Leave a comment Posted on June 7, 2016June 4, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Guest posts, Inspirations, Juvenilia

Small Beginnings, 5: Hazel Edwards

Hazel, aged 6

I always knew I wanted to be an author, but wasn’t sure how to do it.

My first writing was for the children’s page in the local newspaper where you got credits & certificates. I also belonged to the ABC Radio Argonauts children’s program, where stories were read out on the wireless. Probably I was about 8, when my first writing went in the newspaper. It was about a para long. But each Saturday morning I’d race to pull out the Children’s page. I’ve always been a messy newspaper reader.

I was fascinated that black squiggles on paper were the code to get inside a writer’s head.

My Grandma read to me and I learnt to read myself before I started school.

I started diaries on January 1^st but they’d usually been forgotten by the end of that month. I was more interested in other worlds. (That’s probably why I like co-writing now).

I can’t remember what I wrote about, because I was writing most of the time.

The first book-length story I remember finishing in about Grade 6 was a kind of Enid Blyton style mystery with a group of children down a mine. I didn’t know how to finish the story, so I left them there.

Maybe that’s why I now like well plotted mysteries.

Hazel’s latest books are her memoir ‘Not Just a Piece of Cake; Being an Author’ and the co-written ‘Hijabi Girl’. ‘Hippo!Hippo! the Musical’ is touring nationally.

http://www.hazeledwards.com/page/hijabi_girl.html

http://www.hazeledwards.com/page/not_just_a_piece_of_cake_being_an_author.html ‘Anecdultery’ the first chapter in the memoir explains the challenges of exaggerating childhood stories.

Leave a comment Posted on June 6, 2016June 4, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Guest posts, Inspirations, Juvenilia

Small Beginnings, 4: Wendy Orr

Putting on play for parents

I started writing stories and poems as soon as I learned to read and write in English, when I turned seven. Before that, as a Canadian Anglophone child going to school in France, I wrote only in French – my mother still has letters I wrote while she was in hospital – and I wrote only letters. But English was not simply the language we spoke at home, it was the language of stories: both bedtime books, and my father’s crazy made-up

stories. Learning to read in it gave me the freedom to create my own.

From ‘Spring Island’

What I remember most is not the stories – or poems or plays – themselves, but the act of creating: the taste of the thoughtfully chewed pencil, the sun coming through the window onto my paper, the never being quite comfortable kneeling to work on the coffee table – but most of all, the joy of creating something new. Something I never doubted would be extraordinary, at least until I lost interest in it and moved on to the next piece. (The project to write a poem for every letter of the alphabet fizzled out after Puppies). But some persevered for years. When I visited my parents in Canada after a US tour for the Nim’s Island movie premiere, my mother found the story I’d written at 8 or 9: ‘Spring Island. From the changes in handwriting in the notebooks, we guessed that it covered two school years.

I quite deliberately channeled this story when I was writing Nim’s Island: not so much the story itself – a girl and boy meet after running away from their orphanages, and live alone on an island until they get adopted and get horses. In fact, until I saw the notebooks I’d forgotten that there was a boy in the story, although I then remembered his primary purpose: to kill fish. I identified too strongly with the girl to have her do it. (Don’t condemn me, this was 1963. When Nim needs to eat a fish, she kills it herself.)

Small Beginnings 3: Goldie Alexander

Goldie at age 16

I didn’t really start writing my own stuff until quite late in life. Somehow there was nothing in my schooling that encouraged any form of creativity. If ever I tried to write an essay that contained a story, I was actively discouraged, told to leave that to ‘proper’ writers. We kids were instructed to keep to discursive essays.

So what I did when I was young, and still do when life gets me down, is read. And all that reading produced a wealth of imagination. I had always been a voracious reader. But when I was a kid reading was considered ‘a big waste of time’ when one ought to be doing something more ‘useful’. I got into so much trouble for always having a book with me, in fact was almost expelled from a small private school for calling the sewing teacher (I hated sewing) a ’fat pig’ when she caught me reading under the desk instead of learning to hemstitch.

I read everything I could lay my hands on. Looking back, some books would have been regarded as inappropriate, such as ‘The Body’s Rapture’ by Jules Romains which I found in my mother’s bookshelf. It did explain something about sex to a generation kept in blissful ignorance.

So my first true experience with writing came in my third year at university when, between countless and very boring essays, one assignment was to write a play. That was it. I fell in love with writing.

Goldie today

One would think all that early reading would have encouraged me to write wonderfully well right from the start. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I started with adult short stories, even had one accepted by ‘The Australian Literary Supplement’ that was never actually printed. But given I was now teaching English and History to secondary students and at the time there was so little written for kids in an Aussie setting I had a go at my first novel.

I don’t have it any more. All I can say is that it had a very long title – this was fashionable at the time – and questionable plot and characters. I remember when asked by a publisher what it was about, being left totally tongue tied.

What did fall into my lap was being commissioned by Greenhouse Publications in the early 90’s to write young adult novels.

I was given very specific instructions. They had to be no more than thirty two thousand words. The setting was to be contemporary. Though the story should show girls becoming more empowered – this was at the height of women’s lib – it must contain some romantic element.

Such specific instructions meant I had something to hang onto, as back then there were no creative writing classes. If it was still a matter of hit and miss, I had a terrific editor who ‘fixed up’ my mistakes.

So my very first novel called ‘EVERYTHING CHANGES’, and written under the pseudonym Gerri Lapin, opens like this:

****

JOIN DONABEL’S MUSICAL PRODUCTION OF GREASE

AUDITIONS FOR SPEAKING PARTS AND CHORUS FRIDAY 23 JUNE

“Christie and I pushed our way through the group of people milling about the noticeboard, then headed toward the canteen.

‘I saw that film on video last year’, Christie was saying. ‘The girls wear fab fifties gear; tight pants, dresses with necklines right down to here,’ she pointed to a spot barely above her waist, ’Tiny waists and full skirts.’

We found Christie’s boyfriend Wayne, sprawled out on a chair, halfway through a Mars bar. ‘How about Donabel putting on its own production?’ Christie asked, flopping down beside him. ‘Jo reckons we should get into it.’

***

Of course it had some romantic twists though everything ended in a satisfying way. I was so proud of my first novel that I showed it to all my friends. I remember one telling me he had picked it up in a bookshop.

I asked, ’Did you read it?’

He gave me a disdainful look. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Not the sort of stuff that interests me.’

Ah well. Those books gave me, and quite a number of other well known writers, the start we needed. Since then, I have never stopped writing.

Goldie Alexander writes award winning short stories, articles, radio scripts, plays and books. Her novels are published both in Australia and overseas for readers of all ages. Her latest book, a fantasy/scifi novel for older children, is Cybertricks. Her books for adults include: ‘The Grevillea Murder Mysteries’ ‘Lilbet’s Romance’, Dessi’s Romance’, ‘Penelope’s Ghost

and ‘Mentoring Your Memoir’. Her first YA novel ‘Mavis Road Medley’ was a Notable CBCA, was shortlisted for by the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs and is listed as one of the best YA books in the Victorian State Library. Her best known book for children is: ‘My Australian Story: Surviving Sydney Cove’. Her fiction for children includes three collections of short stories and several mysteries, fantasies and science fictions. Her other historical fictions include: ‘The Youngest Cameleer’, ‘That Stranger Next Door’, My Holocaust Story: Hanna’ and the verse novel ‘In Hades’. She has also co-authored a non-fiction book, The Business of Writing for Young People, with fellow writer Hazel Edwards.

1 Comment Posted on June 3, 2016May 20, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Inspirations, Juvenilia

Small Beginnings, 2: Nick Earls

A young Nick(foreground), with friends

I’ve taken Small Beginnings literally and gone back to the earliest existing examples of me coming to grips with the written word. In fact, written letters.

I turned up at school six weeks short of five years old. Storytelling was already a big part of my life by then – the revelation that it might actually be A JOB took another few years to happen. My family had always been big on books and full of stories, so I’d had a formula story that I’d told most days at Ballyholme Playgroup before lining up for one of the two classrooms at the sternly Victorian-looking Grangee School in 1968. In my stories, the central character, a bird called Tommy, would tumble into a toilet and be flushed all the way to a sewage treatment plant and another adventure among the poo and big orange diggers. My audience had all been four too, and what do four year olds love? Poo and big orange diggers. Since then, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so astute about writing effectively for a market.

But Grangee wasn’t about stories, at least not that first day. It was about taking the first faltering step up the steep slope that led to literacy. I opened my school jotter (it says ‘Jotter’ on the front) and, as Mrs Pollock directed, wrote a page of ‘O’s. Note the big pink tick. Mission accomplished. Then I turned over and wrote a page of ‘X’s. Another tick. Then we went home for lunch.

Afterwards I was horrified to learn that I’d be going back. And not just going back – going back most days for the next twelve years. I thought I’d had the school experience. I’d turned up, done my page of ‘X’s and my page of ‘O’s, got my two ticks. What more could there be to know?

Quite a bit, it turned out. How to manage a page, for a start, as my increasingly huge and truncated attempts to write ‘Dick Has the Dog’ demonstrate.

Less than two years later, I’d learned enough to write the work that could, with generous definitional stretching, be called my first book. It’s a journal of a holiday with my grandparents in Yorkshire. I can remember sitting and writing it each night at the kitchen tables of elderly relatives and family friends – people who had featured in the books of James Herriot – putting a lot of thought and work into it, even though it comes across as just the facts:

Tuesday 7th July 1970.
It was hot and sunny so we went to Knaresboro’ to see Mother Shiptons dropping well, wishing well and cave
In the afternoon we went to Ripon and looked round the Cathedral and then on to Studley Royal Park where there is a large herd of deer.

If it had been overcast, would we still have gone to Knaresborough (I’m sure I picked up ‘Knaresboro’’ from a road sign)? I don’t know, but I can still remember the dropping well and its petrifying socks and teddy bears on strings. That stuff comes back to you in dreams at that age.

Since those days, I’ve turned to fiction, Grangee School has long closed and business seems to remain good at Mother Shipton’s, now in its 386th year as a tourist attraction. And my son, at the age of 6 1/2, is about to take a week off school for us to go to Hong Kong. In lieu of schoolwork, he’s been giving the assignment of keeping a journal of the trip.

Nick Earls has written more than twenty books for adults, teenagers and children. His latest project is the novella series Wisdom Tree, with a novella released (as a paper book, ebook and audiobook) on the first of each month from May to September 2016.

1 Comment Posted on June 2, 2016May 20, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Guest posts, Inspirations, Juvenilia

Small Beginnings 1: Dianne(Di) Bates

Di as a child

The first writing I did as a child was, I’m told, a letter to Santa Claus. My mother said I asked for ‘a typewriter and a good temper’. I’m not sure how old I was, probably about 5 or 6. When I was in sixth grade at a new one-teacher school, I wrote an essay about my ideal home. After the teacher read it aloud, children came up to me in the playground and accused me of plagiarism. Their accusations hurt me so much I can’t remember working hard at writing thereafter.

However, in my first year of high school, I befriended Pamela, the daughter of our English head-teacher. Pamela and I loved a series that was currently showing on TV – Adventures in Paradise. We both imagined ourselves the love interest of the leading man, Troy Donaghue. Consequently we spent hours in the playground co-writing TV scripts where Troy Donaghue would fall in love with each of us.

I wish when I was young someone would have given me books – both to read and to write in. But books were simply absent from my home. Their substitute was hard work on our farm. The only books I read as a child were borrowed once a week when I took myself to the local public library. I don’t remember the librarian ever offering me any books to read other than my regular diet of Enid Blyton books. Nowadays I am never without a book in my hands! Unless I’m writing, of course.

Di Bates is the author of 130+ books, mostly for young readers. Her website, which she shares with her YA author husband, Bill Condon, is http://www.enterprisingwords.com.au. Since 2006, Di has been producing a twice monthly magazine, Buzz Words, for those in the Australian children’s book industry http://www.buzzwordsmagazine.com She is a recipient of the Lady Cutler Award for distinguished services to children’s literature.

4 Comments Posted on June 1, 2016May 20, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Creative work, Inspirations, Juvenilia

A new blog series, Small Beginnings: Introduction

I’m starting a great new series on this blog today. It’s called Small Beginnings and it’s a unique look at how authors and illustrators began creating–not their published work, but much earlier than that, as children, teenagers or even young adults (up to early twenties). I think that this is absolutely fascinating in terms of showing how an author or illustrator begins to shape their craft well before the time they even start to think about the possibility of sending off work for publication.

So I’ve asked a number of fellow authors and illustrators to write about what they created in their early years, and if they still have examples of such work, to show us extracts from them. The response has been fantastic and so I’m delighted to inaugurate the series today with something of mine, as an introduction to Small Beginnings.

Me aged about 6, with older sister Beatrice(11) and my father.

I wrote a lot as a child and a teenager. I came to Australia from France with my parents and sisters when I was nearly five, and by then I could already read and write a little in French taught by my grandmother, who’d looked after me for some years(due to illness when I was a baby, making me unfit to stay in Indonesia where I’d been born and where my parents were working). I was already mad for stories–oral as well as written and I loved making up my own too. But it was arriving in Australia and starting to write in English that really got me going creatively speaking. I was lucky enough that in all the schools I went to, creative writing was very much encouraged, and at home, we were so surrounded by books and also by the great stories told by my parents that bathing in an atmosphere of story felt totally natural, though the idea that you could be a writer, as a job, didn’t really enter my head till I was well into my teens.

I don’t remember much of the very early stuff I wrote, but a few titles from primary school-age literary projects still stick in my mind: such as The Adventures of Princess Alicia–a lavishly illustrated, multi-episode comic strip story about a heroine who had two attributes I dearly wished I had–not, not a crown, but magic powers: and long blond hair (my hair was long but very dark!) I illustrated this masterpiece too I might add, in the days before I became embarassed by my lack of talent in that direction. And The Life of a Stamp, a

Aged 16, with younger siblings Gabrielle and Bertrand.

Aged 16, with younger siblings Gabrielle(10) and Bertrand (8)

mystery/travel story centred on yes, a wandering stamp which gets posted on the wrong letters and gets in some sticky situations..There was The Twins’ Highland Holiday which was heavily influenced by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, and there were several poems including one about a ladybird that I got a gold star for in class(I presented the poem written on the back of an illustration of a ladybird). Much of it I remember ‘publishing’ in little books, simply sheets of paper stapled up with hand-drawn covers, with perhaps a little stamp or sticker added to make it look more ‘official’. For a while I even ran a little story club at primary school which I called ‘The Bluebell Club’ (no doubt influenced by Blyton!) in which members read out their own stories. We even had a competition once in which the prize was a book, bought by my mother, who judged the competition–I was very miffed that she didn’t choose mine! As I loved the theatre–I used to go to after school drama classes–I also wrote a lot of plays, very often adaptations of fairy tales, which I wrote, directed and produced and forced my siblings to act in and my parents to watch. My mother was always very kind about these thespian efforts but my father could be quite sardonic about it, slow-hand-clapping and pointing out the narrative flaws rather loudly: an experience which hardened me up for later and occasional poor reviews!

Unfortunately none of that early writing was kept. It’s only when I was in mid-high school that I protested about parents’ tidying-up urge to chuck everything out and hung on to my writings like a determined limpet! So I have quite a few things from that time–lots of poems, a few short stories, and the beginning of a massive fantasy novel started when I was around 16(and in which I intended to reunite every mythology in the world: nothing like teenage ambition!). And then, from a little later, at 19, a picture book–the text written by me, the illustrations by my youngest sister, Gabrielle, who was 13 at the time. That one survives in its entirety(you can see some pages from it it below).

In all of this what I can see is a young writer who is trying her hand at all sorts of things, enjoying playing around with different forms, flitting around from fantasy to realism, contemporary to historical, light hearted to rather serious, long to short. The craft is rather wonky, but the passion and curiosity–yes, and persistence too!–is very much there. I see, in short, an apprenticeship taking place without my even being aware that it was happening; how could I, when it was so much fun?

2 Comments Posted on May 18, 2016May 17, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Interviews, Publishers, Publishing business

Double Act 7: Anna Solding of Midnight Sun

Today, I’m revisiting my ‘Double Act’ series of interviews with authors who are also publishers, and who started their own publishing houses. And I’m interviewing Anna Solding of Midnight Sun Publishing, a small press that has gone from strength to strength since it started a few short years ago.

Anna, when and how did Midnight Sun start? What motivated you to start your own publishing company?

It started one day when I had lunch with a close friend who is an entrepreneur. Even though my novel manuscript The Hum of Concrete had been nominated for three awards for unpublished manuscripts, no publisher had picked it up. My friend thought this was a shame so he suggested: ‘Why don’t we start a publishing company?’ You know, as you do, over lunch, just like that. My, quite logical and heartfelt, reply was: ‘Because we are not crazy…’ Five years later, we are crazier than ever and MidnightSun is beginning to take off in a big way. My friend’s initial expertise and help was invaluable and I would never have contemplated starting a publishing company if he hadn’t come up with the idea. My novel The Hum of Concrete went on to be nominated for another three awards once it was published, including the Commonwealth Book Awards, which meant we were off to a promising start and we felt that perhaps we could keep doing this.

How did you initially persuade booksellers to stock your books?

I was lucky enough to convince Wakefield Press, another independent Adelaide publisher, to distribute our books nationwide. It’s not really what they normally do so they only did it to be kind and give me a break, which was very nice of them. For the last couple of years our books have been distributed by NewSouth Books, who do a terrific job, getting our books into bookshops (and occasionally even into discount departments stores) around Australia and New Zealand.

Have your aims and strategies as a publisher changed from the beginning? How?

Yes and no. The aim has always been to publish amazing books, both in terms of content and design; books that you can lose yourself in, books that look stylish and feel good in your hand. That is still our main aim. On our website we say: ‘MidnightSun Publishing has grown out of a disenchantment with the established publishing houses in Australia. We know there are plenty of fabulous manuscripts about unusual topics floating around, but publishing new and unknown writers poses a big risk. MidnightSun is prepared to take that risk. We want our readers to be entertained. We want to challenge, excite, enrage and overwhelm.’

When we started, we were mainly focused on adult literary fiction but now we also publish a wide range of books for children, from picture books to YA. I have always said that I will only publish books that I love and I think that is a good strategy for a small publisher. Because we spend so much time with each book, we really need to be comfortable talking about all aspects of it to anyone who will listen. Originally, I thought we’d just publish one or two books to see how they went but as all our books have made a profit it has always been easy to keep moving on to the next project. The more well-known MidnightSun becomes, the more high quality manuscripts are sent our way and the more projects we take on. When we started publishing in 2012, we did two books per year, in 2017 we are planning to do five. To publish five or six books per year would secure a more regular cash flow situation, which is something MidnightSun is still struggling with. The more I learn about the business, the more confident I get about all the small steps that need to happen for each book, including the metadata, the AI sheet, different ways to promote the book and which festivals and media contacts to approach.

Has working as a publisher impacted on your own career as an author–whether that be positive or negative?

Yes, I don’t think of myself as a writer first and foremost any more. Publishing has taken over my life, but I have let it happen and I love my job passionately so I’m certainly not complaining. I work with interesting people who all love books, so that has to count for something. Last year, I was fortunate enough to be awarded two writers’ retreat residencies, one month in Finland and one month in Perth, which were both fantastic months when I felt like a writer again. For years, I’ve been working on a ‘companion novel’ to The Hum of Concrete, also set in Sweden where I grew up, and it’s almost finished but I think I need one more retreat to get there. I would like to incorporate more writing into my everyday life, but when I can’t even get a Q&A like this one written until weeks after I should have delivered it, I’m not quite sure how to manage it.

What are the challenges and pleasures of small-press publishing, in your experience? Any memorable anecdotes?

I love finding new talent and nurturing the writers from the beginning. Kim Lock, whose novel Peace, Love and Khaki Socks, was published by MidnightSun in 2013 has since evolved into being our regular designer. Her new novel has recently been published by big publisher Macmillan, which we think is fantastic. Last year, we published Amanda Hickie’s An Ordinary Epidemic and that book will come out with a new cover and new title (Before This Is Over) in the US next year. There are so many pleasures.

The challenges are plentiful, as they should be. It took almost a year to design the cover for Cameron Raynes’ First Person Shooter and we finally decided on one we all liked after rejecting about 30 others. Fortunately, we have a very patient designer. However, one of the biggest challenges for small publishers is to get noticed in the mainstream press. MidnightSun has a loyal following in Adelaide but it’s always a struggle to even get a tiny review in the larger newspapers, let alone a feature article. The other main challenge, at least for us, is to manage our cash flow. Because MidnightSun is doing really well, our first picture book One Step at a Time by Jane Jolly and Sally Heinrich has been nominated for several awards including the important CBCA award, we are in a position where we need to reprint the book but we have had to take out a loan to be able to do so.

As much as there are plenty of challenges for small publishers, the pleasures of seeing a project through from manuscript form to the final product, a beautiful and thought-provoking book, clearly outweigh the challenges. The buzz of opening a box from the printer to see a new book for the first time is very special and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that feeling.

Any advice for aspiring author-publishers?

Go for it! If you are passionate about books and have some sense of business, publishing might be the perfect place for you. I’m not going to pretend that it is easy, because it certainly isn’t, but if you surround yourself people who can help you with aspect that you might be less familiar with, it could be worth giving publishing a go. I have had a bookkeeper and a designer from the start as those were two aspect of the business that I didn’t know that much about. Other than that, you have to learn to wear many different hats; as editor, publicist, sales director, head of marketing and the one who is ultimately responsible – whether things go fabulously or the complete opposite.

Distribution is extremely important and it’s very hard to find a distributor so it’s worth doing some research on this before you take the plunge. Dennis Jones distributes many small publishers. Talk to other small publishers, research printers, become a member of Small Press Network, learn the terminology (what is metadata? AI sheets? ISBN?), subscribe to the daily newsletter from Books+Publishing and, most importantly, find amazing manuscripts to publish. Without intriguing content and stunning production your books won’t be noticed. MidnightSun started in 2011 and we published our first book a year later, which felt right as that is how long it took to learn a bit about how the business works. The longer you have to prepare for a book, with marketing material, review copies, interviews, the better. Now that we are more established, we often work on a book for two years before publication. But don’t be scared, if publishing is your passion, just go for it!

Anna Solding

P.S. Metadata is the information that is put into search engines so that it will be easy to find. AI sheets are advance information sheets about the book, which often contain the cover image, a blurb, an author bio and photo, size, price, publication date and the all-important ISBN. The ISBN is the 13 digit number that is under the barcode, which is used by booksellers to identify the book.

1 Comment Posted on May 10, 2016 Uncategorized

Busy days coming up!

I’m off to Sydney today for a packed program of book events. Tomorrow I’m giving the Keynote Address at the Society of Women Writers lunch meeting in the State Library, as well as giving a workshop the same day in the same venue! On Saturday it’s the Australian Society of Authors’ AGM and then a Board meeting, also in the State Library. Next week on Wednesday and Thursday, I’m going to the Visiting International Publishers program events, and on the Thursday I have appointments with no less than seven visiting international publishers, to talk about our Christmas Press list! Then from Thursday evening to Saturday afternoon, it’s the CBCA National Conference, at which I’m a presenter–and will also be on a Christmas Press trade display table! It’s going to be hectic–but great!

2 Comments Posted on May 2, 2016May 1, 2016 Culture, Essays, Guest posts, Interviews, Language, Translation

Speaking in Tongues: a guest post by Sophie Constable

The pleasure and challenge of not being restricted to just one language is a subject dear to my heart (and close to my experience!) so today I am delighted to publish on my blog a wonderful article by writer Sophie Constable about the situation for multilingualism in Australia.

Sophie Constable has worked as an Antarctic researcher and veterinarian, been an expat trophy wife in the Middle East and did her PhD on health education with remote Australian Indigenous communities. Throughout, writing has remained her passion.

Speaking in tongues

by Sophie Constable

Exploring Australia’s language skills crisis

Rejoice! Jules Verne’s Mikhail Strogoff has just been published in English for the first time in over 100 years. I loved this book and I love that new generations of English speakers are getting the chance to follow the fabulously intrepid Mikhail through the Wild West of Russia’s Far East.

But the fact remains that translation of foreign language books – be they new masterpieces or old classics – is a tiny proportion of the English literary scene, as Strogoff’s translator Stephanie Smee has discussed. And globally, native English speakers are rarely able to enjoy literary works in the original language. Nowhere is this more true than Australia, where multilingualism, already the minority, is in steady decline.

If language, at its heart, is about humanity, as author Elizabeth Little writes, then Australians are losing their ability to understand the world.

Being bilingual, I sometimes forget multilingualism, the norm for much of the globe, isn’t the experience of most Australians. Though we’re a multicultural nation, most people consider English to be enough for our needs and even within bilingual families, bilingualism is declining across the generations.

Are Australians just not interested in languages? Is it too hard in a geographically isolated, monolingual society? What’s the point in learning languages anyway, apart from an exponential increase in the to-read pile?

Imogen Weafer, a retail assistant in Darwin’s Casuarina Square shopping centre who uses Japanese in her work, certainly wasn’t interested in languages when she younger, despite her grandmother and mother being bilingual in Latvian and English.

‘My grandma taught my mother, but I wasn’t interested. I regret that now,’ she says.

Miss Weafer considered that she grew up in a society that didn’t value foreign languages.

‘I lived among generation after generation of farmers who all speak English and nothing else, and think Sydney is overseas,’ she said.

She didn’t consider learning another language until going to Japan after year 11. She chose to stay in Japan rather than study Japanese at school: ‘In school, my Japanese teacher was a French teacher,’ she said, unimpressed. It’s a common problem: more than 100 schools discontinued their languages program between 2003 and 2006, specifically due to a lack of qualified staff.

But English isn’t Australia’s only local language. Growing up on the edge of the Barossa Valley, Ingkerreke Commercial project manager Daryl Thompson didn’t consider German a foreign language. He grew up with it, going to a high school where many students had German heritage. Though all students had to learn to German, by the end of high school he’d learnt more from his classmates than from the teacher.

‘I could swear at people’ he said, ‘and they can understand.’

Darryl Thompson

Despite only speaking English at home and never having taken a language course, Mr. Thompson has since learnt parts of nine other languages. He learned these on building sites around Australia by talking with co-workers. ‘The Australian construction industry is a multinational industry,’ he says. ‘Italians and Greeks do concrete, Vietnamese do the tiling, Croats and Russians do the gyprocking. Knowing a bit of their languages shows that you are interested in them as a person; they are more amenable to do what you want them to do. People that don’t make an effort won’t get as far.’

Sure, many find the idea of learning a language confronting. CSC Adult Night Classes Japanese teacher Mikiko Kawano explains, ‘just like losing weight, you have to do it for a long time to see a result.’ This largely explains why those who beginning learning at a young age become more proficient. However the idea that it’s too hard to learn other languages doesn’t hold with Mr. Thompson. ‘That’s just excuses,’ he says. ‘In today’s era of technology, of internet, easily purchasable online media, audio and video, there’s no reason why people can’t learn.’ CDU Indonesian lecturer Nathan Franklin agrees, finding that the opportunities to learn languages are all around us. ‘They are walking past us in the streets,’ Dr. Franklin says, ‘they are working in the shops.’

The latest census counted almost 400 languages spoken in Australia, including over a hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. Most of Australia’s language skills come from recent immigrants: 87% of Australian secondary school students will have dropped out of language courses after two years or less. For those who are studying languages, Australian students spend less time learning than any other OECD country.

I don’t come from a bilingual family. Nor did I learn my second language overseas. The reason I speak French is that my school went against the trend. Telopea Park Public School in the A.C.T. has an agreement with the French government to import French national teachers to teach in a bilingual system from primary school onwards. And it is one of the only schools in Australia producing entire classes of fluently bilingual students every year.

O.K., so maintaining the bi-national relationship was difficult at times. I’ll never forget the expression on my French teacher’s face when a quarter of the secondary student body protested the testing of nuclear weapons at Mururoa atoll by refusing to stand for the French national anthem during assembly. We experienced first-hand the impact of international relations at the personal level. But isn’t that, after all, what language learning is all about?

Against the trend of declining bilingualism elsewhere, my new home in the Northern Territory has the highest proportion of multilinguists in Australia, and it’s rising. I’ve come to the right place, then!

Eva McRae Williams

Eva McRae-Williams, Senior Researcher with Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, finds exposure motivates others. She says, ‘In Darwin you hear five different languages in the supermarket. Warlpiri, French, Thai, Yolngu, Sudanese.’ These languages are economically important as tourism and remote community work are some of the biggest employers in the Territory.

Motivation is notoriously lacking in native English-speakers. In French there is a saying: a man who speaks three languages is trilingual, a man who speaks two languages is bilingual, a man who speaks only one language is English. Though English is the language which unites us, it’s also isolating us, Dr Franklin finds, because it reduces the compulsion to learn other languages. ‘The Western mentality is that everyone needs to learn English, as English is the lingua franca of the world,’ Dr Franklin states. Whereas ‘[English-speakers] don’t need to learn another language to get a job’, here, as well as overseas, ‘students and business-owners know they need to speak English and they learn out of necessity’.

However, in a global market place, sharing a language can markedly increase bilateral trade and reduces tariffs, according to research. While historically this has been a boon for trade with the UK and the US, seven of the Australia’s top ten two-way trading partners are now countries where English is a second language, including China and Japan, as well as the vast majority of our fastest growing markets, including Indonesia and India. That can put English monolinguals at a disadvantage at the negotiating table. The rise of Asia may threaten English’s dominant economic position – and that’s a problem for many Australian businesses.

For Dr. Chie Adachi, speaking as Linguistics Lecturer at the Australian Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Education, the value of language learning is broader than its purely economic context. ‘If you aren’t learning a language because you don’t see a purpose in it, you are missing the point,’ she says. ‘It’s about changing the way you think.’

New research by a team at the Stanford University is finding more evidence supporting the idea that languages affect how we think. Lera Boroditsky’s team has found that which language you use affects concepts as varied as colour differentiation, spatial orientation, direction of time and causality. Dr. Boroditsky’s findings make sense for Jack Wang, a Chinese-born administrative assistant. ‘Being able to speak another language gives you a different perspective on the world around you,’ he said. Growing up in censorship-rich China, that was ‘mind-blowing’. Dr. Adachi agrees, ‘it allows you to think more broadly and in different ways, which can be a rare experience.’

Ms. McRae-Williams found being a minority English speaker in spaces shaped by Aboriginal languages a transformative experience, saying ‘it opened up another world for me.’ Like 80% of

Australians, Ms. McRae-Williams spoke only English at home before going to Ngukurr in the Northern Territory, where Ngukurr Kriol is the local language. ‘Kriol seems to have a smaller vocabulary of words but there are important subtleties when you use those words and who to,’ she says. ‘Even though there are many English sounding words, they can be used differently, with different

Pitjantjatjara country

connotations and meanings. English speakers might think they are understanding what the Kriol speaker is saying but they are not understanding them, really.’ For example, she found ‘that unlike English language it is rare for people speaking in Kriol to use the word “I” or “myself”, rather “mela” is used which means “we” or “us”. Her experience of how cultural perspectives and knowledge are embedded in language gave her a new insight into centuries of intercultural misunderstanding.

The misunderstandings over land are a prime example. In Pitjanjatjara, you don’t say ‘what is that place?’ but rather ‘who is that place?’ Land is related to people like a grandfather or aunty is: land is a “person” in the Pitjanjatara world view. The idea of “owning” your grandfather becomes nonsensical; the idea of abandoning it, impossible.

Given the historic and ongoing lack of understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and the national and international consequences of wider intercultural misunderstanding, the question ought not be why learn a language, but why not?

Hunting Papa in the Hills, by Alan Wilson, Pitjantjatjara elder

Leave a comment Posted on April 29, 2016April 27, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Essays, fairy tales, Inspirations, Interviews, New books

The power of fairy tales: an interview with Katherine Langrish

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Katherine Langrish, author of a number of wonderful fantasy novels for older children, who has just released her new book–a collection of essays on fairy tale.

Your new book, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, has just been published by Greystones Press, and unlike your other books, it’s a work of non-fiction: but like your other books, it shares a common element–a fascination with fairy tale and folklore. Why are you so interested in them?

Quite simply, I’ve loved fairy tales and folklore ever since I was a child. I’ve never understood why some people feel it’s a taste adults ought to grow out of, unless perhaps the only fairy tales they’ve encountered have been the simplest versions retold for very little children. Fairy tales can be profound and as inexplicable as poetry. As I discuss in the book, a story like the Grimms’ tale ‘The Juniper Tree’ deals with enormous themes – murder, jealousy and abuse as well as birth, resurrection, and joyful communion with the natural world. It will ‘mean’ something slightly different to everyone who reads or hears it, because it elicits from each person their own emotional and spiritual response. In fact, this story was probably rewritten by a German romantic poet, but that’s the other fascination of fairy tales. They don’t ‘belong’ to anyone, they’re anonymous, so they adapt to the voice of whoever’s telling the story. And they’re so old! People have been telling stories like these for centuries.

It’s such a large topic–did you try to pursue a particular line of inquiry or reflection in the book, or is it more organic? And what challenges and pleasures did you find in putting together the collection?

Many of the essays in the book began life on my blog (see below), although for this collection they were massively rewritten and extended. I did not think I had chosen any specific line of enquiry, but to my own fascination I found as I went through the rewrites that a theme was in fact emerging: that of ‘authenticity’. What does, what can that mean in terms of traditional tales? Is the ‘earliest’ version of a particular tale ‘more authentic’ than a later one? My conclusion was, repeatedly, that while it can be fascinating to trace the history and analogues of a tale, it renews itself on the lips of the latest storyteller.

Did any particular fairy tale or folklore scholars influence you in terms of interpretation and reflection?

There are so many wonderful fairy tale and folklore scholars, an embarrassment of riches, but I have to mention the great Katherine Briggs, whose four volume ‘Dictionary of British Folk-Tales’ is a Bible in the field, and whose other books of fairy lore I love – such as ‘The Anatomy of Puck’ and ‘The Vanishing People’. I like her insistence on the primacy of narrative. I also love Max Lüthi’s ‘The European Folk Tale’ which so clearly illuminates the form and content of the classic European fairy tale. Most of the interpretations and reflections in ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles’ are my own, however – if only because I read the stories long before I read any of the scholars.

You’ve maintained a blog with the same name as the book, over several years. It’s a wonderful title. Where does it come from, and was the blog a bit of a testing-ground for the book?

The title of both the book and the blog comes from an old Irish fairy tale, ‘The King Who Had Twelve Sons’. In it, the hero has to ride ‘over seven miles of hill on fire, and seven miles of steel thistles, and seven miles of sea’. I love it as a metaphor for overcoming life’s difficulties, including the sometimes endless-seeming struggle to write well. I suppose the blog has become a testing-ground for the book, though I never expected a book to come of it. I began the blog simply as a place where I could write about the things I love – children’s literature, fantasy, fairy tales and folk-lore – and where I could talk with others who love them too. Does it sound too fey a comparison, if I say that the blog turned into a fairy garden and the book has grown up out of it like a tree?

Do you have particular favourites in terms of fairy tales? If so, which–and why?

I do – and I’ve written about some of them in the book. I’ve already mentioned ‘The Juniper Tree’, and I also love ‘Briar Rose’ and ‘Jorinda and Joringel’. But the story I love best to tell aloud is the English fairy tale ‘Mr Fox’, a very old version of Bluebeard with a far more intelligent and courageous heroine.

What are your favourite folkloric creatures?

My absolute favourites are the household fairies – the brownies, nisses, tomtes and domovoys which live with human beings and help (and sometimes hinder) them. I’ve written about then in several of my books for children: they’re an independent, mischievous, yet devoted race. They offer their services freely and will stay for so long as they are treated with respect and a dish of cream or oatmeal is left out for them on the hearth. I love the way stories about them mingle Otherness with domesticity. And I think they’re very, very old – as old as the story of Rachel in Genesis, who steals the household gods from her father Laban.

Your novels and short stories borrow from several different cultural traditions–can you tell us a little about that?

I began with Scandinavian folk-tales about trolls. I’d been trying to write a story about a young Viking boy which involved him encountering some of the Norse gods. The story just went completely dead on me – I couldn’t find the way forward at all. If a god befriends your character, why shouldn’t everything go smoothly for him or her? It seemed to me I was having to find complicated explanations for my hero’s predicaments. Then I began reading folk tales about trolls, and realised the book ought to be about them. I got rid of the gods entirely as an unwanted extra supernatural level, and the book – ‘Troll Fell’ – worked much better as a fairy tale rather than a fantasy.

When I came to write the third book in the trilogy, I wanted to take my characters over the sea to ‘Vinland’ – North America – something we know Norse men, and probably Norse women too, actually did. And there my characters would inevitably encounter Native American people, just as the Greenlanders’ Saga describes. It seemed to me legitimate to introduce Native American characters into the book: it was that or pretend North America was unpopulated, a clear impossibility. What may not have been so legitimate – yet it seemed to me important – was to introduce, as players on the North American scene, creatures in some way parallel to the trolls my Norse characters cohabited with. I thought long and hard about it and spent months of research, trying my best to respect and faithfully represent the culture I described. Whether or not I succeeded is not for me to say. The one thing I was sure about was that there would be no ‘white saviour’ in the book. My Norse hero owes his life to the Native American characters he meets, not the other way around. I wrote at length about this issue in an essay called ‘Cultural Appropriation and the White Saviour’, and though the discussion has moved on over the last few years, I still cautiously hold to what I said there. Here’s the link:

http://steelthistles.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/cultural-appropriation-and-white.html

In books such as Dark Angels and the Troll trilogy you explore the worlds of what might be called ‘the hidden people’ and their interactions with humans. The idea of a ‘hidden people’ with a wide range of magical powers (from large to small) and alien intelligence but with many similarities to humans and who appear to be drawn to us–if only to exploit us at times–is part of the traditional folklore and stories of many cultures right across the world. Why do you think this is such a universal notion?

Wow, that’s a huge question… and yet maybe it’s a small one too. Haven’t we all had the experience of laying something down and then minutes later not being able to find it? It’s so, so frustrating: ‘It has to be there! I know perfectly well I put it there, just before the phone rang! And now I’ve looked everywhere – and it’s gone!’ The temptation is to blame borrowers, or gremlins, which we know is a joke – but it still makes us feel better to be able to focus the frustration on some invisible, tricksy thing that’s sitting there laughing at us. Maybe it’s a human trait to imagine the universe as personal rather than impersonal. We can deal with the personal, we can understand it and negotiate with it – we humans are very good at that. Such feelings must have been far, far stronger in the past, before science began coming up with ‘rational’ explanations for everything.

Incidentally, just where have I put my keys?

You have been a storyteller as well as a writer. How does that influence your fiction?

I began story-telling years ago when I lived in France and our children were small. I joined a a weekly English-language story session at the Bibliotheque de Fontainebleau for children aged three years and up. It can be quite hard to keep the attention of a group of fifteen to twenty little ones when reading from a picture book: you’re facing them, and you have to keep stopping and turning the book around so they can see the pictures, and that interrupts the flow. An inspirational friend suggested that we all tried telling stories ‘from the heart’ instead of reading aloud. I loved it. I found you could keep the children’s attention better and they make the pictures in their heads. I continued to tell stories to older groups of children for many years, and learned a lot about pacing a story, about narrative structure, and about the kinds of things children enjoyed – what got them excited, what made them laugh. So yes, I think it really did help my writing, which loosened up and at the same time became more confident. I just – love telling stories.

Feathers of the Firebird