Penny Matthews

Ruby 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.

There 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 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.

I 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 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!

When 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!

The '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.

 

For 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