anyone or school you know, has lost books in a natural disaster, like flood, fire, earthquake or just the hard hand that fate can send, or if I can help in any way by giving books directly, or to an appeal or fund raiser, contact me either as a reply to this email, or write to me at PO Box 63 Braidwood, 2622. It may take a few weeks, as there I always more mail than I can quite handle
This has been a hard 12 months for so many people. I’ll send what I can.
2011 Awards
A Waltz for Matilda, Oracle and Queen Victoria’s Underpants (created with Bruce Whatley) have all been made Notable books 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. 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 six 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
May 18 and 19, 2011: Talks at Queensland schools. Contact Helen Bain, helen@speakers-ink.com.au
June 28: Talks at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
July 20 and 21, 2011: Cairns Writer’s Festival.
July 18 and 19, 2011: Talks at Brisbane schools. Contact Helen Bain, helen@speakers-ink.com.au
August 23, 24, 25: talks in Melbourne. Contact simon@bookedout.com.au for bookings or details.
National Literacy week, 29 August to 4 September: talks and activities Australia wide for National Literacy Week as the 2012 National Literacy Ambassador.
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 and 16: Talks in the Victory Garden, Floriade, Canberra.
October 24-31, 2011: Talks and workshops Fremantle, Perth and Albany, WA. Contact the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre for details and bookings. Most of the time is already committed, but a couple of evenings and some weekend time are still free.
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 2012 Gladstone, Q’land.
August 22, 23 (Book Week): Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain.
The May Garden
May in our climate is a time for glorying in what you’ve already got growing, sitting in the suddenly soft sunlight and just enjoying it all.
There are some things that can be planted, of course, and lots to pick too. But the urgency has gone from the garden and orchard. It’s a golden time, limes ripening, avocadoes getting fat, pumpkins stored away for winter- not that we grew any this year, but friends have given us some.
What to Plant in May
Cold Climates (i.e. if you are in ugg boots or a jumper when you read this).
Plant broad beans, long-keeping onions like pukahoe, and peas.
Don’t be tempted by blue sky. Even if the soil still feels warm, any soft new growth may be frosted off. Stick to broad beans and other hardy plants that will mature in spring.
Frost-free climates
Just about anything can be grown now. Put in lots of mixed salad leaves, apple cucumbers, basil, butter beans, huge New guinea beans, coloured capsicum, Chinese cabbage, chillies, chokos, sweet potatoes, long oval eggplant, melons, okra, rosellas, pumpkin, shallots, sweet corn, tomatoes. Try above ground beds for parsley- the roots may rot in hot damp soil. In warm areas, evergreen fruit trees can be planted now – they won’t be burnt by harsh summer sun. In cool and temperate areas, deciduous fruit trees can be planted from now until the beginning of spring.
Cool to Temperate:
Don't be tempted by blue sky and warm breezes. If you live in a very frosty area stick to onion seedlings and broad beans and lots of seedlings of broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. In temperate areas: seeds of radish, onions, winter lettuce, silver beet, 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, onions, spinach.
Harvests:
Let perennial beans dry on the vine; pick them for dried bean soup an stews during winter; potatoes, year-rounders like celery, beetroot and silver beet. Strip corn stalks for ‘baby corn’. Root vegetables are good now – much sweeter after the first frost. You should have a glut of chokos. Dig up sweet potatoes now in cool areas; in frost-free areas, dig them when you want them. Potatoes should have been harvested by now – and another crop put in if you can grow them in places with little frost where they won’t rot. Pick rose hips for winter teas and syrup.
Fruit
Early mandarins, limes, pomegranates, late apples, late Valencias or early navel oranges, tangelos, citrons, kumquats, tamarillos, early kiwi fruit, late passionfruit high up on the vine, late raspberries, late strawberries if grown on a high garden away from early frost, olives, persimmons if the birds haven’t finished them, feijoa, bananas, avocados, custard apple, lychees, macadamias, banana passionfruit and other passionfruit high on the vine, elderberries, medlars, olives, melons, and guavas, carob, fig, pomegranate, Brazilian cherry, guava, Jackfruit, calamondins, lillypilly, Kerri berry, olives, stored walnuts, chestnuts and other nuts.
Other jobs
Make use of a slow garden and warm weather to revamp the chook house for next spring’s chickens; build a mobile hen run to keep down the grass; build more compost heaps; make potpourri and dry herbal teas with the last of the rose petals and scented leaves before they are frosted.
Pests
This is a month of prevention. Prune off dead twigs, mummies, band apple trees with grease, corrugated cardboard or old wool to help control codling moth and oriental peach moth, and clean up old ladders and fruit boxes where moths may shelter. Let hens scavenge round the orchard to pick up old fruit or insects on the ground.
A Few Cold Weather Recipes
Winter Fruit Salad
Half a cup dried peaches
Half a cup dried apricots
Half-cup water
Half-cup apple juice or strained (pulp free) orange juice
3-tb rum (optional)
3 whole cloves (optional)
One strip orange peel (no white pith)
1 orange, peeled and sliced
1 banana, peeled and sliced
Place everything except the orange and banana in a saucepan. Simmer till the fruit is soft. Most of the alcohol will evaporate during this simmering, leaving the flavour behind. Add more water if it seems to be too dry. Stir only to stop it sticking- it shouldn't need much.
When the fruit is soft you can either leave it in the fridge in a sealed container for a day or two before going any further, or do the final stages now: add the orange and banana, simmer for half a minute. Take off the heat and eat hot, plain or with cream, icecream or natural yoghurt. Great cold with yoghurt for breakfast the next morning.
Cherry Scones
1 can cherries, or 1 cup stewed cherries, with stones removed
2 cups self raising flour
2 dessertspoons butter or margarine
Half cup cherry juice
Half cup cream or sour cream
Turn the oven onto hot (275C) NOW.
Rub the butter into the flour; add other ingredients and roll the dough out on a board sprinkled with flour till it's smooth. Cut into rounds with an upturned glass or slice into squares with a knife. (Somehow squares turn roundish as they cook). Place scones in a greased pan, just touching. Brush them with a little milk- if you don't have a pastry brush the tips of your fingers will do.
Now place the pan on a baking tray, so the bottoms don't get too hard before the tops are brown; bake 15 minutes.
Take them out of the oven, and cover AT ONCE with a clean tea towel. Leave for ten minutes. This will give them that lovely soft scone like texture.
Eat hot with butter or jam and cream, or toast them for breakfast or reheat in the microwave (Though they won't be as good re heated)
Spiced Popcorn
Half cup popping corn (from supermarket)
4-tb olive or other oil
4-tb butter or margarine (or more oil can be substituted- I prefer to use oil)
1tsp turmeric
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
Half tsp ground chilli OR a good grind of black pepper if you don't like fiery popcorn
Salt- optional
Take a thick-bottomed pan with a lid. Heat for 30 seconds. Add the oil, wait 10 seconds, then add the popcorn, stir well so it's all covered in oil then put the lid on. Turn the heat down about half way. Keep shaking the pot till it's all popped- will take about three minutes. Take off the heat but leave the lid on.
Place butter or oil in another pan with the garlic and spices, but not the pepper. Heat for about three minutes, stirring all the time. Toss through the hot popcorn. Add pepper now if you are using it instead of chilli- adding the pepper too early can make it taste a bit bitter.
Taste the popcorn and add salt if you like, but you probably won't need to!
Serve with you favourite
Spiced Pumpkin or Root Vegetables
Cut pumpkin and sweet potato (yellow and white) or parsnips or potatoes into smallish cubes. Place in an oiled baking tray. Sprinkle on the spice mixture. About 1 tsp does 3 or so cups of veg.
Bake at 200C 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
Mix:
2 tsp coriander seed- powdered or whole
2 tsp cumin- powdered
Half tsp fenugreek-powdered
3 tsp turmeric- powdered
Half tsp cardamom- 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 desert spoon till they crumble a bit. Store in a sealed jar. Don’t use for 48 hours so the flavours can blend.
Hot Honey Sauce
Good on ice cream, with yoghurt, or to pour over a plain cake to make dessert
1-cup water, half-cup honey, 2 tb butter, 1 tsp orange, lime, mandarin or lemon zest, 1 tb corn flour
Mix cornflour with water. Add other ingredients. Simmer till it's smooth and thick, stirring all the time. Serve hot but cold is good too.
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-tb ghee or margarine
Juice 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; stir for another three minutes; add other ingredients; simmer till rice is soft; add more HOT stock/water if necessary. Add salt (if desperately needed only) and pepper when you take off the heat.
This is excellent.
Apple Pancakes or Pikelets
I’ve included these because I’ve just put the recipe into the novel I’m writing. The book won’t be out for another 15 months but the recipe is too good to wait till then. (In the book apple pancakes the favourite comfort food of a boy in World War 2). At the moment the book is called Pennies for the Enemy, but it may have a different name by the time it comes out.
1 cup grated apple
1 tb lemon juice (optional- sprinkle it on the apple so it doesn't go brown if not using right away)
Half cup SR flour
2-tb castor sugar
1 egg
Half-cup milk
Mix dry ingredients; add apple then milk; stir till smooth. Drop spoonfuls onto a hot greased pan; cook till bubbles appear; turn; cook other side till golden brown. Serve hot with butter, or maple syrup and ice cream, or lemon juice and sugar, or cold with butter and possibly jam. (The World War 2 recipe didn’t contain sugar, as that was rationed, and the egg might be omitted too. The moist apple helped disguise the lack of butter.)
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