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The Ruby Stories
The Ruby Stories
Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Viking, 2018Ruby is back in a bind-up of the four stories about her, and with a brand-new extra chapter updating her life two years after the final book, Ruby of Kettle Farm. Her fortunes take a very surprising turn, and as you might expect Great-Aunt Flora has a hand in it all.
Ruby is one of my favourite characters. Over the four books she changes from being a rather spoilt and self-centred girl to someone who has great compassion for others and a good deal of inner strength. As you can see, the new book has a gorgeous cover and a pretty magnetic clasp. -
Maddie’s First Day
Maddie’s First Day
Illustrated by Liz Anelli | Walker Books Australia, 2018There are lots of picture books about starting school, but most of them describe what to expect. School is like this, they say, and this is what you will be doing. I don't think very many books tell you how you might feel. Starting school marks one of the most important distinctions between babyhood and childhood, and for some it may prove initially just a bit overwhelming. Maddie in the story is terribly excited about being grown up and going to big school, but when the day arrives, she needs a little comfort, and a very good friend.
Liz Anelli's illustrations are perfect - busy, gentle, perceptive and full of detail. -
Finch
Finch
Walker Books Australia, 2018Awards:
West Australian Young Readers’ Book Award, 2020: shortlistedFinch is about an ordinary sort of family which has just moved from the city to live on a farm with a vineyard. Mostly it's about twelve-year-old Audrey, a self-confessed nerd who is fascinated by nature, especially birds. One day, while she's exploring the creek that runs through their property, she discovers a cave. Living in the cave with his little dog Snowy is a mysterious boy, Finch, who shares Audrey's love of birds and becomes her friend. It's a magical time for Audrey, but reality will soon hit home.
Finch works on several levels: as a family story, as a mystery, as a coming-of-age story, and as a story about the need to protect our precious wildlife. -
The Third Brother
The Third Brother
Wakefield Press, 2017I knew nothing about my uncle's older brother, Glen Murrie, except that he'd died in the Second World War. A bomber pilot, he was killed on operations in the Pacific when he was 22 years old. He'd joined the RAAF when he was just 19. Seventy years after his death he was only a name to me, a face in a photograph. I wanted to know more. It was the start of nearly two years' worth of research and writing.
The more I discovered about Glen's life, the more fascinated I became. I read service records, newspaper reports, Glen's logbook, records of the Operations he'd flown. I found that he had been engaged to be married when he was killed. I read heartbreaking letters of loss, letters from his fiancee to his parents.
The Third Brother is a real departure for me. For a start, it's not really a children's book. But it means so much to me that I have included it in my website. -
The Nellie Stories
The Nellie Stories
Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Viking/Penguin Books, 2016The Nellie Stories is what publishers call a bind-up: it includes all four of the original stories about Nellie O'Neill in the one volume. It's a hardback book, not a paperback, and it has a very pretty magnetic closure so that it looks a bit like a lockable diary. The important thing about The Nellie Stories is that it includes a whole new chapter - a 'what happened next?' chapter - which looks at Nellie's life two years after the end of the final book (Nellie's Greatest Wish). And there's also another section, 'What I Imagine for Nellie's Future', in which the rest of our heroine's life is predicted. You'll have to read the book to find out what happens to her!
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One Night
One Night
Illustrated by Stephen Michael King | Omnibus Books, 2014Awards:
CBCA Notable Book, 2015 For Teachers' notes click hereWhen I was quite young, and we still lived in the country, my father told me that at midnight on Christmas Eve the farm animals spoke to each other in human voices. Every Christmas I had the wonderful idea of staying awake and creeping out at night to hear them, but of course I always fell asleep before the magical hour. I still think it's the loveliest story, and part of me believes that it must be true. Dad knew lots of folk legends like that, mostly ones he'd heard from the older German people who lived in our district.
One Night has been published in Japan in a smaller format. It makes a delightful tiny hardback, and somehow the Japanese characters suit it too! -
Eureka Boys (Do You Dare?)
Eureka Boys (Do You Dare?)
Penguin Books, 2015The 'Do You Dare?' series is loosely based on the Our Australian Girl series in that it aims to bring Australian history to life - but for boys (as well as girls, of course!).
The Eureka Stockade is one of the most important events in Australian history. In a way that made it quite difficult to write about, because so much has been written about it already. I had to find a way of bringing those extraordinary events to a personal level so younger readers could understand them. I read lots of books about Eureka, and one tiny detail jumped out at me: in a list of the people who were killed during the rebellion I saw the name Happy Jack. Nothing about him - where he came from, how old he was - just that he was one of the twenty-two people recorded as having died. Who was he? Why had he joined the rebels? I had to create a character for him, and as soon as Jack existed it was easy to fit other characters around him: my hero Henry Bird and his friend Frank Shanahan, and the horrible police trooper Sergeant Nockles. And Lola the carpet python. Suddenly I had a story.
I wish I knew if the real Happy Jack was anything at all like the person I imagined. Whether he is or not, I dedicated the book to him.
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Meet Ruby
Meet Ruby
(Our Australian Girl, Book 1)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2013
By the end of Meet Ruby, the effects of the world economic downturn known as the Great Depression are beginning to bite and Ruby's comfortable life is soon turned on its head. When her father loses all his money, Ruby is horrified to discover that she will have to live in the country with her cousins. How can she bear it?
You can find out more about all the Our Australian Girl books at ouraustraliangirl.com.au
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Ruby and the Country Cousins
Ruby and the Country Cousins
(Our Australian Girl, Book 2)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2013
Ruby hates Kettle Farm, and she hates her new school, where she is treated as a 'townie' outsider. Ruby and her cousin May are chalk and cheese and don't get along, and Ruby's little dog, Baxter, is no country dog. He is soon in trouble.
One of my favourite characters in this book is Uncle James's great-aunt Flora Cameron, who seems fierce but who will prove to be a very good friend to Ruby. Aunt Flora has already appeared in another book: she is the sweet curly-haired baby Nellie O'Neill meets in Nellie's Greatest Wish - eighty years earlier! I wonder how many readers will have spotted that?
I loved writing about Kettle Farm: it brought back so many memories of the farm where I grew up. The school, too, is based on the little primary school I went to for seven years.
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School Days for Ruby
School Days for Ruby
(Our Australian Girl, Book 3)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2013
Ruby has settled into school life, but things change dramatically for her when the four West children arrive in second term. Because their father is known to have been in prison, they are bullied by many of the other children. Only Ruby, who knows what it's like to be an outsider, offers them friendship. When the Wests are hounded from the school, Ruby and May go after them and try to help. But at the Wests' home, Ruby discovers something shocking about her much-loved Dad ...
For me the Wests are the real face of the Great Depression - a family so poor that the children go barefoot and often there is no food to eat. Compared with them, Ruby knows she is lucky.
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Ruby of Kettle Farm
Ruby of Kettle Farm
(Our Australian Girl, Book 4)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2013
By the end of Ruby of Kettle Farm, Ruby is very different from the carefree, rather thoughtless girl she was in Meet Ruby. She has lost a great deal, but gained even more, and now she knows what is really important to her.
The Depression lasted for about ten years and was a defining period in Australia's history. It brought misery to many people, but others say that although they were very poor, it was a happy time. It brought out the best in people, and taught them all sorts of important life skills. I think Ruby would probably agree.
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The Gift
The Gift
Illustrated by Martin McKenna | Omnibus Books, 2012This book has been eight years in the making: Martin McKenna's beautiful illustrations have at last brought it most vividly to life.
The idea for the story came to me when I was looking through a department-store Christmas toy catalogue. It seemed to me that few of the toys advertised were the sort you could love simply for their own sake. Almost all of them did something. They were bright and plastic and interactive, and playing with them, although entertaining, would require little imagination. It made me think of toys generally, and of Christmas in particular, and especially of what Christmas, and gift-giving, are all about. Martin's final illustration in the book says it all, wordlessly.
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Meet Nellie
Meet Nellie
(Our Australian Girl, Book 1)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2012Awards:
REAL Awards 2013: Fiction for Younger Readers (shortlisted) For Teachers' notes click hereFor me 12-year-old Nellie O'Neill sums up the Irish character: she's proud, funny, tragic, warm-hearted, a bit cheeky. No matter how bleak things are for her, she never loses her optimism. Nellie lost all her family in the Great Hunger, the terrible potato famine that crippled Ireland in the 1840s. Orphaned, homeless and starving, she was placed in a workhouse, and in 1849, along with 200 or so other orphan girls, she was shipped out to South Australia to work as a servant. We meet her just as the Elgin is docking at Port Adelaide, and Nellie and her best friend Mary are talking about their wishes for the future.
Writing Nellie's story meant doing a lot of research: about the potato famine, about nineteenth-century workhouses, about the Orphan Immmigration Scheme. Unearthing the details was endlessly interesting.
Meet Nellie is the first of four interlinked books about Nellie, part of Penguin's wonderful Our Australian Girl series about Australian girls who lived at different times in our history. You can find out more at ouraustraliangirl.com.au
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Nellie and the Secret Letter
Nellie and the Secret Letter
(Our Australian Girl, Book 2)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2012Nellie O'Neill's adventures continue in this second book. She has been parted from the friendly and considerate family she worked for, the Thompsons, and has moved to another job, this time as kitchen maid in a wealthy household where her friend Mary is nursery maid. Here she makes an implacable enemy in Bessie Rudge, the cook, who (like many English people at the time) has a deep dislike of the Irish and an ingrained belief in the rigid English class system. Nellie misses the Thompsons and particularly her friend Tom Thompson, who has been teaching her to read. She struggles to write a long-promised letter to Tom. But why doesn't he write back?
My research for Nellie and the Secret Letter included finding out how wealthy Adelaide people lived, details of the class system that prevailed in Victorian times, and what it would have been like to work in a colonial kitchen. Years ago I wrote a book called Australian Colonial Cookery, and that helped a lot.
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Nellie's Quest
Nellie's Quest
(Our Australian Girl, Book 3)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2012Awards:
YABBA Awards 2017: Fiction for Older Readers (shortlisted) For Teachers' notes click here
Burra is a historic copper-mining town in South Australia's mid north. Much of it is still almost exactly as it was in 1850, when it was one of the biggest inland towns in Australia, so it was easy for me to imagine Nellie there. At the height of the mining boom many miners lived in dug-out homes in the bank of the Burra Creek, and Nellie lives briefly with a kind and hospitable Cornish couple in their strange little underground home. But she can't stay in Burra for ever ... she still has no job, and she knows that Mary needs her.
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Nellie's Greatest Wish
Nellie's Greatest Wish
(Our Australian Girl, Book 4)Illustrated by Lucia Masciullo | Penguin Books, 2012What Nellie discovers when she returns to Adelaide will change her for ever.
For a great many Irish workhouse orphans their new life in Australia didn't turn out as they expected. Often it was difficult for them to find employment, and some did end up on the streets, living as beggars or worse. It's a sad little chapter in South Australia's history. I couldn't ignore it: it was a fact, and historically it was very possible that Nellie would find herself in a situation she'd always dreaded, and which Bessie Rudge cruelly predicted for her. But for Nellie, unlike some of the real-life orphans, there is always hope. What happens to her? Will all the wishes she made on the Elgin come true at last?
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Show Day
Show Day
Illustrated by Andrew McLean | Scholastic/Omnibus Books, 2012When I was a child and we lived in the country, we always went to the annual Mount Pleasant Show. Country shows represent the very best of country life - all those beautifully groomed animals, glossy fruits, perfect cakes and jams, exquisitely made baby clothes and jumpers and patchwork quilts ... I loved the horses in action, and the wood-chopping, and the sections specially for children: best pet, best hobby, best handwriting. My favourite was 'Best pair of polished boots'. (You don't see that one nowadays!) Small country shows are starting to die out now, and I think that's terribly sad. They have a character and camaraderie that's missing in the much bigger statewide shows.
Andrew McLean's illlustrations capture the atmosphere of the show so beautifully. You can almost smell the popcorn!
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Crusher Kevin (Aussie Nibbles)
Crusher Kevin (Aussie Nibbles)
Illustrated by Andrew McLean | Penguin Books, 2011Award:
CBCA Notable Book, 2012
A while ago a couple of luxury home units were being built in street near where we live. One day I noticed that there was a guard dog on the construction site. He was a big, plain dog with a fearsome bark, but I suspected that he wasn't nearly as fierce as he looked. He looked lonely.The site was cold and muddy, and I was sorry for him - especially on weekends, when the builders weren't working. I found out from a woman who lived nearby that the dog's name was Terence, and that he was quite old, and that his sight was failing. There, in a nutshell, was the story of Crusher Kevin.
When the units were completed, Terence disappeared, along with the builders and their trucks. I hope people were kind to him.
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Zizzy
Zizzy
Illustrated by Danny Snell | Omnibus Books, 2010Award:
City of Onkaparinga Children's Choice Award, 2012 (shortlisted) For Teachers' notes click here -
A Girl Like Me
A Girl Like Me
Penguin Books, 2010Awards:
CBCA Notable Book, 2010 Davitt Award (Children’s and Young Adult Literature): Winner, 2011 Read an author interview on betweenthelines.com.au For Teachers' notes
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Something About Water
Something About Water
Illustrated by Tom Jellett | Omnibus Books, 2009Awards:
Australian Educational Publishing Awards, 2009: Primary Library Book: winner Wilderness Society, Environment Award for Children's Literature, 2010: joint winner For Teachers' notes click here -
Look, Baby!
Look, Baby!
Illustrated by Cheryl Orsini | Working Title Press, 2009 -
Heart of Magic (Lightning Strikes)
Heart of Magic (Lightning Strikes)
Walker Books, 2008This story is about two very different girls who are best friends. Stacey is quiet and shy, and longs to be more like confident, pretty Twyla. On the day they go to the Royal Show for Twyla's birthday treat, they very unexpectedly have a quarrel. Stacey, furious with her friend, decides to go and have fun on her own. She meets a gypsy woman who gives her a gold heart pin, and after that things change dramatically. To her surprise, shy Stacey turns into someone very like her ex-best friend. I set the action in a showground because it's so noisy and colourful, the sort of place where almost anything could happen. -
Fairy Four-Eyes (Aussie Bites)
Fairy Four-Eyes (Aussie Bites)
Illustrated by Emma Quay | Penguin Books, 2007 -
Pudding and Chips
Pudding and Chips
Illustrated by Janine Dawson | ABC Books, 2004Awards:
CBCA Notable Book, 2005 -
Little Red Bear
Little Red Bear
Illustrated by Anna Pignataro | Scholastic Press, 2003Awards:
Queensland Premier's Literary Awards 2004 (shortlisted) CBCA Notable Book, 2004 -
A Year on Our Farm
A Year on Our Farm
Illustrated by Andrew McLean | Omnibus Books, 2002Awards:
CBCA Book of the Year: Early Childhood, 2003: winner CBCA Picture Book of the Year, 2003: Honour Book For Teachers' notes click here -
Jump, Baby!
Jump, Baby!
Illustrated by Dominique Falla | Omnibus Books, 2002 -
Jack's Owl: Omnibus Solos
Jack's Owl: Omnibus Solos
Illustrated by Stephen Michael King | Omnibus Books, 1999 -
The Sea Dog: Omnibus Solos
The Sea Dog: Omnibus Solos
Illustrated by Andrew McLean | Omnibus Books, 1998 -
Potato Baby
Potato Baby
ABC Books, 1997Awards:
CBCA Notable Book, 1998
Potato Baby was the first book in which I used the Irish potato famine as part of the storyline: it plays a much bigger role in the Nellie (Our Australian Girl) books.
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The Best Pet: Omnibus Solos
The Best Pet: Omnibus Solos
Illustrated by Beth Norling| Omnibus Books, 1997Awards:
CBCA Notable Book, 1998 -
Moving On
Moving On
Illustrated by Penny Walton| Ashton Scholastic, 1993