The Children's Book Council of Australia
Announcement of the 2009 Book of the Year Award Shortlist
31 March 2009
National President of The Children's Book Council of Australia, Ms Marjorie Kirkland,
State President, CBCA Queensland Branch, Ms Michelle Witheyman-Crump,
President of Book Links Queensland, Ms Beth Green,
Members of the Judges Panels,
Distinguished publishers, writers, and administrators of our book world,
Supporters and promoters of children's and young adult literature,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Welcome to Government House on this beautiful autumn morning in Brisbane.
In the spirit of reconciliation that we wish to see fully expressed in our State, so that we may enjoy true harmony in our communities, I acknowledge, with respect, the traditional custodians of the land on which we are gathered, the Jagera and Turrbal peoples and their descendants.
It is with great pleasure that I welcome you today, as Governor and as the Patron of CBCA Queensland, to this annual event to announce the Book of the Year Shortlist. It is always a pleasure to welcome guests to this historic house of the people of Queensland, but when it involves books and literature, there is an added pleasure for me, as someone whose entire life and career has been shaped by and has revolved around words and wordcraft. My books are like my children - they are members of my/our family. They have traveled all around the world with me, the collection growing with each posting. And after eight months in this large residence I am still trying to figure out where to put them all. I have been able to unpack many hundreds - maybe thousands, but just as many again remain in boxes and forlorn piles on floors and tables, awaiting the meticulous arrangement and classification into categories that I so enjoy, savouring familiar titles, inscriptions, dustcover comments and illustrations as I go. My lament is that of Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: "So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install, a lovely (extra) bookshelf on the wall."
As I was born in 1946 - the year I note when the CBCA made its first award! - my collection dates from then. I still have most of my childhood books, as does my husband - many of them school and Sunday school prizes - and until we can persuade our two now grown-up daughters to take all their books, we have all theirs as well - as they, too, were avid readers - almost, I think from the womb. So Government House at present is housing quite a treasure trove of children's books!
It's fun to compare those very early children's books with those of today. The range was certainly far smaller: they catered for a narrow range of ages and dealt with a much narrower range of subjects and issues - for girls - school - Tenth at Trinders, The New House Captain, Cecile at St Clares; pets - She wanted a Pony, Lassie Come Home" annuals and omnibuses - Girls Own, The Champion Book for Girls, Lucie Atwell's Annual; the beloved "Anne" and "Heidi" books; fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and The Water Babies - and classics like the Just So Stories and Alice in Wonderland were on almost every girls bookshelf (and yes, you've guessed it - everyone of those are here with me at Government House - except my much loved and charmingly illustrated "Water Babies", which I hope is lying yet to be unearthed in one of those unpacked boxes). For boys the selection was different: it was adventure, adventure and more adventure, with swash-buckling, derring-do, exploration and a little fantasy for good measure! - books like those among my husband's boyhood collection: Phantom Patrol, Four in the Half-Deck, Pirate Sealer, The Young Fur Traders, In Steel Grey Armour, Around the World in 80 days. If - as boys - you didn't like the adventure and fantasy genres, you would have been in trouble ... (although there were always also comics - at least under my two brothers' beds!).
The cultural bias was palpable: much of it came in the form of British imports where people's lives were lived out in utterly different landscapes, radically colder climates, and quite different houses, towns and cities. Enid Blyton was in her heyday.
I am sure that the British bias in our reading diet made what Australian books there were so much more vivid and so extraordinarily popular. The Seven Little Australians, The Magic Pudding, and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, and the "Billabong" series were all published in the late 19th and early in the 20th Century - a reminder of why they truly merit the description of classics. You can almost smell the gum leaves in the pages of some of those richly illustrated books.
It is a source of great satisfaction to me that these classic Australian books remain popular today: If anyone needs evidence of their continued appeal, Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians provides it. It has now sold over 2 million copies in the English language, been reprinted over 50 times, translated into at least 11 languages, been performed as a stage play, made into a film, and not one, but two television series.
That doyenne of the history of Australian Children's books, Maurice Saxby, has described at length the great renaissance in Australian Children's literature in the 1950s and 60s when it evolved into a full-blown genre in its own right. In that exciting development, the Children's Book Council of Australia played a key role. When the Council was first established in 1945 it was way ahead of its time, not just in Australia but internationally. I understand that first book award to which I referred earlier, in 1946, attracted 25 entries, suggesting that the Council positioned itself well in the vanguard of the yet-to-come renaissance. And I know that the Council has always ‘moved with the times' - and that its standing in the world of children's literature is the envy of - and a model - for other countries - something of which we can all feel very proud.
If we fast-forward to the present there are some striking changes to children's literature. On the one hand there is a vastly enlarged number of children's books to choose from - just compare those 25 nominations in 1946 to the record 451entries for this year's awards! There has been an equally profound and - for most - welcome widening of the sorts of issues handled in children's books.
We have moved a long way from adventure, recognising that children inhabit a more complex world, are being confronted with and need to find ways of understanding and dealing with the complexities of human behavior and of our increasingly interconnected world and multicultural society - so cultural issues, historical fiction, war, poverty, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are now part of children's literature. I'm thinking here of books like Elizabeth Fensham's Helicopter Man which deals sensitively with the issue of schizophrenia; like Shaun Tan's Picture book The Arrival revealing graphically the strangeness of arriving in a new land by an immigrant family.
I believe we should both admire and thank the authors and artists who have taken the risks in exploring these subjects and developing these new and important forms of children's literature; as we should also thank the publishers (some of whom are present today) for sharing those risks and providing the rewards - opening up new reading possibilities for our children and youthful readers.
The irony, of course, is that while there has been an explosion in the range of children's books, they have less and less time to read them. The English writer Lady Montagu's advice to her grand daughter is something I cherish and seems as apt today as when she wrote it, in 1752:
"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet".
Two and half centuries later, those "new fashions" and "expensive diversions" have exploded and the competition for a child's time is far more ferocious. Extra-curricular activities crowd their daily life, shrinking that precious free time to relax and roam through a book - and what time is left is captured by the internet, video games, email and Facebook.
I am not sure whether any of us really know where the age of instant electronic information is leading us. As it affects reading, there is a lot of research being done - some of it quite alarmist. A 1991 UK study showed that 25% of boys and 35% of girls reported reading a book for pleasure the previous evening. By 1999 the reading cohort had fallen to 18% and 22% respectively.
That trend seems to be born out among Australian children. A more recent survey by the Australian Centre for Youth Literature on the reading habits and preferences of our children aged between 10 to 18 found 21% no longer saw reading as a relevant leisure activity, nor part of their means of social interaction.
Another 2007 UK survey showed that 55% of children prefer watching TV to reading.
But the news does not seem all bad. This same survey found the decline in popularity of reading has been halted, with nearly 70% of nine-year-olds and 60% of 11-year-olds saying they enjoy reading stories.
An even more recent report from the United States, the 2008 Kids & Family Reading Report indicates 62% of children would rather read a book on paper than on the Internet, while almost two thirds said they love or like reading books for fun. And since children use the Web to check out author sites, book reviews and other online literary tools, the report suggests the Internet actually encourages reading. It goes on to note that despite the fact that after age eight, more children go online daily than read for fun daily, high-frequency Internet users were more likely to read books for fun every day.
So Lady Montagu need not yet turn in her grave: the battle for the attention of children - to give them the lasting pleasure of reading - is not yet lost - with parents who read and encourage their children to do the same; with the wealth of writers present today, including those vying for our Shortlist honours; with those adventurous publishers and our wonderful book shop owners having survived - despite dire predictions they would be swallowed up by book supermarkets brimming with popular pulp; with our committed teachers and librarians; and with marvelous, dedicated organisations like the Children's Book Council of Australia, Book Links and others, how could it be otherwise?
Thank you all for joining us today - and now, on with the show!
I invite National President, Marjorie Kirkland, to proceed with the eagerly awaited announcement - of the 2009 CBCA Book of the Year Shortlist - so that we may all, girls, boys and adults alike, be able to discover yet more authors in our closets.