Australian Women Writer's Challenge 2012 2013

It's been fun participating in the Australian Women Writers Challenge this year. It became a really successful initiative. Some people have made an outstanding contribution. Over 370 bloggers signed up, we've reviewed more than 1250 books by more than 480 different authors.  Shelleyrae at Book'd Out has read and blogged over 100 books by Australian Women Writers this year!

It has gone on to find international acclaim, not just local success, been featured in the Huffington Post, and has been called one of the 20 greatest moments for women this year.

I've read 13 books and blogged 11 of them so far. I may have read those books anyway, but may not have blogged them, but I do think it's important to highlight the amazing books we read by Aussie Women Writers.

The Dream of the Thylacine by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks

Who Explored Australia? Blaxland, Lawson, Wentworth, Evans and Strzelecki

Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson

Flood by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley

The Naming of Tishkin Silk by Glenda Millard

The Children of the King by Sonia Hartnett

Life in Ten Houses by Sonia Hartnett

Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley

Sophie Scott Goes South by Alison Lester

Nest. The Art of Birds by Janine Burke

One Small Island by Alison Lester and Coral Tulloch



I'm looking forward to the 2013 Challenge. I wonder what I'll discover next year?

One Small Island

I was very excited about this title when it came out last year, it's a shame that it's taken me so long to read it. It's a fabulous book, about a fascinating part of the world. Little did I know how fascinating it really is.

One Small Island tells the tale of Macquarie Island, a small island in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica. But like all good things that good possibly be construed as belonging to New Zealand, we found it first and claimed it for Australia.

Macquarie Island was discovered in July 1810 by Captain F Hasselborough, who had been blown off course while heading to Campbell Island, another subantarctic island. He named it for Lachlan Macquarie, the new Governor of New South Wales. Actually, much of New South Wales is named either Lachlan or Macquarie, and I'm sure the ongoing popularity and use of the name Lachlan in Australia stems from this time also.

Macquarie Island was a natural refuge to huge colonies of seals and penguins. A sealing industry was immediately set up in 1810, and in the ten short years that followed the sealers killed more than 100,000 fur seals, until there were none left. Naturally a lack of seals didn't stop the ravenous desire for oil, the elephant seals were the next target, and when they were all but gone then penguin oil became the industry. It seems rather impossible that there was a penguin oil industry at one time, I'm glad we live in a somewhat gentler time.

I've known about conservation efforts on Macquarie Island for some time, the recent efforts to rid the remote island of rabbits and rats. I didn't know that previously there were feral cats, dogs and wekas amongst many others!

There is a lot of information packed into this book, so much so that both endpapers include even more.

The book itself alternates large illustrative double pages

with beautiful, intricate pages crammed with information in various formats- imaginings of primary journals from early explorers and sealers, newspaper accounts, maps, drawings. There are a few lines of text at the bottom of each page, that reads quickly as a stand alone story. I was too keen to read the story so read through the bottom first and then came back for a slower reading of the informative pages. It's a very clever design, easy to read just the text for younger children, but then with much more information that older children and adults can digest. Although young children do love pouring over illustrative detail.

While One Small Island is a tale of ecological destruction and (mis)adventure, it is ultimately optimistic and hopeful. We have stopped the slaughter of seals and penguins. Although it is sadly too late for the Macquarie Island parakeet, the seals and penguins have come back. The wekas, cats and dogs have gone. There rabbits and rodents are on their way out due to expensive, large scale government efforts. The books message that it's important to care for our "precious places, no matter how small or faraway they are" is a vital one.

An Illustrated Year by An Abundance of Books

Nest

Some books just demand to be read when the iron is hot and Nest was one of those books for me. I had been to the fabulous On the Wing session at the Melbourne Writers Festival and was fully primed. I ignored the multiple other books that I should have been reading, and once I'd read the first few pages whilst browsing in the bookshop I was already hooked. I was in. Signed copy in my hand I was ready to go.

Janine Burke is a Melburnian, art historian, biographer and novelist, who begins Nest by proclaiming herself a "very amateur naturalist." Yet she has been observing birds since the 1980s.

We tend to take birds for granted, in the landscape of our neighbourhoods. Yet when they're gone, it's as though there's a hole in the sky, in the air, an abscence of beauty and grace, and vivid chatter or haunting cries are replaced with eerie silence. The presence of birds communicates the health of a place. They are our contact with wild nature. 

The mere word 'nest' itself "conjures fundamental notions of home, family, privacy, shelter and rest. It's a word of embrace, of origins, both visceral and tender". When Janine first experiences a striped honeyeater's nest up close and personal behind the scenes at Melbourne Museum she finds it "An elaborate piece of work, it looked like an exotic purse worthy of an empress, stitched by a Surrealist seamstress". Yes nests really are "flamboyant little miracles of design".

Janine Burke's art historian and curator self is never that far away.

How can we regard nests as 'art' when art is something we traditionally associate with museums and galleries, with quiet, ascetic environments and, most importantly, with humankind? Of course, art is far from fixed and constantly challenges its own boundaries. Particularly since the beginning of the twentieth cenury, attitudes towards what constitutes art have changed radically. 

Nest was a quick and engaging read for me, broad ranging and wonderful. I read it whilst returning from Victoria to NSW and it made the travel miles pass by without my even noticing. Nest is a beautiful book to hold. A lovely hardback edition with 12 colour plates in the middle- essential to illustrate the wonderful nests that she is describing, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

There was a particularly fascinating section on John and Elizabeth Gould. Recognisable names to be sure, but I wasn't aware that they were not only contemporaries of Charles Darwin, but they were invaluable to helping Darwin establish his theories, and find fame. When the Goulds travelled to Australia, they left their three youngest children behind in England, and brought only one of their children with them. Sadly Elizabeth was to die tragically young at 37 soon after their birth of her eighth child.

Picture source

Some random facts that I enjoyed musing over:

Despite being aware of lithographs for some time, I'd never thought about the name, and what that actually meant. Traditionally lithographs were made by drawing on lithographic limestones with grease crayons. Elizabeth Gould made her extraordinary, fine images of birds using big slabs of stone. I still don't quite understand the process to be honest. How did she get such glorious fine detail and colours?

Picture source

About 5 billion birds of 200 species leave Europe to winter in Africa each year. This is only about a tenth of the world's migratory bird population. It's a very dangerous journey, nearly half the adults and most of their young will die.

Janine Burke appears to be as fascinated by the possibility of swallows migrating as I am. She says they can travel up to 300km per day, which seems a more feasible distance than the 965km suggested by Swallow.

The outrageous behaviour of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was already married when he met the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. They ran off to Italy, only to return with Mary pregnant. Poor Harriet Shelley drowned herself in a river giving Percy and Mary the opportunity to marry. Although even then it wasn't such a happy marriage- forced to live in exile in Italy, "Mary was despondent, owing to the death of three infants and Shelley's proclivity for flirting with women close to her".

Charles Dickens had pet ravens. His raven inspired Edgar Allen Poe to write The Raven. Turns out that Dickens had his pet raven stuffed and you can see it in Philadelphia.

Karen Blixen, whilst skeletally thin and suffering from the ravages of syphilis survived on a diet of oysters, champagne and amphetamines.

No, Nest is not just about nests.

Sophie Scott Goes South

I've long been obsessed by the notion of Antarctica. Back when I was 20 I decided to write an action thriller set in Antarctica. I'm not sure why, it's not really my genre, and I don't really write. Pity I didn't get round to doing it though, now Matthew Reilly has been there and done that, and my ideas would just seem derivative.

I always do enjoy tales of people journeying to Antarctica, so of course was keen to get my hands on Alison Lester's latest book, Sophie Scott Goes South. I saw Alison Lester speak at the CBCA Conference in Adelaide in May.

Sophie Scott Goes South is somewhat of a collaborative effort. In 2005 Alison Lester made the long journey south herself on the Aurora Australis from Hobart (5475km each way!). She sent daily emails to schools and families around the world. Children often drew responses to her emails and sent their artworks to Alison Lester. She then created the Kids Antarctic Art Project. There are lots of amazing resources, articles and images about this project online. Alison often manipulated or compiled the children's images to make them her own. She describes that process here. There has been a touring exhibition of those artworks for several years, although I haven't been lucky enough to see it.

Sophie Scott is a 9 year old girl whose father is the captain of the Aurora Australia. She goes with him for a 5 week supply journey to Antarctica. Presented in diary format Sophie tells the story of her voyage- her anticipation, the cramped sleeping arrangements in the cabin she shares with her Dad, the astonishing journey with massive seas and seasickness. The voyage south is exhilarating despite the extremes of weather. Icebergs. Penguins. Seals and whales.

Fully illustrated by the beautiful pictures from the Kids Antarctic Project and also by photographs that Alison Lester took on her trip. Sophie Scott Goes South conveys a lot of information as well as telling a story. Antarctic explorers. Icebergs. The amazing weather at the bottom of the world, and glimpses into how people survive there.

Yet all written with a view to kids.

We threw lolly-coloured streamers to the people waving and held on until the streamers snapped and the water between us got wider and wider. 

Antarctica is an important place. One that needs to be protected for future generations, and for itself. I hope I get to visit myself one day, and make my own Antarctic diary just like Sophie.

An Illustrated Year is hosted by An Abundance of Books.

Graffiti Moon (with some random Melbourne graffiti)

I always really enjoy reading some fiction based around travel locations. So when I had the chance to travel to Melbourne for the Melbourne Writers Festival this year I was keen to read some local writing. Happily I chanced on this review of Graffiti Moon in the week or so before I left. Perfect timing.

Graffiti Moon was an Honour Book for the Older Readers in the Children's Book Council of Australia Awards in 2011. It also won the Young Adult prize for the Prime Minister's Literary Award in 2011 and the NSW Premier's Literary Award. So I'd seen it around and was thrilled to start.

Graffiti Moon is the story of one hot Melbourne night. Lucy is finishing high school and going for a night of fun adventure with her friends Jazz and Daisy. Daisy has a boyfriend, Dylan, but he's forgotten her birthday and is throwing eggs at her head in a show of boyhood excitement at finishing school.

Lucy is an artistic type, she has been learning glass blowing from an artist in a local studio and working on her Year 12 major piece. Both her parents are creative too, her mother is trying to finish a novel, her father a magician. Of course they have to hold down more pedestrian jobs to pay the bills. Things aren't running all that smoothly and her father is currently living in the shed in the backyard.

Lucy is besotted with a local graffiti artist Shadow. She sees his work on walls in the local area, and is moved by his work, his artistry. She knows that he isn't like the boys at her school. Lucy hasn't met him, but she plans to, although his identity is a closely guarded secret and he works stealthily at night with his partner Poet who provides the words to Shadow's vision.

I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall. 

But tonight she is out with her girlfriends and stuck with Dylan and his two friends, Ed and Leo. She plans to use this night to find Shadow and meet him.

There are many, many art and artist references, which I know I wouldn't have got when I was a younger reader. Jeffrey Smart. Rothko. Vermeer. Magritte. Some others that I have never heard of before. Cath Crowley does a good job of incorporating enough about these artists and their works that you get the meaning, without it seeming forced. Cleverly told in three alternating voices. Lucy. Ed and Poet. I was very quickly drawn into this wonderful, funny story.

Life in Ten Houses

I hadn't heard of Penguin Specials until I stumbled upon this ad in the Weekend Australian Magazine last week. 

A new series of ebooks designed to fill the quick read niche. I knew that I would immediately need to read Sonya Hartnett's Life in Ten Houses. I like her work, am interested in her writing, and am about to head off to Melbourne. YAY!

Very quickly it was sitting on my ipad, even though I'm not all that well acquainted with ebooks as yet. And of course, I picked up a few other Penguin Singles while I was there. They have a free sampler available, which looks like a good bet. I also bought Will Self's The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker- who could resist such a title? and Bob Brown's One Person, One Value.

So even while each inidividual Single is cheap, they're not when you buy 3 at once. Actually I can't see the price now that I've bought it, but I think this 24 page morsel was $3.99. I'm not sure whether that represents value or not. I suspect I lean to the side of not. It was great to read, and if I thought most of the money went to the author I'd be quite happy with the price, but I can't imagine it does.

Life in Ten Houses is a meditation on the difference between a house and a home, and the influence of a house on a writer. Actually it's an interesting insight into Sonya Hartnett's world. Sonya is a proud Melburnian, and rightly so. Melbourne was named a UNESCO City of Literature in 2008. Only the second city in the world at that time to hold such an honour. The first was Edinburgh. The list now includes Iowa City, Dublin and Reykjavik. A third of Australia's writers live in Melbourne, and a third of our bookstores are open for business there!

Sonya Hartnett grew up in the eastern and northern suburbs of Melbourne, and she describes them as the "roof and walls and floor as well as the launching place of my imagination". She describes the many houses that she has lived in over the past 12 years. 10 addresses is too, too many in such a short time, but perhaps logically she loves "the packing, the regular reassessing of the worth of those objects that share my life".

Sonya is really on a quest for her Last House, the place she will live out her days, "which is less a specific building than some corner of the world that miraculously confers upon me a sense of eternal contentedness". I really like that conceptually, I'm not in my Last House. I wonder where it will be?

Particularly interesting were the sections where she discussed her writing. She discusses her writing process, her need to write, her anxieties. A decade ago she was "partially employed" by her writing and supplementing her income by working part-time at the Hill of Content bookshop, a door I'm bound to darken in the next fortnight. Thursday's Child was her cornerstone book, career changing, and yet inspired by "hours spent in idle observation of the ants that dug ceaselessly at the foundations of the house". Having seen a stage show adaptation of Thursday's Child that makes perfect sense.

Sonya Hartnett is typically categorised as a children's author. She did win the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2008. And yet she states that she has written three children's books of the 20 or so she has now published. She points out The Silver Donkey (2004) "the first of my children's novels", and The Children of the King (see my review), "the third of the children's novels". Sadly, she doesn't mention what she considers her second. The Midnight Zoo?

Somewhat humbly she claims to be "no social commentator", and then asserts

I am an examiner of the ancient subjects- friendship, nature, family; forgiveness, courage, loyalty- and in a world where jets fly into buildings and teenagers sew their lips together while politicians justify their inclination to lie, it's right to keep such themes alive. Indeed it was around this time that I began to consider writing more specifically for children: children's literature narrows the focus of those grand old subjects, distils them into their purest and most noble form.

I think that I'll wonder most about this question:

Do the books we need find us, or do we shape ourselves around the books we find?

The Children of the King

Sonya Hartnett is a big name in Aussie writing. A bit of a powerhouse really. She's written quite a number of highly regarded books. She won the Astrid Lindgren Award in 2008. I've read a few of her books, but certainly not all. I always mean to read her latest book, but then get caught up and don't get to it. I was most jealous when my son's teacher started reading this book to his class for their daily read aloud book. I was even more thrilled when my son brought home a copy from the school library for me to read. Now the pressure was on. I had to read it out of maternal duty. And I'm glad I made the effort.

Although I thought The Children of the King started out a bit slowly (after the near heartstopping suspense of the first few pages). The story of two children, Cecily,12 and Jeremy, 14, siblings who are taken by their mother to live in their uncle's grand house, Heron Hall, to avoid the imminent threat of bombardment in London. Clearly we're in England in 1940, just before the start of the Blitz, although it's never really expressly stated, and I'm not sure that child readers would necessarily know that.

Jeremy and Cecily are clearly well off children. From the very start their are clues to their family fortune. "Her own suitcase was too fine to write on; it had a leather tag." They travel first class on the train. They have servants. Their uncle is called Peregrine. On their train journey they notice the many unaccompanied children who are also being sent out of London. Jeremy suggests that they too should take an evacuee as "it's the right thing to do." And so they arrive at Heron Hall with 10 year old May Bright in tow.

May isn't one to be cooped up inside despite the English weather, and quickly sets to exploring Heron Hall and the surrounding areas. She soon finds some mysterious ruins over the river. Peregrine tells them they are the ruins of Snow Castle, and that there is a terrible legend around the castle. "The tale is cruel. Unfit for childish ears." Of course the children immediately want to know the story. Peregrine does tell them over time, the story of a Duke from long ago and two missing children. I'm sure that if I'd paid more attention in high school history then I might have known who this story was about. Sonya Hartnett tells us who it is during this intriguing interview.

There are many, many passages about power and the horrors of war.

"Children have always borne the brunt of decisions made by adults," said Peregrine. "No child is responsible for the bombs that will fall on London tonight, but plenty will pay a dreadful price nonetheless."

Even more with writing that shimmers.

Dawn came early in those short weeks of summer. The sun rose limpid over the hills, pale and tired despite its youth. Its heatless light reached over miles of marsh, crept across streams and slunk over rocks, cast thin shadows from robins and shone dimly off dew, and finally crawled, with a daddy-longleg's fragility, up the walls of Heron Hall to Cecily's window, there to stare through the glass like a starved cat. Morning was here. 

The Naming of Tishkin Silk

I finished The Naming of Tishkin Silk last week. And then I reread it today, on a sick day, spent mostly lounging about in bed. It's a gentle little book. With a great big knot of sadness at it's core. 

The setup is quirky, Griffin, an uncommon boy, born on the 29th of February and his Rainbow sisters- Scarlet, Indigo, Violet, Amber and Saffron have been homeschooled by their mother. Now his mother and baby sister are away, and Griffin is forced to attend to the local school for the first time. 

From the very beginning of the story we are aware that Griffin holds himself responsible for why his mother and sister aren't at home. 

If he were an ordinary boy then maybe Mama wouldn't have gone away. Maybe his secret thoughts wouldn't have changed everything.

It is obvious to the adult reader that whatever Griffin's secret thoughts had been they aren't going to be the reason that his mother and sister aren't there. 

Griffin lives with his Rainbow sisters, his father,grandmother Nell and dog, Blue in the family house, the Kingdom of Silk, up the Silk Road (I love that, it's too funny). The Silk family are hippies I suppose, with their rainbow names, pet crow, and daisy chain making habits. Griffin befriends Princess Layla, a girl from school who also wears daisy chain crowns. 

He understood right away, that a person who believed in the magic of daisies, a person skilled in the art of crown-making was likely to be an uncommon kind of person.

There's some beautiful writing especially in the latter parts of the book:

He felt himself falling, down, down, and then something warm. He opened his eyes. Layla was beside him, still holding his hand. Inside, he felt something swell, like the tiny flare of a match in the darkness. Layla smiled and squeezed his hand and the feeling grew stronger. And though Griffin, didn't realise it, the feeling had a name. It was courage. 

Griffin, named after the mythical beast, finds his courage, and we find the answer to the whereabouts of his mother and sister in a bittersweet ending.

The Naming of Tishkin Silk was published in 2003, and was an Honour Book in the 2004 Childrens Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Younger Readers.  It became the first of six books in the Kingdom of Silk series. I've got #2 Layla, Queen of Hearts on reserve at my library. I'm looking forward to it. 

Flood

Australia is famously a land of droughts and flooding rains. There have certainly been plenty of both recently, and Queensland has borne the brunt of much of it. Jackie French wrote Flood in response to the floods that devastated huge areas of Queensland in 2011. At least 35 people died. The whole country was affected. 

Jackie French grew up in Queensland. Her family still live there. So naturally she had a strong emotional reaction to the floods. It was a personal, family emergency as well as a national one. This beautiful and moving book is Jackie's response to this disaster.

Flood starts with the end of drought.

But then the rain kept coming and coming. Too much rain. And the river went from being a friend to being an enemy. 

Jackie French doesn't mention the deaths. Instead she focuses on the response to the floods. The human response. 

The kindness of strangers bloomed like flowers after rain. 

Quite a few pages feature the huge boardwalk that tore away and the tug that steered it safely through the maze of bridges, without causing more damage.

Bruce Whatley did an amazing job with the illustrations. He painted vertically on an easel to get the paint dripping, which adds so much to the flood soaked atmosphere of the book. A lot of his illustrations are from the dog's eye point of view. People are shown in some dangerous situations, but they are shown being rescued.

He writes a very interesting paragraph at the end describing his illustrative technique.

Humour is easy but producing illustrations that show serious emotion is a very different thing. Recently I discovered I have more success producing images that have elements of self-expression and 'art' with my left hand.

Bruce illustrated Flood with his non-dominant hand! I find that incredible- to be so talented to be able to use your non-dominant hand to get more emotion in your work. 

Flood was one of my top reads of 2011. It was printed in Queensland. A copy was donated to every primary school in Australia, and my son has read it at his school. I think that's a fantastic idea. Profits from the sales of the book were donated to the Queensland Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal. 

An Illustrated Year is hosted by An Abundance of Books.

Painted Love Letters

I was excited to find this book at a used book sale a few weeks ago. It became the first book that I dipped into from my Big Fat Book Haul. 

I came across Catherine Bateson last year when I read the wonderful Rain May and Captain Daniel. She has won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Younger Readers twice since 2003, and had a showing with an Honour Book or Notable Book in most other years! That's a rather extroadinary achievement. And makes me even more curious about Catherine and want to read her books. 

Painted Love Letters is one of her early books from 2002. Chrissie is a teenager, trying to fit in at high school even though her artist parents keep moving, and she needs to change schools. It's Queensland in the 70s we suspect- at least I hope so, given her fashion choices.

Chrissie's dad Dave is dying. He gets diagnosed with lung cancer early in the book. And the inevitable happens over much of the rest of this little morsel of a read. At only 93 pages it's a compelling, quick read. 

Each day my body gives up a little more, so it becomes a little closer and I can feel another little piece of this life slipping off me, slipping away. My body is teaching me how to leave. 

There are interesting references to Father Damien and his leper colony in Kalaupapa. It didn't sound a particularly Australian name, and I wondered where it was. Turns out it's not Australian at all, but Hawaiian.

Who Explored Australia? Blaxland, Lawson, Wentworth, Evans and Strzelecki

Like everyone else who was ever an Australian school girl I remember teachers trying to teach me about Australian explorers. Of course I've forgotten most of the details. Sure we all remember their names, they're famous names, and I think lots of people remember that the first crossing of the Blue Mountains by white settlers was in 1813. But do we remember, details about their lives, or explorations? I know I didn't.

I chanced upon this book at my local library. Actually there are 4 in the series, and I'll be interested to have a look at them all eventually. 

This book focuses on the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Part of the Great Dividing Range of Eastern Australia, the Blue Mountains has some quite rugged terrain and formed a barrie to westward exploration after the English settlement of Sydney in 1788. It is made illustrated with old maps of the Sydney Basin. This one by William Dawes, a marine on the First Fleet. I work with one of his descendents which adds to the interest. 

Gregory Blaxland, William Wentworth and William Lawson eventually famously crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813. Their names are memorialised in three of the townships of the Blue Mountains. I hadn't remembered anything else about them from my primary school days. 

It turns out that Blaxland wanted to cross the Blue Mountains to have more grazing land for his cattle- although I really think that the Sydney Basin should have been big enough! He was also the first successful  winemaker in Australia. He was apparently unpopular with "figures of authority". I'm not sure what that means, but am sure that its an interesting back story.

William Lawson became one of Australia's largest landholders after he was given a grant of 1000 acres as a reward for surveying land beyond the Blue Mountains. He became the Commander of Bathurst in 1819. Bathurst was the first inland settlement established in Australia. I drive through Bathurst many times every year, and didn't know that!

William Wentworth was fascinating too. The illegitimate son of a surgeon and a convict, apart from becoming an explorer, he also wrote the first book to be published by an Australian- the impressively titled A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales. He went on to become a member of the Legislative Council and founded The Australian. A weekend copy of which graces my table as I type. 

I've occasionally pondered why our highest mountain has a distinctively Polish name. It is nearly impossible to spell after all. Here is the answer. Paul (Pawel) Strzelecki was a Polish adventurer, explorer and social reformer who travelled the world exploring for minerals. He is credited with being the first European to climb Mt Kosciuszko in 1840, which he then named after Polish national hero and American Revolutionary War General, Tadeusz Kosciuszko. In turn, Strzelecki's name was given to the Strzelecki Track and Strzelecki Desert of Central Australia by Charles Sturt. Strzelecki was only in Australia for 4 years, but he certainly left an enduring mark. 

I'm looking forward to checking out the other titles of the series. I'm not a great reader of nonfiction, and these Junior Nonfiction books are perfect for me to whet my appetite for knowledge. I'm sure kids would enjoy them too. 

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012

I'd seen the badge for this challenge around the blog world a few times of late, but hadn't really looked at it until the other day. Then I read my friend Janine's post on Otherland by Maria Tumarkin.  Now I realise that 289 bloggers have signed up for this challenge! What have I been missing? Suddenly I paid attention.

As I should. I like Aussie Women Writers. I read Aussie Women Writers. Sometimes I blog about them. I did a few last year. Only one so far this year. Margaret Wild's The Dream of the Thylacine. Which I shall retrospectively label as being for this challenge. I certainly mean to read more. I'm hopeful that this challenge will keep me mindful of my commitment.

I have a number of books that immediately spring to mind. I want to read more Jackie French this year. I so loved Nanberry last year. I won Deb Fitzpatrick's Have You Seen Ally Queen recently. And I've come across Cassandra Golds and must read her soon.

Plenty to get on with. Are you reading some Australian Women Writers this year?

The Dream of the Thylacine

Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks are both famous in their own right. Margaret Wild as the author of more than 70 books, including the extraordinary Fox, the result of her previous pairing with Ron Brooks. Ron, equally is one of our most famous and celebrated illustrators, his Bunyip of Berkeley Creek an enduring Australian classic. So I was sure that any new book by the two of them would be an interesting read.

I have a soft spot too for books about Thylacines, the Tasmanian Tiger, that became extinct in the 1930s after the last known animal died in captivity in Beaumaris Zoo, near Hobart, in 1936. Their extinction is particularly tragic I think, although of course the extinction of any species is tragic. Thylacines lived on the Australian mainland before the introduction of the dingo about 4,000 years ago. After white settlement of Australia they were restricted to Tasmania, and they were hunted out of existence in little over 100 years, aided by bounties. Now the Tasmanian Devil, Tasmania's other major predator, is under threat from Devil Facial Tumour Disease, at least now people are working to try to prevent the Devil's demise.

I was always going to pick up this book as soon as I saw it at the library. I hadn't heard of it before, but it literally leapt off the shelf at me. The back cover blurb calls it a lament for a lost species, and it certainly is that. The words are few, and illustrated by black and white illustrations of caged Tigers. The Tiger in each of the three pages like this becomes faded and more distinct in each image.

Interspersed between these pages are Ron Brook's beautiful painted illustrations of a free Tiger, capturing the Tiger's dreams of freedom, and a life in the wild. Ron Brooks writes very movingly about his paintings for this book on his website (you just need to scroll down a bit). Ron lives in Tasmania, and his love for the Tasmanian landscape is evident in his paintings.

It's a beautiful and moving book. I found this last image particularly poignant.

An Illustrated Year is hosted by An Abundance of Books.