Dorothy Neal White
Newsletter 41
April 2009

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EVENTS

Let’s Misbehave! Anarchy and intimidation in stories and rhymes for children

On Thursday 2nd October 2008 The Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection and the National Library jointly hosted an illustrated talk by Gavin Bishop, children’s writer and book illustrator.

About 175 Friends and members of the public enjoyed some fine fare in the Library’s Main Foyer. Some took advantage of the opportunity to view the Grimm Stuff exhibition of illustrated versions of folk tales and fairy stories from the Dorothy Neal White and National Children’s Collections before moving to the Auditorium for Gavin’s presentation. Gavin kept the audience entranced with slides of his illustrations and entertaining and informative commentary on the reason he chooses to illustrate both New Zealand and overseas traditional tales and his sources of inspiration. His presentation was followed by many questions and great acclamation, proving that Gavin is not only an accomplished author and illustrator but also a gifted speaker who can adapt his style to any audience from small children to adults.

In thanking Gavin, Lynne Jackett noted that he has been nominated for New Zealand children’s literature awards more times than any other author or artist. You can read more about Gavin on his web site http://www.gavinbishop.com/flash/index.html

Lots in translation!!

On Wednesday 26th November 2008 Julia Marshall talked to a meeting of the Friends about creating and running Gecko Press. Julia’s background in publishing and children’s literature included working in the publishing industry in Sweden for 12 years and with Bridget Williams Books for two years. Julia also completed Kate de Goldi’s course for writing for children.

During her OE, Julia had enjoyed European children’s books and looked for them in English translations. She – and the audience – were astounded to discover that only 1% of children’s books published in England had originally appeared in another language.

Upon her return to New Zealand Julia decided to eschew the safe options and make use of the experience she had gained overseas. She decided to translate and publish award-winning or notable European picture books in New Zealand – and thus in 2005 Gecko Press was born to “publish curiously good books from around the world. … We choose books excellent in story, illustration and design, with a strong ‘heart factor’.” (from the Gecko Press catalogue). Julia showed images from several of the 27 books currently forming the Gecko Press list. The Gecko Press books are all eye-catching and beautifully produced and audience members were grateful recipients of copies of the new Gecko Press catalogue and a Donkeys greeting card.

The world, of course, includes New Zealand, so while most of the books originate overseas, Julia has so far published four books by New Zealanders. It was a remarkable achievement to win the New Zealand Post Book of the Year Award with the first of her “New Zealand” books, Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop’s Snake and Lizard.

The event was attended by 31 people, a number of whom were “new faces”, responding to the advertising of the event on the Wellington Children’s Book Association web site. Many at the event expressed their enjoyment to Julia in person, and I have received several comments since re-iterating what a great evening it was. You can find out more about Julia, Gecko Press and its list at http://www.geckopress.co.nz .

Blow.08

Four members of the Friends Committee attended Consensus and conflict in junior fiction, an illustrated talk by Caroline Campbell. Many of you will recall Caroline’s presentation, complete with side-saddle and crop, after she was awarded the Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection Scholarship (2003-2004).

Caroline is both a lecturer at the Institute of Communication and Design at Massey University in Wellington and an illustrator of children’s books. This talk was based on her research into Australasian junior fiction published 1890-1920. Caroline explored the idea that images of New Zealand Māori and Australian Aborigine in the picture books and illustrated novels that were created for Australasian-born audiences offer an alternative to ‘dying race’ and passive mythologies.

Caroline used four illustrations from books in the Dorothy Neal White Collection as examples including these two from Tiki’s trip to town by James Duigan with sketches by G.S. Wanganui, N.Z. : A.D. Willis, [1893?].

You can read Tiki online in the International Children’s Digital Library http://www.childrenslibrary.org

Lynne Jackett Research Librarian
DNW & NCC Collections

OBITUARIES

Shaping children’s literature – Eleanor Spence, 1928-2008

Eleanor Spence had wanted to write for children, about Australia, from the time she was a girl. Yet it was not until she was a children’s librarian in Coventry that the wish became a need. It was in England that she discovered just how few Australian children’s books existed.

Spence went on to make an outstanding contribution to Australian children’s literature, in a pioneering career spanning five decades and entertaining generations of young people. Her work helped shape the direction of children’s literature in Australia.

Eleanor Spence, who has died at 79, was born Eleanor Rachel Kelly, the youngest of the three children of Eleanor and William Kelly, who owned an orange orchard at Erina on the NSW Central Coast. Her mother, a high school teacher in Edinburgh, had met her father in Scotland, where he was recovering from wounds suffered in World War I. They corresponded after his return and she eventually sailed to marry him.

Spence went to a three-teacher primary school and books were as essential as furniture in her home. She began to write short stories and poems at about 10 years. She read these to her mother, who suggested that the stories be based in her own land, rather than the land of the books she was reading, inevitably Europe or America.

Erina was a rural area before World War II. The Central Coast became for her a place halfway between reality and romance. She spent a lot of time gazing at morning skies, sunsets and evening stars. She played in the bush, cricket on the veranda on rainy days and rode her bike to swim at Terrigal or in Wamberal lagoon.

She attended Gosford High, which had an excellent library and good English teachers. Winning a scholarship, she studied arts at Sydney University, living in a Country Women’s Association hostel in Kings Cross. She graduated in 1949.

A year’s “rather unsatisfactory teaching” in a girls’ school was followed by two years as a librarian in in Canberra. Holidaying in Austinmer, she met John Spence; they married in 1952 and went to England, where he did postgraduate work in Rugby and she reached her turning point in Coventry.

Back in Sydney in 1954, Spence began her first full-length story, Patterson’s Track, which Oxford University Press published in 1958. It featured a rural community such as she knew at Erina. In the 1950s Australian children were reading Blyton, Biggles and English school stories. In the 1960s Oxford published a list of Australian children’s authors, and Angus & Robertson appointed the first specialist children’s editor. Writers such as Hesba Brinsmead, Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Patricia Wrightson, Nan Chauncey, Joan Phipson and Spence emerged.

Further stories by Spence alternated with the birth of her three children. The Green Laurel, Children’s Book of the Year in 1964, was written at the busiest time, with children aged two to seven. Then she studied Australian history as background for her books. The earliest were about basically happy families, with difficulties rather than conflicts but without sentimentality. Yet they touched on social issues and carried an element of mystery, and the social issues component grew more important with time. Her books became part of what was described as a “cultural and artistic renaissance” in Australian children’s literature.

Maurice Saxby, the children’s literature expert, wrote: “More than any other writers, Eleanor Spence and Joan Phipson have perhaps helped guide the direction of Australian children’s literature in the past 30 years. They have both expressed in their novels of family life not only social changes but the concerns and preoccupations of a growingly complex Australian society.”

During the ’70s and ’80s Spence’s books were regularly published to critical acclaim and an enthusiastic readership. The October Child (1976) broke new ground in describing the challenging experience of a boy with autism. It won Spence another Australian Book of the Year Award, and in 1977 she was shortlisted for Britain’s Carnegie Medal.

Subsequent books examined religious discrimination, adoption, homelessness, family life, relationships, bigotry and materialism. The Seventh Pebble (1980) won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for its depiction of challenges facing an immigrant Irish family in rural Australia. She wrote historical novels, including Me and Jeshua, about Jesus’s cousin growing up in Nazareth. Spence wrote 21 books for children. Her last, Another Sparrow Singing, was published in 1992. Several have been translated into other languages and Braille.

In the 1970s and 1980s she worked as a teacher’s aide and then taught at the Autistic School, Forestville; in 1978 she took a Churchill Fellowship to study care for autistic children overseas. The Spences lived in Turramurra until they divorced 20 years ago, when she moved back to the Central Coast.

The Australia Council Literature Board awarded her an Emeritus Fellowship in 1998 and she became a member in the Order of Australia in 2006. Eleanor Spence is survived by her children, Alister, Nigel and Lisette, and their families, including five grandchildren.

Tony Stephens Sydney Morning Herald October 17 2008.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/shaping-childrens-literature /2008/10/16/1223750228433.html

Loved children’s writer loses fight with cancer

Ivan Southall, one of Australia’s best loved and most prolific children’s book authors, has died. He was 87.

Southall, who passed away at the Wantirna palliative care hospice early yesterday after a short battle with cancer, won four Children’s Book of the Year Awards during the 1960s and 1970s.

He received national and international acclaim for his books — including the British Library Association’s Carnegie Medal for Josh (1971). His Hills End was included in The New York Times list of books of the year in 1963.

Children’s author John Marsden said Southall would be sadly missed. “I’d call him the last of that generation of great storytellers who reigned supreme in the 1950s and ’60s,” Marsden told The Sunday Age.

“Some of his books haven’t dated all that well admittedly because he was quite class conscious when he wrote … but he was still just a terrific, natural writer with a great flair for storytelling.

“And as he grew older, he had a willingness to experiment and get more adventurous with his writing, which wasn’t always appreciated by his audience.”

Marsden said Southall’s books were always strong on character and he had a real Australian quality to his stories.

He said one of his best books was Seventeen Seconds, about a couple of Australians working in bomb disposal in World War II. “God, it was a hair-raising book. It was just a stunning piece of writing, which didn’t get the attention it deserved.”

Maurice Saxby, children’s literature expert and a close friend of Southall, said the author had had “an inestimable influence on the way his readers view themselves as individuals and as Australians”.

One of Southall’s most popular books, Fly West, was derived from his adult book They Shall Not Pass Unseen, a gripping account of his wartime service with RAAF No. 461 Squadron. It is regarded as one of the best Australian non-fiction books to come out of World War II.

His daughter, Elizabeth Barber, who read some of her father’s own books to him in the hours before he died about 2am, said right to the end that despite difficulties with his cancer and early dementia, he spoke often of his wartime experiences.

Southall was the pilot of a Sunderland flying boat based in Wales and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for sinking a German submarine in 1944.

Southall was born in Canterbury on June 8, 1921, and raised in Surrey Hills. Educated at Box Hill Grammar, he wrote from an early age and served an apprenticeship as a process engraver at an afternoon newspaper.

After war service as a pilot, he stayed on in Britain and worked as an RAAF historian before returning to Australia and starting a career as a freelance writer for magazines. He mowed lawns to supplement his income.

In 1981, Southall was awarded an Order of Australia for services to literature. In 1998, the State Library of Victoria staged a retrospective exhibition of his work, Ash Road to Ziggurat.

Gerry Carman & Mark Russell November 16, 2008
The Age

http://www.theage.com.au/national/loved-childrens-writer -loses-fight-with-cancer-20081115-67pg.html?page=-1