Misrule

Just home from the annual awards dinner, and very tired, so this will be quick! (Why is getting cab late on a Tuesday night so difficult?!)

The NSW Premier's Translation Prize & PEN Medallion:

John Nieuwenhuizen, translator of numerous YA books from the Dutch.

Winner of the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature:

Narelle Oliver's beautiful picture book Home. Picture books rarely take out this prize, so special congratulations to Narelle for this achievement.

Winner of the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature:

Ursula Dubosarsky for The Red Shoe. This is the fourth NSW Premier's award for Ursula, and the second in two years! Yay Ursula! (Alas, poor Ursula missed the dinner, as she broke her arm yesterday while walking her dog Argus, so her dad made her acceptance speech on her behalf.)

Winner of the NSW Community Relations Award:

Shaun Tan, The Arrival.

And—ta-dum!

Book of the Year:

The Arrival!!!

Full shortlists of all categories can be read here.

And already, there are news reports. It will be interesting to see how arts commentators deal with a wordless picture book as Book of the Year—and fascinating to see how these books are starting to enter into the mainstream.

The awards dinner is always a great night, catching up with old friends and new, and what a great selection of children's and YA books this year.

Sorry not to provide more in the way of commentary, but I need to get to sleep!

Please read this impassioned piece by Joss Whedon on the stoning murder of 17 year old Iraqi woman Dua Khalil. As you've probably read, this oxymoronic "honour killing" was filmed on a mobile phone as security officers in the area did nothing to prevent the killing, and the video has been shown all over the media and internet. I have only seen two stills, on Wikipedia (no, I'm not linking), and I doubt I'll be able to shake the memory, or Whedon's description: Her face was nothing but red.

A quote from Whedon's essay that goes to the heart of the matter:

All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once. If you can’t think of what to do, there is this handy link. (alas, there's no link on the site.) Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now.

One thing that someone has done is to create a T-Shirt that bears the slogan I Am Dua Khalil. Profits go to Equality Now. Maybe a T-Shirt doesn't seem like much, but if it encourages a sense of solidarity amongst men and women across the world against the worst atrocities committed against women like Dua Khalil, then that's a good thing.

Alas, however, a commentator on 702 Drive this afternoon observed that the widespread availability of the murder of Dua Khalil has in fact encouraged copycat "honour killings" (sic), just as he observed that, ironically, (in his opinion) such a murder would never have happened under Sadaam Hussein's police state—that the post-invasion lawlessness of Iraq has allowed such killings to flourish. I don't know—I don't have the expertise or knowledge to comment. But in the name of Dua Khalil and the hundreds of thousands dead, we—I—must do something.

It's been in the works for a few weeks, and now I think I can safely announce that I am soon to change jobs. This is my last week—perhaps just for the time being—with The School Magazine. I have accepted a ten month secondment to the Corporate Communications Unit of the Department of Education and Training, where I will be working as a journalist on the monthly staff newspaper "Side by Side". I start on June 4.

I am very excited about this new opportunity, although I feel a bit sad about moving out of children's lit in my day job. However, my first assignment as Girl Reporter is to cover the launch of Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon (which I reviewed here last week) at La Perouse PS. So I imagine I will be incorporating my interest in literature and education quite well! And I am really looking forward to learning new skills as a journalist, and to be writing regularly. And I am really looking forward to getting out into schools and seeing all the fabulous work happening out there.

The CC Unit is expanding rapidly, with a lot of new media projects in the works, so lots of stuff to get stuck into. I'll be working in the city—and there's a major pay rise as well!

So wish me luck and I'll keep you posted!

Although never personally a particular fan of Lloyd Alexander's fantasy, his passing cannot go unmarked. Alexander died on Thursday at the age of 83, just two weeks after the death of his wife of 62 years, Janine.

By all accounts, Alexander's final novel, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio, is superb. I look forward to it.

We will review Alexander's wonderful memoirish novel The Fantastical Adventures of the Invisible Boy (known as The Gawgon and the Boy in the US edition) in The School Magazine. (If you get a chance to see the edition ["Touchdown" June], check out Stephen Axelsen's brilliant illustrations, which accompany the extract from the book. They're fantastic.)

My great friend and terrific author Pamela Freeman at last has a website dedicated to her books and writing. She includes teaching resources and a section dedicated to Mary MacKillop, the subject of her fictionalised biography The Black Dress, which won the 2006 NSW Premier's Young People's History Prize.

I first "met" Pamela when I edited a story of hers called "Ghost Town" for The School Magazine back in the early 90s. I remember saying to my boss at the time, "She's good, this Pamela Freeman". Well, yes, she is, and we soon became good friends and then, a few years ago, neighbours!

Pamela's first adult fantasy, Blood Ties, will be published by Hachette in September 2007. Look out for it. It's the first in a trilogy to be released over the coming two years, and it's excellent—and I'm not particularly a fan of big fat fantasy books, but I loved Blood Ties. All personal bias aside, it's intelligent (as you'd expect—Pamela is one of the smartest people I know) and enthralling and original.

Also keep your eye out for the forthcoming sequel to the award-winning Victor's Quest, Victor's Challenge, to be published (again, with illustrations by Kim Gamble) by Walker Books in Australia and the UK. Victor's Quest is probably Pamela's best-beloved book, and fans of the sweet-but-not-very-bright Victor will be delighted to follow his adventures in the new novel.

Who knew? Performance poetry is an option in the NSW HSC!

And while I'm here, check out the list of texts available to English students completeing their HSC. Almost makes me wish I was still teaching!

Almost...

Last week I had a conversation with a colleague, an Aboriginal woman, about her frustration with the lack of (children's) books that reflect contemporary, urban, middle-class Aboriginal lives and experiences. It's true that most of the books available are still traditional or Dreamtime stories, or memoirs, mostly of rural or mission life. (Meme McDonald and Boori Pryor's books are notable exceptions, although, apart from Njunjul the Sun, they are not city-based tales.) My colleague is looking to perhaps create a book that tells her (remarkable) family's story, and at some stage I hope we find time to work on a project together.

So in that context, I was pleased today to read a new junior novel, Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon. Yirra was written by Anita Heiss in collaboration with the students of La Perouse Public School, which is reflected in the ensemble cast of characters of school kids of various cultural backgrounds—which are rarely overtly identified—and in the easy, natural yet omniscient narrative voice. The main character is Yirra, a young girl (I'm guessing 11 or 12) whose beloved Siberian Husky, Demon, is totally undisciplined, knocking down elderly neighbours and chewing up and burying underwear and shoes and iPods. Yirra has to get Demon trained, or give him up for good.

I could quibble with some flaws in the story—the structure is a bit clunky, characters come and go a little confusingly, and there are a few logic infelicities—but they really are just quibbles. Told in the present tense, what's great about Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon is its energy and its directness. Aboriginal experience is at its heart, but it's intrinsic to the story, milieu and characters rather than a "top down" imposed ideology. There's a chapter in which the kids learn in class about the Aboriginal and European heritage of La Perouse ("La Pa" in the venacular) from the "Elders of the Week". The lesson is a combination of the personal, political and historical, and it could have easily been a very clunky, didactic scene. Instead, the novel has been successful enough in establishing community and culture, through character and events, that the discussion between the Elders and the kids imparts information in a naturalistic and engaging way. (The book also includes some helpful back notes—maps of La Perouse, a glossary, acknowledgments and author bios, including the La Pa PS kids.)

I will address the key quibble I have. Demon's behavioural problems are central to the book's plot and emotional core, and regretably, it doesn't really make logical sense. We're told that Demon, as a pup, was Yirra's Christmas gift when she was four. We don't know how old Yirra and her friends are in the narrative time of the book, but they seem to be about 11 or 12 (boy/girl crushes abound). It stretches credibility that Demon's bad behaviour would have been tolerated for 7+ years, or that it would suddenly have emerged in his middle years. I can live with this—the kids that wrote the book with Heiss wouldn't think about the factual basis for their plot ideas, and I can well understand how such factual compromises would have been made in the writing and editorial processes. I also don't think young readers of the book will notice or care, which is possibly as it should be, but I also don't believe that factual truth need be sacrificed to emotional veracity. Still, I know I am reading as an adult whose job requires her to research and fact-check as second-nature, and I understand that there are more important concerns in a collaborative effort with the political/ideological/cultural intent behind the publication of Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon. And I applaud that intent unreservedly. I just can't help but think that it would have been a better book if some of the kinks had been smoothed out (and maybe the kids who contributed to it would have learned something significant about writing and editing along the way).

Despite this, I liked Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon a lot. It's an accessible and engaging experience for primary school readers, regardless of their cultural heritage; the kids and their relationships with each other and the adults in their lives are realised simply, sympathetically and (mostly) believably. And most importantly, it's a most timely and welcome addition to literature for children that presents the Australian Aboriginal experience as current, contemporary and unexotic.

Illustrated by Adam Hill.

I had just settled down to work this morning, writing up my notes from my meeting with my supervisor yesterday, when I managed to tip over an entire glass of diet coke. All over the desk, onto the floor, all over the powerboard—the powerpoint, of course, being entirely inaccessible behind the filing cabinet—all over me. First thing I pulled out all the powerleads in the board, expecting any moment that either it or I would go up in a puff of smoke. Then I grabbed the stack of books (with my borrowed copy of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion on the bottom) and raced out to grab a teatowel. Wiped down the books. Back to the study to soak up as much (oh woe!) wasted diet coke and to rescue Geraldine McCaughrean's Oxford Treasury of Fairy Tales, which was propping up my laptop which miraculously DID NOT GET A DROP ON IT. Thank god for the pinched nerve that has been plaguing me for weeks and the physio's advice to elevate the very expensive MacBook Pro. And Geraldine's OK too—just a bit of damp on the laminated slipjacket. And Jack's OK too—and somehow, not a single drop landed on my precious paper-covered Andrew Land's Blue Fairy Book.

The printer—aargh! The printer! OK, dry off the printer. Now soak up more puddles of coke.

What about that powerboard? Why isn't there a massive electrical fire in here?

Five teatowels later...

Off with the wet jeans and the damp Texas Woman's University T-Shirt (thanks, Sylvia!) which I like to wear while I'm working on my thesis to convince myself I Really Can Do This—I'm an Honorary Texas Woman! On with the cotton trousers and my Clarice Bean T-Shirt to remind myself I am Utterly a Disaster.

At least now I have a full load of washing. How many distractions can one poor post-graduate student devise for herself?

And dammit, I'm going to have to go and buy more Diet Coke...

My niece Grace created a quiz to see how well people know her, and then challenged me to make one—so here it is!

Take My Quiz on QuizYourFriends.com Can you Ace my quiz? Yes! No Let's Find Out!