A (Slightly) Free Range Birthday
Alice decided that this year her birthday was to be a Day in the Forest. So we borrowed a big car and took a handful of friends to the Ferntree Gully National Park.

First we had a scavenger hunt and some exploring...


... and then a picnic...


... followed by cake and pinata at Alice's grandparents' house (conveniently located just up the hill).


Afterwards, we had intended to visit William Ricketts' Sanctuary, but it began to rain, so we took them for milkshakes in the village instead, and then gave them 50 cents each to spend on a knickknack stall at the weekend market...


... then we drove five slightly damp but very happy little people home again.

And the next day, we got Rex!Best. Birthday. Ever.

Goodbye Betty

Betty Collins was one of the loveliest women I have ever known. Unfailingly kind, generous and positive, she was the kind of person who made you feel better just by walking into the room. She trained and worked as a pharmacist in an era where such a career was extremely unusual for a woman. She faced many hardships, including the sudden death of one husband and the slow decline of another, with faith, cheerfulness and courage. She was a dearly loved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and a loving and thoughtful friend to many. She died last week on her 81st birthday.

She was the mother of my friend David, and Michael's friend Marg. If not for Betty, Michael and I would never have met, so I have particular reason to be grateful to her. But I'm also grateful just for having known her. Thank you, Betty.

Weekend in Boort

Mikey checking out the old railway station.

The top of my head, with the main street as backdrop.

The all important war memorial. This one, unusually, lists only those soldiers killed in conflict, not all those who served. Those names are listed beneath a mural on the wall of the RSL building down the hill.

Cracked mud under a bridge over the creek. This shot turned out a lot more arty than I'd intended!
Trees near Little Boort Lake. We walked all the way around it. Twice. There's not a lot to do in Boort on a Saturday afternoon when there's no footy on...

View of the lake from the window of our B&B. It was so peaceful, we could hear frogs croaking all night. And there were birds everywhere - swans and ducks and galahs and cockatoos and wrens - there were lots of others but I didn't know their names. And of course there were crows...


One of the many scarred trees by the lake. Boort was once an Aboriginal meeting place, and the people would remove long scoops of bark from the trees to make canoes, shields, containers and baby-carriers. Boort means 'smoke on the hill' - a signal for meeting, perhaps.


We made a visit to the cemetery, too. Mikey searched for fallen diggers, and found a few. Lucky we didn't bring the girls, I don't think they find old country cemeteries as fascinating as we do.


We also investigated a 'dry' lake that wasn't as dry as it was supposed to be. We spent the next three hours scraping mud off our shoes.

So why did we drive for three and a half hours to spend a night in beautiful, historic, isolated Boort? You'll have to wait and see...

Happy

Cicada Summer has been shortlisted for the 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the first time children's and young adult fiction has been included. You can find the full lists here.

The shortlists were announced yesterday at Readings bookshop in Carlton, by the (extremely tall) Minister for the Arts (and lots of other things) Peter Garrett. That's me in the front, fitting snugly under the Minister's armpit.

It's such a tremendous honour to be included in lists featuring such kid- and YA-lit luminaries, but most of all I am pleased for Cicada Summer itself, if that makes sense. Though it touches on big themes (grief and loss, family and friendship, growth and change and trust), Cicada Summer is in some ways such a small shy book that I was always a little worried it might be overshadowed by flashier, noisier stories. It's like seeing your quiet, introverted child being led out onto the dance floor to glow, just for a moment, in the spotlight.

I Dig Time Lords, Too...

When I came across Chicks Dig Time Lords (via Lizbee's blog -- see, good things do come from googling oneself...) I knew I had to have it. This is a book about me, I thought. And lo, I sent away for it, and it hath arriveth, and I hath eagerly read it.

And discovered, no, it isn't about me after all. This is overwhelmingly a book about Fans of Doctor Who. And I've realised that I am a mere fan, not a fangirl. Squees and shipping and zines and cons and New Adventures have never been part of my experience of adoring Doctor Who; my long and loving relationship with the show has lived behind closed doors, inside my mind, and for the most part, secretly. I never felt that need to share my devotion -- only once, at high school, with one other friend, did I reveal the true extent of my secret life (hello FE, if you're out there).

Because my love has been solitary rather than communal, is it any less real? The mythology of the Doctor has been part of my identity since I was thirteen. I know I'm not the only person who's imagined their own version of the Doctor's story. I never identified with the Doctor myself, or with any particular companion, but invented my own companion and constructed an elaborate story arc around her.*

My high school friend and I referred to our secret life as "etcetera." Etcetera was extra, a parallel existence. The closest I came to fanfic was writing about Calwyn and Darrow's relationship in the Tremaris books. Yes, there was a little pinch of the Doctor in Darrow, and a little smidge of "her" in Calwyn, though they soon developed their own independent lives.

So I guess I'm not a true fan, even though the world of the Doctor is such a part of my own history; I must be something else, something less, something merely partial. A borrower, a visitor in another's world. I've knitted my own scarf out of the Doctor's wool; but it still keeps me warm.

And hey, the TARDIS is a big place. There's plenty of room for all of us.


*Yes, her -- not me, not exactly. She was a princess, for a start, and from another planet. She didn't have my name. And she'd mastered temporal mechanics and developed her own means of time/space transport. In fact the more I think about it the more I realise she was modelled on Romana -- an equal, not a hanger-on, not a damsel in distress. And her adventures weren't restricted to travelling with the Doctor (though he was certainly a handy way of accessing other worlds).

On the Irresistibility of Sand and Water

So we went to the beach.

We were invited for a couple of days to a friend's family beach house at Jan Juc, and I forgot to bring a camera. But we went to the same beach at the same time last year, and once again the three girls were drawn to the magic combination of running water, wet sand, stones and sticks.


Just imagine everyone slightly bigger, and with longer hair, and the banks of the stream not quite so steep, and Alice with a different hat, and you'll have a pretty accurate picture of how they spent every morning.

Liz wondered if the urge to alter the course of running water is hard-wired, or if it's culturally determined -- are there any societies in the world where children don't feel compelled to build a dam or dig a deeper channel? I suspect it's a primal instinct. No matter how cold or wet their feet became, how raw their hands from digging and scraping, they couldn't keep away.

Why Rewriting Takes So Long

It's a funny old job, being a writer.

Sometimes it's like flying; sometimes like pulling teeth. Sometimes it's like playing an endless game of "let's pretend". And sometimes it's like trying to put together a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle -- disturb one piece and the whole edifice comes crashing down.

Little do editors and other commentators realise the havoc they can wreak with their helpful suggestions. Recently one reader of my WIP suggested setting the action in a real small town in central Victoria which spookily matches the description of the fictional village in the manuscript. Great idea, embedding the story firmly in a real landscape (which is an important element of the book).

But -- if they live in X, why doesn't my protagonist go to the real high school there? Why doesn't her mother work at the real hospital in town, instead of miles away? The nearest regional centre is now an hour and a half away, rather than the conveniently fuzzy "about an hour" of the (fictional) big town in the original version. There's a real footy club, with its own colours and rivalries, different from the ones I invented. Where is the war memorial in this town? Where is the football ground? Every time my protagonist goes for a walk, I have to adjust my mental geography.

It's a fine line between adhering to reality and letting the edges blur, and everyone draws that line in a different place. I have no problem creating a fictional family to be the stalwarts of the footy club or the major landowners of the district, nor with shifting trees and even lakes around to suit my story, but it nags at me that Sadie's bus ride to school is now way too long. I think I might send her to the local school after all. But then I need to invent a plausible reason for her to meet her mum in the big town... And that conversation in chapter 7 doesn't make sense any more... But if I change that, I have to change that scene in the restaurant...

And the dominoes topple, one by one. You just have to have faith that when you've patiently picked them all up and fitted them back together, it makes something better than what you started with.

PS If you're interested, there is a thoughtful discussion of Winter of Grace here. Thank you, Lizbee.

Pieces of Nana

Today might have been my grandmother's 105th birthday (there was some confusion about whether her birthdate was actually the 16th or 17th June).

Doris Alice McCulloch was tiny, tough and stubborn. Having survived the Depression, she abhored waste; she kept a basket of half-dead batteries near her radio and rotated them, eking out the last spark of life in each rather than throw it away. She re-used teabags. Before her marriage, in the 1920s, she worked in the rag trade in Flinders Lane, and sometimes used to model the clothes for clients. (Maybe she modelled some of Phryne Fisher's fabulous outfits?) She was a keen amateur actor; she won elocution prizes, performed radio plays and toured country towns with a drama troupe.

At 80, Nana moved into a granny flat attached to my parents' house just as I was moving out. I picked up her armchairs, some saucepans, an antique stove-top coffee-maker (later broken by a careless housemate who didn't even have the decency to confess his crime).

I still have some relics of Nana: her sewing basket, complete with wooden darning mushroom; a china jug; an elocution medal; a book of household remedies called "Consult Me For Everything You Want To Know." But this week, I broke the knob off the lid of Nana's old saucepan that I've been using for the past 25 years, and I felt sad -- one of the last links to my grandmother is about to disappear from my daily life.

But then Alice came down from the attic brandishing a fur hat. "Can I wear this?" The same question I asked Nana when I rescued it from the top of her wardrobe as an 18 year old.

From hand to hand, down the generations, things pass on. Not the things you expect, not jewels or furniture or works of art -- what survives is a funny old hat, a vanity case, a darning mushroom. And I wonder what objects of mine my own grandchildren might end up with?

Happy birthday, Nana. Alice looks great in your hat.

... And Counting

It's almost Evie's birthday, which means it's also almost the anniversary of us moving into this house. We moved in a few days before Evie was born (two weeks early, impatient as always to wriggle into the middle of things).

That was nearly six years ago. By the end of this year, barring catastrophes, I will have lived in this house longer than anywhere else in my entire life.

The previous record is held by my parents' home in Upper Ferntree Gully, where I lived from the middle of Grade 6 till the end of high school; six and a half years. After I started uni, I never lived there again, though it was always my safety net (and emergency storage facility -- sorry Mum and Dad!)

Third place goes to the little dark house in Budd St, Collingwood, which I shared very happily and harmoniously with Robert and the cat (happily, that is, until the very end when it all turned rather messy -- sorry, Robert.) I find it hard to believe now that I lived quite contentedly for six years in a house with almost no external light source, but there you go, it's true.

Six plus six plus six is eighteen, which leaves 25 years of shiftless gypsy roaming. I have a suspicion my restless days are over; this one feels like a keeper.

Phew!

Just as I was racking my brains for a blog post, Simmone put this up at insideadog. Thanks, Simmone!

THE PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE

What is your most marked characteristic?
Tranquility

What is the quality you most like in a man?
To play a straight bat

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
When they confide in me

What do you most value in your friends?
Being there

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Timidity

What is your favorite occupation?
Dreaming

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Second hand books and lots of em

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
As a parent, you are only as happy as your most unhappy child

In which country would you like to live?
Australia, but with holidays in Scotland, Italy & France and places I haven't been yet

Who are your favorite writers?
All my friends of course, and today: Nancy Mitford, Helen Garner, and Patricia Wrightson

Who are your favorite poets?
I don't do poetry

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Tristan Farnon OH DEAR

Who is your favorite heroine of fiction?
Rosamund Stacey, The Millstone

Who are your favorite composers?
Christine McCombe, Jane Siberry

Who are your favorite painters?
Sandra Eterovic, First Dog on the Moon

What are your favorite names?
Der, Alice and Evie of course.

What is it that you most dislike?
Arrogance

Which talent would you most like to have?
To be able to sing and draw, preferably at the same time

How would you like to die?
In my sleep, knowing the world is safe and my family are all happy, and many many years from now

What is your current state of mind?
Astonished by the number of breweries in Australia (don't ask); very excited to have found a book of Joan Aiken's short stories today (All But A Few)

What is your motto?
Nil desperandum

Okay, your turn.

What You Can Do With A Schooliform

In one of the Charlie and Lola books, Lola announces that she doesn't want to go to school because she doesn't want to wear a "schooliform." (Luckily as it turns out, her school doesn't have a schooliform and she can go dressed as an alligator if she wants to.)

Our school does have a schooliform, though a fairly flexible one. There is an official jacket, official windcheater and hat, and the uniform shop sells checked frocks, tops and trackie pants. But in reality, as long as it's navy or white, pretty much anything goes. Thus Evie went to school the other day in a dark blue Seed skirt with a nifty buckle belt (thanks, Sandra!), a white skivvy and stripy tights and got away with it.

Among the older girls,the current fashion is for white leggings (preferably lace-trimmed)* and netball skirts. Nothing else will do. Some girls also wear skinny pants under their dresses. Others wear a very smart tunic (not part of the uniform, but in prep Alice wanted one because her cousin had one, and she actually started a trend. Now she won't be seen dead in it.)

Back in my day, we rolled our socks down as low as they would go, and we all buttoned our shirts under our chins and turned up our collars (it was the 80s). We did our best to contrive drop-waists in our dresses, knotting our belts or even our school ties at hip-height (until we were reprimanded).

It's astonishing how much flexibility schoolgirls can wring out of the same basic ingredients. I was shocked a few years later to realise that the kids on the tram were wearing their socks LONG and their shirts unbuttoned and their skirts hitched UP. Quelle horreur!

So what did you do with your schooliform?

* if there is a less practical garment for schoolyard play, I'd like to know what it is. We are on our sixth pair already this year.

The Library-Fighters

I have clear memories of all the libraries in my life -- from the soaring glass walls of the Ela Beach library in Port Moresby, to the cupboard sized room (perhaps it actually was a storeroom?) at Tarangau Primary in Mt Hagen, where the headmistress growled at me for borrowing books that were "too old" for me, to the blissful hours I spent on library duty, stamping and sorting, in the cavernous library at my secondary school. There has never been a time of my life when I didn't belong to at least one library. Even when I spent six months in Scotland, I made a beeline for the Stockbridge Library in Edinburgh, curled up in the democratic warmth, and wrote a suite of short stories.

Our school's library has been a little bit neglected lately (note: the picture above is not our library. It is a random library I lifted off Google.) Our library used to live in a gorgeous purpose-built space with a mezzanine, but the year Alice started, that space was turned into the Prep Unit and the library was shunted upstairs into a disused classroom.

Staff shortages (and other priorities) meant that over the last few years we've had a part-time librarian at best, or at worst, only parent volunteers and classroom teachers to keep the library going. At least ours is still open. One nearby school has closed its library altogether; at another, the children can access the library only once a fortnight (attendance optional), and only if a parent is available to process the borrowing.

We're lucky. We're getting one of those snazzy new economic-stimulus buildings, four classrooms with a space in the middle which is designated a "library." Woo-hoo! A group of book-loving parents are starting to organise ourselves to make sure this opportunity to revitalise our precious library doesn't slip away.

Our first job is to do a stocktake. I fear it might not take long. A lot of books have been culled in the last few years, sold off at fetes and fundraisers. The problem is that everyone has their own idea about what makes a book cull-worthy.

Mum #1: Oh, those revolting old books. So tatty!

Mum/Booklover: Oh those wonderful classics -- they're old but they can be re-covered. They might even be valuable!

Teacher #1: (rolls eyes) Please, get rid of all those terrible old-fashioned books full of mums bringing slippers to dad and cooking his dinner! So un-PC!

Mum #2: Some of those books have guns in them, we'd better throw those out.

Dad #1: All those out-of-date non-fiction books must go. Look at this "computer" book, it's a disgrace!

Dad #2: We need books that relate to the curriculum. If it's not relevant, it can go.

At this rate, we'll have no books left! And that wouldn't really matter, if we had a bottomless pot of money with which to buy gorgeous new shiny books to fill the shelves, but of course we don't. And even a nice fat wad of cash doesn't buy you very many books, sadly. Not to mention comfy chairs or beanbags, or a new computer cataloguing system, or nice new shelves on castors, or some audio-books, or DVDs, or (wildest dreams) a full-time teacher-librarian, or any of the other things we'd like.

But because we all love books, we all remember the libraries of our own childhoods, and we all believe that the library is too important to neglect any longer, WE WILL FIND A WAY!!

We will find a way.

The Name-Go-Round

I am slightly obsessed with names, particularly fashions in names, what's hot, what's not. This stems partly from having to choose baby names myself and also with choosing suitable names for characters. Nothing is more jarring to me than reading a contemporary book where the characters all have names that were highly fashionable in the 70s or 80s but have since fallen from favour (like Caroline and Jennifer). My current WIP, set in 1974, features Julie and Nadine, daughters of Barbara and Allan. I obsessively check the birth notices every week to see what's in and out.

I'm fascinated by the cycles that names seem to churn through. At the moment we are living through a revival of the kinds of names that were last hot at the turn of last century. One of my friends pointed out a few years ago, "Our daughters are all named after Edwardian housemaids!" -- Alice, Thea, Lucy, Evie, and Nelly (since then Freya has arrived to break the trend). All the little girls at school are called May and Amelia and Esther and Grace and Sophie. The little boys could be a roll call of WWI soldiers -- Jacks and Wills and Harrys and Stans and Henrys and Alberts.

Of course this matter becomes especially pertinent when there is a BABY on the way (not in our family, but one of our dearests!) and the name debate becomes positively fevered. We named both our girls in utero (perhaps rashly) but it wasn't until I attached a name to my unborn child that I could regard her as a real person. Before Evie was born, we often spoke of her by name to Alice -- when Evie comes, we'll do this or that -- which I think helped Alice accept her arrival quite happily; she was a proper member of the family long before she popped out.

But I digress. Penni and I were talking names this weekend and remarking on the fact that names from our grandparents' generation are back in style. Which leads me to ask: what were your grandparents' names? Are there any neglected gems lurking out there?

(For the record, mine were Matthew Irving and Doris Alice on one side, and Frederick Charles and Pamela on the other. If we'd had a boy, he would have been Charlie.)

Humpty Dumpty Eats Bananas

This is what my girl and her friend made at school!

What Makes You Cry?

A wonderful post over at the Guardian book blog about children's books that "still make you cry." Personally I don't think I've cried at a book that wasn't a children's book for a long time. Also, I cry more now that I ever used to when I was an actual child.

The one that is guaranteed to set me off is the last scene in The Railway Children (cited by many Guardian readers) where Bobby sees her father, returned at last, on the train platform, and cries out, 'Daddy! My Daddy!' (Oh, God, I'm crying just typing this...) The film version makes me weep just as hard, if not harder.

I was also surprised, a few years ago, to find myself sobbing at the death of Matthew in Anne of Green Gables, a scene which I'm sure I read quite dry-eyed, dozens of times, as a yoof.

I must admit that the deaths of animals, which moved many Guardian readers, have never really troubled me, but then I am not really an animal person. Though I was amazed when Ginger died in Black Beauty. I think that was the first death I'd encountered in literature, and I couldn't quite believe it could really be true.

Most recently I found myself tearing up at David Almond's perfect Skellig. Though maybe they were partly tears of sorrow that I myself will never write anything so wonderful.