Buxton Primary School Visit

For 4 years now, a group of children’s authors and illustrators and myself have been visiting country schools around the area which was so devastated by the Victorian Bushfires in 2009. Last Friday we traveled to Buxton Primary School where Buxton students were joined by students from Taggerty and Marysville Primary Schools.

Mark Wilson, Marjory Gardner, Claire Saxby and myself had a wonderful day sharing our creative insights with the children and teachers.

The highlight for me was reading Hey Baby! to the preps, when the moment I finished reading they screamed out ‘Can you read it again?’ No writer can hear better words than those. I then produced my bag of plastic animals, selecting animals at random and asking the children whether those particular animals appear in the book. It’s always great fun, even if the noise level is sometimes deafening. I also explain all the parts of a picture book to the children – cover, endpapers, half-title page etc. and watch how they soak up the information.

We left Buxton on Friday afternoon smiling and each laden with a bag of country goodies – mountain ash honey, freshly picked oranges and lemons, potatoes still wearing earthen coats and a bottle of sparkling local wine. Always a wonderful and fulfilling experience.