The Book that Made Me

by Various

  I can see now that my courage to tackle these issues, and to write in a familiar world about characters who are just like the students and people I met every day, started after I read Displaced Person.

  Several years ago I managed to track down a copy and read it again. It didn’t disappoint. It really is a wonderful book.

  It’s now on my bookshelf alongside Preep, Farewell to Shady Glade, The World According to Garp, Hills End (the bull in that story scared me stupid!) and A Wrinkle in Time, all books that had a profound effect upon me as a person and as a writer.

  * Displaced Person won the 1978 Alan Marshall Award for narrative fiction and the 1980 Children’s Book Council of Australia, Book of the Year Award for Older Readers.

  Happy Endings

  Brigid Lowry

  I was a quiet solemn child who lived with my three older sisters, my parents, and a bantam hen. My mother and father were bohemians, intellectuals, poor, charming and interesting. They were also alcoholics. It was a messy, troubled childhood. Sometimes there were fabulous parties with dancing and laughter; sometimes there was shouting, violence and neglect. We lived on the edges of happiness and craziness in the house at One Tree Hill, a place of polished floors, dusty corners and secrets. Pink tea-roses climbed in the windows; there was a grapefruit tree and a veggie garden, and for a too-brief while we looked after a spaniel with gentle floppy ears for an artist who’d gone to India. There were many books in our house: novels, communist magazines, poetry books, picture books, fairytales and photography books. I pored for hours over The Family of Man, a collection of photographs from an exhibition by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. New York! Imagine! The photographs were of people of every age and nationality, doing all manner of things from being born to dying. I was beginning to learn that the world was much bigger than me, much stranger than my conventional school, and that it contained horizons far beyond my difficult family and my lonely bedroom.

  My father was a printer who had a creative genius for typography and for being charming at the pub, but no talent for money. He would, for example, finish designing a wonderful poster for a symphony concert the day after the concert. My mother wrote poetry, drank too much sherry and talked on the telephone late at night to someone who wasn’t my father.

  How I loved reading. Books were escape, solace, stimulation, a place of beauty and wonder. Books were important. They held the currency of ideas. Books were what you got for Christmas, if you were lucky. Books were carried home safely from my weekly expeditions to the Epsom Library, where you had to be Very Quiet. I withdrew as many books as I was allowed and devoured them, sprawled on my bed with my bantam at my feet for company. Books were to be respected. You had to look after books and not write on them or get them wet. They could be loaned but must always be given back. A book, I discovered, was also something you could write. I composed two poems, one about gypsies and one about autumn leaves, and my father printed a hundred copies, which I sold to unsuspecting relatives for two and sixpence each. I liked writing things down and carried a small hardback notebook with a dusty orange cover in which I wrote down quotes and things that interested me.

  I enjoyed school. There were heaps of books at school. Books of maps, books of words, books of tidy letters. At school there was order, of a sort. Desks were in neat rows. Assembly came first; maths came after geography. After lunch, on sleepy afternoons, the teacher read us a chapter about Pegasus, the flying horse. I liked art, with its colours and paintbrushes and I liked learning about foreign lands but I liked English the best. English was easy; you got praise if you spelled necessary and Mississippi correctly. I liked dictation, where the teacher read something aloud and you had to write it down, and comprehension, in which you read something then answered questions that proved you understood it.

  In English, words were considered important. They reigned supreme. Both of these were good words: reigned and supreme. I collected words in my notebook. Vanilla. Obfuscate. Jitterbug. Moonbeam.

  I would read anything, including books that were far beyond my reach, but I had favourite books which I read over and over again. One of them was Bunchy by Joyce Lankester Brisley, about a little girl living with her kindly grandmother who cooked delicious treats. In each chapter Bunchy entered a different world where inanimate objects came to life: bread dough, scribbles, buttons, a snow dome, a decoupage screen, clothes pegs, magazine advertisements. They became elegant people to whom interesting things happened. I loved the imagination and creativity of this book, and the wonderful illustrations by the author. My own grandmothers were disappointing in comparison; one lived far away and the other was very sensible and stern. No magical characters came to life at my gran’s house. Even though she was wealthy, she bought dry day-old cakes, and required silence and obedience from her visiting grandchildren. Once I pinched a sixpence from the neat pile in the kitchen, with which she bought the newspaper, and was forbidden to visit her for months. No doubt she loved her grandchildren, but it was a very restrained love.

  Another favourite book was a New Zealand children’s classic by Joyce West, called Drovers Road, set on a sheep station in the South Island. It featured Gay and Merry, who had spiffing times and rollicking good adventures on their delightful horses. My life was tricky, but between the pages of Drovers Road, I found safety and was soothed. In books, everything that went wrong got sorted out neatly. Loose ends were tidied; endings were happy. All was well, in books.

  My most beloved book when I was eight was The Good Master by Kate Seredy. I liked it in the same way I liked anything from a foreign land: kimonos, Chinese woodcuts, sandalwood fans. The Good Master contained gypsies, snow, horses, spicy sausages, a fair, a kind uncle and aunt, a splendidly happy ending. I loved it because when I read it, I wasn’t me any more, a scared child in a house of disaster. I was Hungarian. I was Kate, riding her wild horse, playing with my new cousin, beloved of my aunt and uncle, in an exciting, exotic world.

  Fifty years later, I’m asked to write about a book that meant something to me when I was young. The Good Master, I decide. It’s not in the library but it’s still in print, so I order it online from America. With a click of my finger the very reasonable sum of $11.95 disappears from my bank account and a fortnight later my childhood book magically appears in my letterbox. I leave it on the sofa for a day or two. I’m afraid to open it, in case it disappoints me. But once I dive in, it is pure pleasure. This is a paperback version, so it no longer has a dark red leathery cover, but it still has the same gorgeous ink pictures by the author: Kate hiding in the rafters among the sausages, Kate and Jancsi riding their horses, skirts with eighteen petticoats, beautiful carved boxes made by a shepherd. Its themes are ecology, family, work, love, redemption. It praises living simply, and values education and love and goodness. It tastes of goulash and homemade spicy sausages. It tastes of happy.

  When I was nine, my mother gave up on her marriage and shifted out on my father without telling him. We went to live in a vibrant inner-city suburb. My father, left alone in the big old house on the hill, gave up on everything and a few weeks later he took his own life. I grew older, I grew up, I tried every job I could think of: waitress, bookshop assistant, lab technician, primary school teacher. I worked as a foster care worker, I lived in a Buddhist community, I got married and had a son. At thirty-five, after a challenging day as a relief teacher at a difficult school, I asked myself what I most loved doing. Writing was the answer so I went back to university. I began by writing poetry and semi-autobiographical material but I ended up writing Guitar Highway Rose, a book for teenagers that became a big success. I followed it with seven more titles for young adults, and my first book for adults is about to make its way into the world. In my books the world is a safe place. Stuff happens but it’s mainly good stuff. I try to accentuate the positive, the quirky, the kind. I write happy endings, and leave others to write the dark, the heavy and the disturbing. No surprises here.

  I still love books. I
give them as gifts for Christmas; I bring home as many as I can carry from the library. I’m looking forward to sharing books and stories, magic and adventures, ideas and creativity with my granddaughter. I’ll introduce her to Eeyore and Piglet. I’ll read her Green Eggs and Ham and Where the Wild Things Are. When she’s older I’ll give her a copy of The Good Master, written in 1935 but still as vibrant and relevant now as it was then. “I loved this when I was a kid,” I’ll say. I will give her books for Christmas, and I pray she won’t be too busy on a screen to read them. I’ll hug her like mad and cook her delicious things and let her make as much noise as she wants.

  You’ll Go Blind: A Cautionary Tale about the Power of Reading

  Julia Lawrinson

  What I read as a child troubled me. Not everything, of course. There were uncomplicated experiences with Dr Seuss, Little Golden Books, some version of Pooh Bear that barely resembled AA Milne’s and a book of poems I read until its cardboard cover shredded and the spine split.

  But anything describing bodily ills preoccupied me.

  My mother had a set of four medical encyclopedias, left over from two failed attempts at nursing. There were diagrams showing how to fix an arm sling, the features and effects of intestinal worms and what a baby looks like in utero. There was a set of sketches featuring a hatted, long-coated man demonstrating what to do if caught in a nuclear explosion (dive into the gutter, put your hand behind your neck, don’t look up), as well as pictures of how to best build and stock your bomb shelter. And, most affecting for me, there was a diagram of a young girl (me?) suffering the stages of polio, from sore throat and fever to stiff neck to hospitalisation. Every time I got a sore throat (which was frequent: I grew up among smokers) I would anxiously assess my mother’s eyes to see whether she, too, suspected I had the dread disease. If she thought my anxiety was odd, she never said anything. (If I’d had the courage to voice my fears, I’m sure she would have quickly informed me that I’d been immunised against polio at birth.)

  Perhaps as a way to direct me away from gruesome medical spectres, Mum gave me Little House on the Prairie when I was seven. The gift was inspired by the television series: before I got the books, I was already dressing like Laura, with long brown plaits, a long blue dress, and wellington boots in lieu of lace-ups. Later, I tried to get Mum to knit me a pair of woollen stockings, but she said Perth was too hot. I also attempted to run down through the tricky, knotty weeds at the front of our house like it was a prairie. If my mother thought I was a bit odd, pretending to be a girl from the American Midwest in the 1870s, she never said anything.

  The Little House books added a dimension to Laura’s story that television could never hope to provide. I became obsessed with the details of their privations and setbacks, and I longed to suffer privations of my own. Perth and its suburban seventies tedium didn’t seem adequate: I wanted Dad to hunt bears for our dinner and make our furniture out of saplings; I wanted Mum to invent new things to do with salted pork and cornmeal. I longed to have a bath a mere once a week. (I wouldn’t have gone so far as to be deprived of ABBA, though; I was quite attached to that most modern contraption, the record player.)

  I also loved the fact that naughtiness was not an invention of the twentieth-century real-life friends I was already fond of collecting and trying to emulate. Laura, the heroine of the Little House books, couldn’t help the naughty things she thought and occasionally did, in spite of the strap that awaited her whenever she was caught. When she slapped her annoyingly perfect, blonde, pretty sister Mary across the face after Mary taunted Laura about her brown hair, I wanted to applaud from across the century that divided us. When she led snooty Nellie Olsen into the creek until leeches attached themselves to Nellie’s delicate, town-girl legs, I admired the ingenuity of her revenge. And later, when an older Nellie made a move on Laura’s soon-to-be fiancé while the three of them were on a horse and buggy ride, and Laura “accidentally” made the horses bolt so the fiancé could see Nellie’s true colours, I was pleased that despite the strictness of her upbringing, Laura’s spirit was not diminished.

  But aside from the pleasure of reading about ancient girl combat, the Little House books fed my continuing obsession with illness and its life-altering effects.

  One of the central events in the Little House series, the one that separates the books about Laura’s childhood from those of her adolescence, concerns scarlet fever.

  I remember reading and re-reading the beginning of By the Shores of Silver Lake, the book that marks the beginning of Laura’s maturity. The book began describing how Laura’s Ma and three sisters had been ill with scarlet fever. Pa and Laura were looking after everyone by themselves and Pa was worried about how to pay the doctor’s bill. But the most shocking thing to me was the dramatic but understated news that the disease had left Laura’s older sister Mary blind.

  I had been introduced to the idea of living with blindness by two other books that I’d got from the Scholastic Book Club: one about Helen Keller, which had the Braille alphabet on the back, and one about her teacher, Annie Sullivan. But having the previously insufferably good Mary become blind induced me to try to imagine in detail what it would be like. What would I do if one day such a calamity happened to me?

  To this end, I spent entire days pretending to be blind.

  If my mother thought there was something odd about me sitting at the kitchen table, eating my toast and Vegemite with my eyes scrunched up, she never said anything. She also refrained from commenting when we went to the supermarket, as I felt my way up the aisles with outstretched hands. I might have cheated by opening one eye from time to time to make sure I wasn’t going to collide with the Cornflakes display, and to check out the satisfyingly baffled expressions on the faces of other shoppers – but I wanted to be prepared. I wanted to understand.

  I grew up, but I never grew out of obsessively identifying with the books that most spoke to me. I never discussed this phenomenon with anybody, any more than I disclosed my childhood penchant for pretending to be blind. It was only later that I realised that I was experiencing one of the gifts of reading: the ability to identify with people whose experiences were far removed from our own, to inhabit the skin of another for a short, imaginative while.

  I might not grope my way around Coles or Woolworths these days, but I am still careful with what I read. Books still trouble me; they get under my skin; they make me feel as if I am inhabiting the worlds I’m reading about. Because of this, you won’t find any books about serial killers on my shelf, or novels featuring anything medical. And if you want to know what I’m reading at the moment, look closely: I’m sure it’s still written all over my face.

  Ingenious Decisions

  Sue McPherson

  I’d love to say I’ve been reading since four and my love of words entered my bloodstream the day I picked up my first book … but I’d be lying. Apart from school readers in kindergarten and a few worn Little Golden Books, I battled through primary and secondary education unmoved by the written word. No excuses; it just wasn’t part of who I was back then. Sport, farm life, friends, family and music was by far more interesting than sitting with a book. It may not sound proper or sophisticated enough, but I reckon my introduction to books via great yarns, the visual arts and music definitely shaped my journey as a reader/writer/storyteller.

  So many things have influenced me as a reader and writer. To reduce my influences down to one book is impossible. That’s why I’ve chosen four.

  Jolliffe’s Outback

  Cartoons and Australiana

  By Eric Jolliffe

  Started reading age thirteen

  Yep, you read right. This is a cartoon book full of witty, most times mad, funny cartoons reflecting outback Australia. What a winner!

  Like many cartoon books, Jolliffe’s Outback magazine didn’t have many words, which was fine by me. One or two sentences told the story, that’s all that was needed. The image did the rest. Put the two together and you had a full story
right there in one. Simple but very effective. The lad could draw, he knew the bush, he knew the people and critters that lived among it. Eric Jolliffe was a grand storyteller.

  Jolliffe’s Outback magazines were laugh-out-loud funny, simple and relatable. And we couldn’t wait for a new one to hit the newsagents. My dad, Ernie, had a great love for and infinity with the bush. He worked in and around the smell of eucalyptus, snow gums and rich mountain soil his whole life. Dad had a mad sense of humour and freaky sense of comic timing. Dad cracked us up; he’d sit in his chair at night and flip through the magazine giggling and eventually laughing that much you’d think he’d keel over dead with a heart attack.

  Mum, Faye, the grown-up, was a lot more conservative. She was a great cook – still is – she would sew our uniforms, knit and crochet jumpers for harsh winter months. In-between playing house, Mum would also trap and skin rabbits and sell them for meat and skins, milk the cow and keep a beautiful garden. Mum didn’t get Jolliffe like the rest of us. No matter how many times Dad tried to share a hilarious cartoon moment, Mum wasn’t interested. After telling Dad he was a silly old goat she’d walk away. This in itself had us in stitches.

  Even though Eric Jolliffe had his critics, his humour, love of the outback and his observation of the people who lived within it enhanced my love of storytelling. Jolliffe taught me the importance of great images and crisp action while using the least amount of words possible, a structure also significant when writing for screen.

  If you ever come across a Jolliffe’s Outback magazine, hold on to the bugger. Not only are they funny, entertaining and educational, they’re also collectable.

  Adam’s Empire