Launching Literacy and Numeracy Week as Federal Literacy Ambassador |
Letter of the Month | The Mine: Governments Abandon Our Endangered Species
Latest Awards
New Books…Christmas Wombat is almost here! (and magic reviews for Nanberry)
Schedule for the year ahead
The September Garden
A Few Recipes…including an especially delicious just invented new biscuit (‘cookie’ if you’re reading this in the USA)
I’ve meant to write this for two days but have been playing hooky in the garden, planting the tomatoes a month earlier than I ever have before, picking the first asparagus spears, watching the rhubarb leaves emerge from the soil and, yes! – the cassava bushes have survived winter and are growing about 10 cms a day and once again the banana grove has survived -9º C frosts, battered but sending out new leaves. No bananas this year, but then our bananas are poor confused beasties and fruit when it feels like it instead of when well behaved northern bananas are fruiting.
Every bird seems to twittering from yet another branch laden with blossom. The only grumpy beast around is Mothball wombat – I watched her bite a mouth full of fur from Short Black the other day.
Mothball was annoyed that I’d made a vat of lime cordial. Lime cordial making means the house, garden – and Mothball’s hole – smells of limes too. Mothball’s sense of smell is about 100,000 times better than mine (literally). Wombats ‘see’ the world by smelling. I suppose it was like someone had painted out my world in lime green fog. But it wasn’t Short Black’s fault.
Actually Mothball did try to bite me too – she’s not stupid. She guessed whose fault it was. As I’m not stupid either – or not where wombats are concerned – I wear thick jeans when I’m near her, so she only got a mouthful of cloth. She also attacked a bag of limes Sue was taking home, but we managed to save both Sue and the limes.
Why do I love a creature who tries to bite me? Who blames me when she’s cold in winter, hot in summer, the grass is dry in a drought or she gets her paws wet and has to move holes in a flood?
She’s not cute like a kitten. She’s not cuddly either. (Some wombats are very cuddly.) Frankly, she smells. It’s not a bad smell – a bit like composting grass and doormat – but it’s not one you’d care to dab behind your ears. (Unless you’re a wombat).
Maybe I love her because biting is what wombats do. Their skin is tougher than ours, and their pain threshold higher, too. A nip from Mothball is the same as a grumpy mutter from a human friend.
But mostly… okay, I don’t know. There’s just some deep abiding sense that it’s been a privilege to share these last 16 years with her and I hope we’ll share many more. She’s taught me to see the world just a little bit differently – and also to be very, very quick with the wombat food when I hear the bump at the front door.
Launching Literacy and Numeracy Week as Federal Literacy Ambassador
On Monday, 29 August, we – Education Minister, Peter Garret, Numeracy Ambassador, Simon Pampena, and myself as 2011 Federal Literacy Ambassador – launched Literacy and Numeracy Week at Arawang Primary School in Canberra.
Education Minister Garret was… tall. It takes about three seconds for someone of my height standing next to him, to manage to look all the way up and see his face, and discover that he is a very, very nice person with a genuine passion for kids and literacy.
Simon was fantastic, funny and has managed over the past months to convince even me that numbers – under a very limited set of circumstances which don’t involve trying to balance my accounts – can be fun. (I already knew they could also lead you to extraordinary places, but even that hadn’t made me want to spend much time with them, a bit like aliens offering to take you on a tour of the universe but who were so dull you weren’t sure you could put up with a few decades of their company.)
But the real stars were the kids of Arawang Primary. They sang us an Indigenous song of welcome, Mozart with modern words and other songs that were so beautiful we were all silent for seconds before we were able to clap.
Arawang Primary has a policy of ‘no auditions’. Everyone can sing – and does – and they are shown how to make their own vocal skills brilliant.
Later they created a story of a zombie turtle in a city of purple marshmallows that smelled of rotting cheese, who longs for friendship and understanding. The halls were hung with their artwork and stories. I started reading some of them, entranced – then looked at the ages and realised that they’d been written by five- and six-year olds. Arawang is a special school in many, many ways.
The next day was the Literacy and Numeracy Conference in Adelaide, where teachers shared specific strategies for making learning richer and more fun. I sat there remembering Miss Bonney, my Year Three teacher, with her cane over our knuckles if we dared to ask a question. Every morning we had to recite a poem that included the lines:
‘I know that the earth exists,
it is none of my business why,
but the fact stands clear,
That I am here
In this world of pleasure and woe… ’
And ‘woe’ it always was with Miss Bonney.
I can’t see a Miss Bonney’s regime lasting in today’s school world. (And, yes, many of my other teachers were inspired and dedicated and I owe the fact that I am sitting here writing this to them.)
Wednesday was the launch of Read Around Australia, with kids around Australia reading either Whoever You Are by Mem Fox or Eric by Shaun Tan at 2 pm.
I arrived at Ocean View College, a co-educational, comprehensive State government school, at about 1 pm, a wonderful school with one of the best school views in the world: green grass ending in blue sea and sky. The new auditorium is full of kids from Kinder to Year 9 as well as kids in wheelchairs from the school next door (they hope to be all one school, soon).
At 30 seconds to two we began the countdown. They yelled out three… two… one… zero, and I began reading Shaun Tan’s Eric, with the text and illustrations illuminated behind me.
Eric is possibly the smallest, and the most enormous, book I know. The pages are tiny, there are few words but every time you read it more memories and realisations about the world – and yourself – are evoked.
I had thought it was a story for older kids. But even the four-year olds at my feet stared in quiet wonder that became joyous shrieks when they saw what the exchange student had left their host family, crouching on all fours because it was too much to sit straight and marvel too. The kids from next door bashed their wheelchairs and banged to show what they were feeling too.
I have never seen so many kids so profoundly moved.
I already knew the book was special; had seen my husband (a man who never reads a book unless it has diagrams in it entranced for two days by The Lost Thing), I’ve been reading to kids since I was five years old – but I’ve never seen so many kids faces with so much awe and delight.
And then I came home and went to bed with the ‘flu, which is why I’m writing this a week after it happened, not the next day.
I’m bushed. Being Literacy Ambassador on top of all the other invitations I’d accepted for Book ‘Week’ – which goes on for at least two months and so it should – has meant that days have gone by where I realised I haven’t sat down for a proper meal but lived on bread and honey or whatever I can grab at the airport. There’s more to come, too.
But I will never forget the privilege of being at Arawang and Ocean View schools, such totally different schools, bonded by the inspiration and the delight of learning they give their kids. Maybe that’s why the ‘flu vanished after only three days. Not even the ‘flu can stand up to the memory of the kids’ faces last week.
Letter of the Month
Dear Jackie French,
Thank you for visiting us. I think it is okay to be a little bit different. You are like me. I’m different too.
Yours truly,
Molly
Letter from kids passed on by teachers and parents are both a blessing and a curse, a joy to read but they need two or three hours a night to answer them all. So this is a plea: if you are sending on kids’ letters, could you check their signatures to make sure their name is legible? Kids often decide to have fancy signatures, but I can’t write back saying ‘Dear Splodge’.
Could you also make sure the address is legible, especially if you are writing from another country? I live in Australia, so I’m not familiar with US and UK postcodes, or what an abbreviation may stand for and neither is our local post-master. A reply might get to you, but every week I get at least one letter or package sent back saying ‘address unknown’. And if you want to be sure a reply will get to you, an enclosed addressed envelope would be wonderful too.
And please please don’t send emails with attachments or photos or scanned documents. I’ve spent two mornings this week wresting my computer back to normalcy after two different parents tried to send me what I think must be a scanned copy of their child’s project at high definition and my whole system froze. I’d love to have seen both projects- but I’m just one person, with one computer, one internet line, two tired hands and only 24 hours in the day. I wish I could see every project, or talk to every kid who likes my books. But neither I, nor my computer, can manage it.
The Mine: Governments Abandon Endangered Species
The NSW government approved the Dargues Reef mine and processing centre two weeks ago.
The mine is going to be 2km upstream of us, 6 km of tunnels large enough to drive a truck into going down 500 metres, or 130 metres below our valley. We didn’t even know the true extent of the mine until after approval was given.
I could have accepted the decision if I thought that anyone had looked at the income from the mine and compared it to the income from the orchards and other businesses downstream and said :we’ll go with the mine. But they didn’t.
I could have accepted it if anyone had come to look at the many endangered species here, and made an informed decision to say: we’ve looked at them, and know where they are and how they might be vulnerable, so we can work out how they need protecting. But no one did that, either.
Three weeks ago everything in the creek downstream of the mine died, for a five-kilometre stretch. Everything. In 38 years I have never seen the creek dead before.
I reported it to the Federal Department. Let us know if it continues, they said, and we’ll pass it onto the state authorities.
No one came to look.
Both the NSW and Federal Governments have management plans on paper for endangered species. The one for Araluen Zieria includes looking for more outcrops – and there are more outcrops that haven’t been mapped. But neither government has even assessed the endangered species here, except for a brief half-day visit in the 1990s by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, when they proved the presence of the endangered brush-tailed rock wallabies by DNA analysis of the hair found in a rock overhang.
Across Australia other endangered populations of brush-tailed rock wallabies facing specific threats have specific management plans drawn up to minimise the risk to their viability.
The management plan here consisted of, ‘Don’t tell anyone of their presence so you don’t encourage shooters’. So we said nothing, to try to keep them safe. But the wallabies are threatened by loss of their water now, a far more lingering death than death by a bullet.
What use are environmental protection laws if no one looks at the endangered species? It is almost as though they have decided NOT to look, because if they don’t look the problem will eventually go away. The endangered species won’t be endangered any more. They’ll be dead.
The creek is recovering as I write this – the small waterways in the gullies feeding into the creek were still filled with frogs and now there are tadpoles in the creek again. Whatever had poisoned the creek seems to have gone and it may have had nothing to do with the work being done in the exploration and testing phase at the mine at all – someone may have poured something into the creek from the Majors Creek bridge (for whatever bizarre reason) or any one of several other scenarios that don’t involve the mine site and the activities being undertaken there.
Over the last year I’ve contacted every government department, both Federal and State, that might be involved.
But no one came to look.
Latest Awards
The Tomorrow Book, with Sue de Gennaro, has just been awarded the 2011 Wilderness Society Award. Natalie Winter, the book’s brilliant 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.
Latest books
By the time you read this Christmas Wombat will be in the shops, or will be by October 1, anyway. The first copies arrived today. I gave myself a half hour just to absorb it all again, the simple brilliant hilarity of Bruce’s pics.
They’re wonderful. So funny, so silly, and so very Christmas.
Flood, with Bruce Whatley
This is a picture book about the QLD floods, published to raise money for the Premier’ Flood Appeal. The water may have slipped back into the creeks and rivers, but many people are still doing it hard. We also wanted to show kids why floods happen- the monster under the bed is always scarier than the one you know. But the book is mostly about how everyday people become heroes; how more than 60,000 people came on the first day of the clean up; how flood wracked towns became places of mud and friendship as strangers lent a hand.
Bruce’s artwork is extraordinary, a pale wash of flood colours, created with his left hand- not the right hand he uses to create Mothball wombat. My words are about flood and friendship; Bruce shows the water, and the story of a dog, a Queensland cattle dog who sees and survives it all.
We had to work fast to get it done. I don’t think we could have done it without the teamwork of so many other books we’ve done together. Much of the book came from my father’s descriptions, a few weeks before he died, as he sat on his veranda above the river and watched it all. But I didn’t know if it worked till I saw the faces of the kids who had been through it all.
One of them touched the pages with his finger. ’That’s what the flood looked like,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten floods have colours like that.’ He smiled and said’ I’d forgotten how many people helped us, too.’
I hope that when he tells his grandchildren about the flood, that kindness is what he remembers most.
Nanberry: Black Brother White.
The reviews have been wonderful, and I’m more relieved than I can say. ‘Nanberry’ is based on the true story of four extraordinary people. At every stage I’ve wondered ‘is there any way to do them justice, as well as make the book one where readers keep turning the page?’
Once there were two brothers: one black, one white, in a tiny colony at the end of the world.
This almost unknown story about the earliest days of European settlement in Australia captured me when I first saw the picture of Nanberry, the Aboriginal boy adopted by the colony’s first surgeon, John White.
Surgeon White was a gentleman, a snob and scientist, who hated Australia. Yet he gave an Aboriginal boy the honoured names he’d later give to his own son.
Rachel, the convict girl he loved but could never marry, had survived a death sentence to reach Australia. She would become the richest and most loved woman in the colony.
Nanberry became a sailor in the British Merchant Navy, returning to Australia to fight as a warrior, and to help protect his brother. Andrew, the ‘white brother’, became a hero too, surviving the carnage at Waterloo to return to the place he truly remembered as home.
The story of John White, Nanberry, Andrew and his mother Rachel, has all the ingredients of a saga. Battles, lives sacrificed to codes of duty and survival against crippling odds of starvation, disease and isolation. Above all, it’s a story of one man’s abiding love for his children.
It’s scarcely believable — and yet it happened.
It's all there, in our history. Is it even possible to recreate that time of desperation and love too?
It has been a joy and privilege to track down their stories, from old letters and court transcripts to White’s own words. I hope it will be joy to readers to discover it. I hope you find it as compelling a window into that strange and fascinating world of two hundred years ago as I do.
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.
Schedule for the Year to Come
Here’s what in the diary so far, though there are several other tentative bookings that aren’t listed here. And really, really and truly (or my husband and best friends are going to take away the car keys) I can only manage one trip of four days at most- including travelling time- away a month.
This year I’ve said ‘no’ to things for months and then at last in a weak moment said ‘yes’, but I have made a not very New Rear resolution: next year I will keep a small amount of time quarantined for myself, for friends, for lunches in the sunshine. Please do understand – most days I get at least one invitation to talk, sometimes six, which means I do have to choose the ones that will reach the most people for the least amount of traveling time; I’m not really up to driving more than four hours a day.
This is what the calendar has so far, but there are already another half dozen trips pencilled in.
September 28, 29 & 30: Talks in northern Tasmania.
October 1, 2, 8, 9, 10 & 16: Talks in the Victory Garden, Floriade, Canberra.
Friday, October 21: Youth Literature Day, Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre.
Saturday, October 22: possible PD Workshop Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre.
Monday, October 24: Youth Literature Day, Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre.
Tuesday, October 25: Albany, Youth Literature Day.
Wednesday, October 26: Albany Young Writers’ Day.
Thursday, October 27: 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 18: Talks at Sydney book shops on Christmas Wombat.
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.
Schedule for 2012
March, Saturday 17: Harvest Festival. Moruya, NSW.
March, Sunday 25: Talk at Old Parliament House, ACT.
May 7, 8, 9, 10: Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain at Speaker’s Ink for bookings.
June 5: Talks at the Australian Jewish Museum, Sydney.
July, somewhere around the 8th: Talk at the Australian Literacy Educators Association Conference, Sydney.
July 22-25: Curtis Coast Literary Carnivale, Gladstone, Queensland.
August 22, 23 (Book Week): Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain at Speaker’s Ink for bookings.
The September Garden
The September garden is such a perfect, glorious time for gardening that I regret even the few minutes I’m going to spend writing this. I want to be out in it, planting and pruning out the dead foliage from last summer and winter that I left to help protect the plants till the last of summer’s harsh heat and then the worst of the winter frosts were over.
We’ll probably still have a frost, but hopefully the veg I’ve planted will be protected by netting – it’ll need to be more than -3º C now to kill them, though if they weren’t protected they’d wither at -1º C.
So, what do you do now? Plant like mad – see below.
Pull out, mulch or slash all weeds before their seeds set.
Water if you can because with good tucker and good water plants can do 90% of their year’s growth in spring.
Don’t mulch the veg yet though. As mulch attracts frost plus you want to allow the soil time to warm up for that first new crop of beans, corn, and sun-ripened tomatoes.
But mostly, just get out in it. My mind and body feel like they’ve been in hibernation after just two days out in the garden. There’s another novel nudging at my consciousness – gardens are fruitful places in many ways – but it’ll wait till the withering sun of summer, when I want to be in the cool of my study tapping at the computer, emerging in the early morning or dusk, like the wallabies, when the world is sweet and cool and birds sing again.
Plant LOTS of potatoes – they won’t grow till the soil warms up so shouldn’t get frosted – peas, parsley, snow peas, radish and cabbages can be sown when the air is warm but the soil still cool. But coat the seeds in cooking oil to stop them rotting in cold soil. Dust them with white pepper after oiling if you’re worried by ants. When the soil is warm enough to sit on bare-bummed, plant tomatoes, corn, silver beet, carrots, celery, capsicum, dandelions, eggplant, okra, Chinese mustard, melons, pumpkins and zucchini.
Frost-free climates
Fruit trees like limes, tropical apples, avocados, grape, choko, sweet potato and passionfruit vines, seeds of amaranth, artichoke, asparagus, basil, burdock, carrots, celery, chilli, corn, celeriac, collards, eggplant, gourds, kale, leeks, lettuce, mustard greens, okra, onion, parsnip, parsley, peas, pumpkin, radish, rockmelon, salsify, shallots, silverbeet, tomato, watermelon and zucchini.
Temperate:
Any fruit tree, vine or shrub, bare-rooted or evergreen, seeds or seedlings of baby carrots, beetroot, lettuce, parsnip, peas, radish, swede, turnips, celery, celeriac, leek, lettuce, onions, mizuna, mitsuba, seed potatoes, rocket, silverbeet and spinach. Pots of tomatoes or chilli plants can be grown on a warm sunny patio.
Cold:
Last chance this year for bare-rooted fruit trees, gooseberries, currants and grape vines. Plant seedlings of onions, cauliflower, collards, kale, mustard greens, peas, salad greens like mizuna, mitsuba, spinach, also rhubarb crowns, artichoke suckers, asparagus plants and seed potatoes. Plant early tomatoes, zucchini, melons and pumpkins in pots on a sunny windowsill to give them a head start.
Harvest: You’ll still be picking the same veg as last month – but there’ll be more Brussels sprouts, cauliflowers will be starting to form heads, you’ll find firm red cabbages and there’ll be new shoots off the broccoli. Don’t just pick the main bunch – keep picking all the little bits that follow. In warm areas you might just get the odd sprig of asparagus and a few broad beans. Start gorging on sweet winter root vegies like carrots, parsnips and beetroot now, before they go to seed when the weather warms up too much. Try cardoon stems and dandelion leaves before they turn bitter in summer.
Also, early peas or snow peas plus year-rounders like carrots, radish, yacon, stored Jerusalem artichokes, beetroot, silver beet, celery, celeriac, salsify, turnips, foliage turnips, and parsnips; and winter veg like cabbage, cauliflowers, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, early dandelion leaves from last year’s growth, spinach, bok choi, new mitsuba and mizuna, pak choi, Chinese celery, chilcayote melons and parsley.
Fruit: Navel oranges, lemon, lemonade fruit, custard apples in warm areas, tangelo, mandarin, cumquat, calamondin, pomelo, shaddock, Satsuma and lillypilly in warm areas, Atherton raspberry in warmer areas, Japanese raisin ‘fruit’ (actually swollen stems), kiwi fruit, grapefruit, avocados, a few macadamia nuts, rhubarb and Tahitian and Kaffir limes. You should still have masses of stored nuts, apples, quinces and late pears. Try them thinly sliced in a salad with goat’s cheese and chicory or rocket leaves.
A Few Recipes
Fruit Crunch Refrigerator Bickies (or cookies if you are reading this in the USA)
This is a new recipe, created for Bryan as something with chocolate, but not dark chocolate as that can keep him awake at night – the perfect ‘before bed biscuit’. (NB if you are in north America this recipe is for a cookie. Our ‘scones’ are more like what you call ‘biscuits’)
I now make double amounts of this mix and keep the uncooked mix in a sealed container in the fridge. It lasts for at least a month and I can take out enough to make a dozen small bickies whenever I need them – ten minutes later the house is full of the scent of freshly baked biscuit. And these do smell exceptionally good. The house smells of baking for at least a day afterwards.
Ingredients:
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup plain flour
125 gms butter
4 tbsps golden syrup
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup chopped crystallised cherries
1 cup finely chopped dried apricots
1-2 cups chopped white chocolate – I grate a bit then chop the rest, so there are small, medium and large bits in the mix.
Optional: 1 tbs powdered ginger and 1 cup crystallised ginger instead of some of the crystallised cherries, for a very gingery version.
Method:
Melt the butter with the brown sugar and golden syrup, stirring till well mixed. Add everything else but the chocolate. Mix well. Let it cool, then add the chocolate. (If you don’t do this the chocolate melts into the mix. You also need to allow time for the oats to soften into the mix.)
Roll into small balls; flatten on a cooking tray, and bake at 200º C for about ten minutes, or 150C for 15 minutes, or till just pale golden brown. They will crisp as they cool.
Keep in a sealed container. They’ll keep for weeks, but are far better eaten fresh and fragrant, no more than five days old.
Ten-Minute Simple Celery Soup
1/2 bunch celery
125 gm butter
2 red onions, quartered
6 cups chicken stock (or a good vegetable stock if you don’t eat chicken, or even water- it will still be good, especially if the celery is home grown with a rich home grown scent)
2 peeled potatoes, halved.
Method: Throw it all into a pot, put the lid on and boil till the spuds are soft. Use a hand-held blender to whizz it all together. Add black pepper and perhaps a sprinkle of chives before serving. If too thick, add a bit more stock.
Serves 4.
Cheese and Asparagus Frittata
Serves 2
The chooks are laying… and laying… and laying. We have only seven laying hens but some days there seem to be many more than seven eggs…
Ingredients:
6 eggs
2 thick bunches of asparagus, boiled or steamed until just cooked i.e. vivid not washed out green
2 tbsps extra virgin olive oil
1 bunch chives, chopped
1/2 cup cheese, grated – different styles of cheese can create wildly different dishes, but I haven’t found any cheese that doesn’t work with this, from blue vein to parmesan to ‘rat trap.’ (Soft cheeses like fetta and brie are best in chunks). I mostly use an aged cheddar, though that varies if I been serving cheese to friends and have leftovers of other varieties.
½ cup cream
Beat the eggs, chop the asparagus, fine or in chunks as you prefer. Add everything else. Place in a baking dish and bake for 30 minutes or until firm. Eat hot, tepid or cold the next day.
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