When Kate Forsyth kindly asked me to contribute a guest post to
her blog, she suggested that I could write about my favourite Australian children's books.
This got me thinking about all the Australian children's books I could have read, and should have read, and would have loved, had I read them as a child -- but didn't.
This is what I sent to Kate:
Even though I
was born in Australia, and I have been an avid reader all my life, it is a
strange but true fact that when I was growing up, I didn't read Australian
books.
Though I was
born in Melbourne, I spent most of my childhood in the Highlands of Papua New
Guinea, in a tiny town called Mt Hagen. My father worked there as a charter
pilot, flying light planes in and out of isolated mountain villages, carrying
all kinds of passengers and cargo - everything from cattle to coffins, sacks of coffee beans to cans of fish.
Mt Hagen was a
very small town in those days (now it's
the third largest city in PNG) but for
some reason it had an excellent public library, in a dark little building near
the market. It seems so unlikely that such a well-stocked library could
possibly exist that I've tried to research how this could have come about, but
I haven't been able to find out, and the library doesn't seem to exist any
more. My best guess is that it was the result of some philanthropic impulse or
charitable exercise: send a
library to the Highlands! Whatever the case, I was the beneficiary. I read my
way through shelves of wonderful children's authors: Joan Aiken, Louisa May
Alcott, Arthur Ransome, Laura Ingalls Wilder, E. Nesbit, Leon Garfield, PL
Travers, CS Lewis, Elizabeth Goudge and so many more. I've spent many rewarding
years since, trying to recreate that library via second hand bookshops, with
some success!
With no
television, few shops or recreational facilities, there wasn't much to do in Mt
Hagen except to read, and I read everywhere: at the table, under the blankets,
sitting in trees. Like many children, I read my favourite books over and over
again. Sometimes I borrowed the books just to put them under my pillow at
night; I loved them so much and knew them so well that there was no need to
open the covers.
I was especially
drawn to books about magic, ghosts and time travel, memories and dreams. Some
of my particular favourites were Tom's Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce, The
Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, CS Lewis's Narnia books, and A
Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley. Many of the books I loved best were by
English authors, and when my family travelled to the UK (so my father could
visit his family for the first time since he was twenty), I felt an immediate
and intense bond with the English countryside.
I instantly felt
that I knew this landscape, deep in my bones: the damp green fields, the
spreading trees and sheltering hedgerows, the stone cottages and
bluebell-filled woods. This was home,
this was where I belonged, and when we left a few weeks later, I cried for
days.
Weirdly, I felt
no such connection to the Australian landscape when we returned to Melbourne on
leave, even though I'd been born and spent the first six years of my short life
there. I wonder now whether, after reading all those English books, the
landscape of England had seeped into my imagination as a place brimming with
magical possibilities. In contrast, the few books I read by Australian authors
all seemed to be sternly realistic, about girls with ponies in sun-scorched
paddocks, or, terrifyingly, about children surviving bushfires or plane crashes
alone. There didn't seem to be a space in the Australian landscape of those
books for magic, or fantasy, or time travel; no ghosts, no history; nothing for
me to hold onto.
How wrong I was!
Of course there
were books, Australian books, that knew about magic; but for some reason, I
never managed to find them. It was only as an adult that I discovered wonderful
books by Australian authors that might have given me the same sense of
wonderful, mysterious power that I'd gleaned from those English fantasy
stories. One of the reasons I wrote Crow Country was to try to add to that
list, and help a new generation of readers to realise how much magic and power
lies in our own landscape.
Here are three
of my favourite Australian books for children and young adults from the era of
my youth, books I wish I'd found:
1.
Playing Beatie Bow, by Ruth Park
How did I manage to miss this book? It was
published in 1980, when I was 13, but for some reason it took me another thirty
years to read it! The time travel element, so hard to get right, is handled
expertly, and the scenes of early Sydney are wonderfully evocative. The love
story is poignant and perfectly pitched.
2.
Pastures of the Blue Crane, by Hesba Brinsmead
Not a magical story as such, but the
descriptions of northern New South Wales are so gorgeous that the writing
thrums. The story of aloof Ryl's discovery of her inheritance and her gradual
connection with her estranged grandfather is very moving. The book's handling
of racial issues was radically progressive at the time, though it seems
awkwardly dated now; but this is still a beautiful book.
3.
The Rocks of Honey, by Patricia Wrightson
Wrightson's books were the books I needed
to read, but somehow never found at the right time. Her sensitive handling of
Aboriginal mythology was revolutionary at the time; although she was criticised
more recently for appropriating cultural content, many Indigenous leaders
applauded her work, and she introduced generations of children to Aboriginal
magic. I could have chosen half a dozen Wrightson titles, but The Rocks of
Honey was one of the first I read and it remains special to me, a simple but
subtle tale of magic and misunderstanding.
