Rain Stones 25th Anniversary Edition
Page 12
Bryan introduced me to computers too, and spent three weeks gently persuading me I could write on his Apple Macintosh without it exploding. It took me twenty minutes to write my first story on it. A typewriter you could correct your work on without copying it all out again! I was hooked. And wrote more books and articles, even faster.
We still live in the shed, though no one who sees our house now would ever guess that it began as a shelter for a tractor and a packing shed for cases of peaches and buckets of fresh basil to deliver to customers in Canberra. The typewriter went back to the dump soon after I fell in love with Bryan, and then with his computer. A pity, as I think of that typewriter with great affection now. I hope someone else rescued it, for yet another life, but I suspect it’s buried under garbage.
Smudge grew old. He spent his last weeks sleeping next to the shed, and is buried in the garden. Mothball took his place, the wombat who became the star of Diary of a Wombat. Mothball’s daughter and granddaughters live under our bedroom.
Gladys moved out when Bryan moved in and made the doors snakeproof. She lives down at the creek now, or I think she does — it’s hard to tell with black snakes. Maybe it’s her daughter or granddaughter I meet there too.
Lacy the goanna lurched back up into the steeper gorge country when the drought broke, in a flood of wombat droppings and casuarina needles that left the ground shivering under metres of water, the rain too heavy even to flow down the hill, the air too wet to breathe.
The baby is a man, with sons of his own. And I still write. I walk the bush and meet the wombats. It is strange, after twenty-five years, to see how much has changed and how much is just the same.
The high sheer cliffs, streaked with wedge-tailed eagle droppings. The powerful owls’ nests, up in the wet gullies under backhousia trees, where the ground is soft with maidenhair fern, and tree ferns sprout as water seeps from rocky screes.
The trees that were seeds back then are tall now, avocadoes, lemons, oranges, 270 sorts of fruit when I last counted. The trunk of the kiwi vine planted the year my son was born is thicker than my arm. The camellias are tree-sized too, a blaze of colour, the rambling roses as dense as any that sheltered Sleeping Beauty, but I’ll fight off any prince who tries to hack them back. I’d rather have the flowers than princes.
And books. For a while we kept adding rooms to house the books, then bought the cottage next door, to fill with books and so editors and illustrators and playwrights who would rather sit among the leaf trickles of the valley than have me come to Sydney to work could visit. These days my friend from those long-ago days, Angela Marshall, corrects my spelling, and my errors in chronology and much more, for which the editors are grateful, as they no longer have to ring me up to ask, ‘On page thirty-six, what is that word at the start of line twenty-two?’ and have me say, ‘Rhinoceros.’
I am even more grateful. Without Angela, as without Lisa and Bryan, the books I’ve written could not be. Nor the ones I have yet to write, nibbling at my neck, whispering, ‘Write me,’ the ones better than any I have attempted before.
It has been an extraordinary twenty-five years, and Rain Stones gave it to me, as did the skill and generosity of those editors and publishers who saw beyond the mess and spelling to the love and beauty underneath. And you, the readers, have given me all this too, because it is you who gave me the chance to learn to be a writer, the joy of creating the books of my mind and heart and of the warm soil below my feet.
Which means, perhaps, that there are only two words I really need to say. And they are:
Thank you.
Jackie French
October 2016
About the Author
JACKIE FRENCH AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children’s Laureate and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much-loved historical fiction. ‘Share a Story’ was the primary philosophy behind Jackie’s two-year term as Laureate.
jackiefrench.com.au
facebook.com/authorjackiefrench
Also by Jackie French
Australian Historical
Somewhere Around the Corner • Dancing with Ben Hall
Daughter of the Regiment • Soldier on the Hill • Valley of Gold
Tom Appleby, Convict Boy • A Rose for the Anzac Boys
The Night They Stormed Eureka • Nanberry: Black Brother White
Pennies for Hitler
General Historical
Hitler’s Daughter • Lady Dance • How the Finnegans Saved the Ship
The White Ship • They Came on Viking Ships
Macbeth and Son • Pharaoh • Oracle
I am Juliet • Ophelia: Queen of Denmark
The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman
Fiction
Walking the Boundaries • The Secret Beach
Summerland • A Wombat Named Bosco • Beyond the Boundaries
The Warrior: The Story of a Wombat • The Book of Unicorns
Tajore Arkle • Missing You, Love Sara • Dark Wind Blowing
Ride the Wild Wind: The Golden Pony and Other Stories
Refuge • The Book of Horses and Unicorns
Non-Fiction
A Year in the Valley • How the Aliens from Alpha Centauri
Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me into a Writer
How to Guzzle Your Garden • The Book of Challenges
The Fascinating History of Your Lunch
To the Moon and Back • The Secret World of Wombats
How High Can a Kangaroo Hop?
Let the Land Speak: How the Land Created Our Nation
I Spy a Great Reader
The Animal Stars Series
The Goat Who Sailed the World • The Dog Who Loved a Queen
The Camel Who Crossed Australia
The Donkey Who Carried the Wounded
The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger
Dingo: The Dog Who Conquered a Continent
The Matilda Saga
1. A Waltz for Matilda • 2. The Girl from Snowy River
3. The Road to Gundagai • 4. To Love a Sunburnt Country
5. The Ghost by the Billabong • 6. If Blood Should Stain the Wattle
The Secret Histories Series
Birrung the Secret Friend • Barney and the Secret of the Whales
The Secret of the Black Bushranger
Outlands Trilogy
In the Blood • Blood Moon • Flesh and Blood
School for Heroes Series
Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior • Dance of the Deadly Dinosaurs
Wacky Families Series
1. My Dog the Dinosaur • 2. My Mum the Pirate
3. My Dad the Dragon • 4. My Uncle Gus the Garden Gnome
5. My Uncle Wal the Werewolf • 6. My Gran the Gorilla
7. My Auntie Chook the Vampire Chicken • 8. My Pa the Polar Bear
Phredde Series
1. A Phaery Named Phredde
2. Phredde and a Frog Named Bruce
3. Phredde and the Zombie Librarian
4. Phredde and the Temple of Gloom
5. Phredde and the Leopard-Skin Librarian
6. Phredde and the Purple Pyramid
7. Phredde and the Vampire Footy Team
8. Phredde and the Ghostly Underpants
Picture Books
Diary of a Wombat (with Bruce Whatley)
Pete the Sheep (with Bruce Whatley)
Josephine Wants to Dance (with Bruce Whatley)
The Shaggy Gully Times (with Bruce Whatley)
Emily and the Big Bad Bunyip (with Bruce Whatley)
Baby Wombat’s Week (with Bruce Whatley)
The Tomorrow Book (with Sue deGennaro)
Queen Victoria’s Underpants (with Bruce Whatley)
Christmas Wombat (with Bruce Whatley)
A Day to Remember (with Mark Wilson)<
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Queen Victoria’s Christmas (with Bruce Whatley)
Dinosaurs Love Cheese (with Nina Rycroft)
Wombat Goes to School (with Bruce Whatley)
The Hairy-Nosed Wombats Find a New Home (with Sue deGennaro)
Good Dog Hank (with Nina Rycroft)
The Beach They Called Gallipoli (with Bruce Whatley)
Wombat Wins (with Bruce Whatley)
Grandma Wombat (with Bruce Whatley)
Copyright
Angus&Robertson
An imprint of HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks, Australia
First published in Australia in 1991
This edition published in 2016
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Jackie French 1991, 2016
The right of Jackie French to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
French, Jackie, author.
Rain stones / Jackie French.
25th anniversary edition.
ISBN: 978 1 4607 5317 0 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 7430 9529 4 (ebook)
For primary school age.
Nature study—Australia—Juvenile fiction.
Country life—Australia—Juvenile fiction.
Short stories, Australian.
A823.3
Cover design by Hazel Lam, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover image by Terry Bidgood / Trevillion Images