CHILDREN, READING AND LIBRARIES

Ursula Dubarsovsky is a much awarded Australian writer of fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, whose work is characterised by a child’s vision and comic voice of both clarity and ambiguity. She has won nine national literary prizes, including five New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, more than any other writer in the Awards’ 30-year history. She has now been appointed the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2020–2021. On 31 March 2020, Ursula Dubosarsky recorded a speech for The Sydney Institute to be viewed on Youtube and was interviewed after the talk by Anne Henderson. What follows is her speech and the transcript of the interview.

CHILDREN, READING AND LIBRARIES

URSULA DUBOSARSKY

Thank you for the invitation to speak in my capacity as the new Australian Children’s Laureate for 2020-2021. I’m going to be speaking to you about children, reading and libraries – in the time of the plague.

What is the Australian Children’s Laureate

Just a little bit of background first about the position. I am often asked – what actually is the Children’s Laureate? A Laureate, of course, is a traditional honour in the western world, originating in the great sporting contests of ancient Greece with a laurel wreath as top prize, and over the centuries has taken on a general sense of high honour – Nobel Laureates for example. When it comes to literature, though, the word is most frequently associated with the Poet Laureate, a British institution dating back to the seventeenth century, which awards a small pension to an eminent poet, who in return is expected to compose some lines of poetry on significant public occasions.

It was the then Poet Laureate Ted Hughes who in the 1990s raised the notion of a separate Laureate of children’s literature. Hughes also of course wrote with great distinction for children. As a result of a conversation between Hughes and the acclaimed British children’s writer, Michael Mopurgo, the first Children’s Laureate was appointed in the UK in 1999.  It’s a two-year term, and the purpose is to honour a British writer or illustrator for children, coming with a small pension in return for service to the community – not so much writing public poetry, but celebrating, supporting and nurturing reading and literature for children.

The idea was taken up fairly quickly around the world, and there are Children’s Laureates now in the United States, the Netherlands, Ireland, Wales, Sweden – and from 2008, Australia.  The Australian Children’s Laureate follows much the same form as the British Children’s Laureate  – one significant difference being that while in Britain the Laureate is awarded a silver medal upon appointment, here in Australia the Laureate is presented with a life-sized statue of a magpie.

For clarification, in Australia the Children’s Laureate is not a government appointment, nor is it associated with any library or school or any other institution – it is a small private charitable organisation, called the Australian Children’s Laureate Foundation, that chooses the Laureate and funds the position.

So with my trusty magpie in hand, all through 2020-2021, as the new Australian Children’s Laureate, I will be doing whatever I can to encourage, support and celebrate a love of reading in Australian children. Before the corona virus hit us, this was intended to involve a great deal of travel all around the country and overseas talking with as many children, parents, educators, librarians and organisations devoted to the needs of children as I could. Now we have all had to rethink and time will tell what the Australian Children’s Laureate will get up to in these new rather sad circumstances.

There’s no instruction booklet for the Laureate. I’ve been free to choose whatever way I wish to approach it.  Like all freedoms that’s little daunting. I had known I was going to be the Laureate some months before the news was made public in February this year, at a ceremony at the National Library in Canberra, so I had time to think about what I could do that I felt would be meaningful and perhaps not just a laudable reiteration of what a great thing reading is.

After all, I’ve yet to meet anyone who is actually against reading. If there was a national referendum tomorrow, asking “do you think Australian children should be good readers” we can be pretty sure that everyone would tick the “yes” box.  We all want our children to be good readers,  and by a good reader, I mean someone who reads a lot, and is comfortable reading a broad range of literary material, across time and culture – in other words a fully literate citizen of the world. That is surely what we want for all our children. Nobody wants a future society where only a sliver of the population are good readers, while the rest of us make do reading text messages and Facebook posts.

And yet I think all people involved in the area of children’s reading have to wonder – is reading, as a more sophisticated discipline, at this particular moment in our lives together on earth, made even more so by the arrival of the coronavirus epidemic, slipping out of our children’s grasp? Is it becoming one of the dying arts?

Reading sophistication stagnating

I’ll turn briefly for reference to the latest results of the well-known sometimes controversial national Naplan tests – which have been cancelled this year because of the coronavirus, and it may well be this will mark the natural death of Naplan, in its current form at any rate.

Now, although there’s a great deal of heated discussion on the merits of the various rival theories of how to teach children to read, it would nonetheless appear on the latest results that Australian children learn to read reasonably well. In 2019, when 95 per cent of nine-year-old Australian children were tested in reading, close to 30 per cent of them scored in the highest band, and I think they could safely be described as good readers.

But by the time Australian children reach Year 9, just a few years later, when they are about 15 years old, this score takes a dramatic dive. From 30 per cent in Year 3, only 4.5 per cent of Year 9 students scored in the highest band of reading. And athough one would usually assume the more years of education you have, the better educated you will be, this same sharp descent is mirrored in all the aspects of language that Naplan tests related to reading – that is, spelling, grammar and punctuation and writing. In fact, only 3 per cent of 15-year-olds score in the top band for writing. 3 per cent in the top band for writing 4.5 per cent in the top band for reading, in Year 9. Has being a good reader and a good writer, the cornerstone of all education, already become an elite activity by age 15, only for the lucky few?  In a country as peaceful and affluent as Australia that seems an incredible state of affairs.

And whatever view you take of Naplan testing, whether you feel it’s simply recording something  happening on a certain day under certain circumstances, and of negligible value,  or whether you feel, as is argued, that it’s part of an armory of pedagogic tools designed to improve performance, one can only make the observation that if it’s meant to improve performance, it’s not working.

Reading less as they grow older

So why does the ability to read well at the age of nine fall to pieces over the course of a few years? Well, obvious as it sounds, there is only one way to become a better reader, and that is by reading. There’s no other way.

The digital age, as we’ve noted, is not in itself a barrier to learning to read. Thirty per cent of good readers at aged nine, tested in 2019, were born in 2010, so they are all what we call digital natives. Many of them would have been playing with their phones since they mastered the basic hand grasp at a few months old. In fact the digital age may help with learning to read, if the number of educational learn to read apps that are around are anything to go by. Children are excited about learning to read, as they should be. It’s an extraordinary power and changes their lives forever.

But as they grow older something falls away. You might say, looking at them, the young are always reading, perhaps more than ever before, with their heads like all of us, bent over screens and devices. But what are they reading? Well, not books. Like most of us, dare I say, they are sending each other messages, playing games, skimming through thing that pop up that interest them. To learn to read is one thing, and to learn to read at increasing levels of sophistication and concentration, is another. Reading more, and reading widely, reading deeply. Reading, one might say, out of the comfort zone of contemporary language, however rich and fascinating it is.

A high school teacher in Melbourne told me a few years ago now at a conference that she believed that very soon her students, including her good students, would lose the ability to read books even from the comparatively recent past. She cited the short stories of Henry Lawson, which her students found too hard to read. They couldn’t understand it. The point is not whether they should or shouldn’t be reading Henry Lawson, the point is that Henry Lawson’s prose is not difficult or dense. It’s clear as a bell. But it’s not contemporary. It’s not the more or less instantaneously comprehensible language of people their own age, their own time.

To read even a single book, especially a book written by someone from another time and place to your own, requires an order of concentrated uninterrupted attention. To read a book that is slightly harder to read or different to the last book you read while being a joy is also a discipline, and like all achievements of the mind or body require effort and practice.  And time and space.

Books

And books.

Let’s look first at books. You can of course read books on screen. At the moment, with the indefinite closing of libraries and bookshops, most of us will have to read more books on screen than we are used to. There is no lack of opportunity or availability of the world’s literature, it’s at your literal fingertips and again there are dozens of apps to help you do just that. Look at all the ebooks the children will borrow from the library and read now they are at home during the shutdown, so we are told.

The problem is, by and large, up until now, at any rate, we haven’t wanted to read books on screen. Sales of digital books, for both children and adults, have remained low compared to the sales of paper and carboard books. And if you look at the public library system, of the millions of items that are borrowed each year from Australian public libraries, by children and adults. only a small percentage of them are digital while the vast majority are paper and cardboard books.

This was not according to plan. Paper books were supposed to disappear with the march of digital technology. But they have persisted, at least up until a week ago, a kind of “recalcitrant object” as the social scientists might say. We want them, although we’re not supposed to. Children  in particular. When I visit schools across Australian, children who grew up with screens in their cribs herd forward implacably towards the book I have in my hand.  They want to touch it, clutch it, hold it to their chest, almost breath it in, run off with it, find a place to sit or lie down, to open it, stare at it, think, sink into silence and read. In the zone, concentrating, lost in a book.

Who knows what habits of the long centuries will change after months of corona virus? But up until now, when we read, what we have liked to read, for want of a better word, is the physical book.

Libraries

And this brings us to libraries. To create a generation of readers, children need access to a lot of books. It’s a great and good thing of course, and should only be encouraged, to buy a child a book as a prize or a gift, and to have books on the shelf at home. But to become a good, fluent adventurous reader a child needs more books than any one home can provide. They need thousands of books to choose from.  And that means libraries. They need the freedom of a library, to experiment, to find books they like, books they don’t like. Books they will read a hundred times and books they will cast aside on the first page. Fiction or non-fiction, it’s a process.  Slowly but irresistibly they will form their own taste and develop their own ability to choose. And then they will love reading. And keep reading, right throughout their life.

To look first at school libraries. You would think that standing up for libraries would be uncontroversial. But libraries are a great irritant to some people, especially to some educators. Libraries in schools come in many forms. I have visited schools with wonderful, vibrant libraries and brilliant effective librarians. I’ve also visited schools who have a room called a library, but no librarian, no regular times for children to visit and borrow, and the room is only opened once a year when the author comes to visit to find it full of hoops and basketballs.

And I have also visited schools where libraries have been deliberately dismantled as a progressive act, librarians redeployed and the rooms once filled with books recreated as learning hubs. Indeed, Departments of Education across the country are building brand-new schools where they make a virtue of not having a library. No need for a library, they say, there’s a flexible I-hub on every floor, with a preselected shelf of books in rotation. I remember asking my father once, who went to Neutral Bay Public School in the 1930s, did you have a school library, Dad? And he replied with some resentment, “Yes, a box of old books under the teacher’s desk.”  It seems they were the avant-garde at Neutral Bay, with their 1939 prototype of the flexible “I-hub”.

And to pause a moment to consider the symbolic value of a library in our schools and communities. What did that primary school library that I stepped into full of sports equipment, followed by 45 puzzled children scrambling to find a place to sit for their “author talk”. say about the importance of reading in education and in life to those children? And what does a brand new seventeen story departmental school in Parramatta, built without a library say about reading to those adolescents? I’ve heard people say, “Oh you can have the books on the shelves, but the kids won’t read them.” Well they certainly won’t read them, one hundred per cent, if they’re not there.

Even the word itself, library, seems to upset people. At one of my son’s schools over the summer holidays the library was renamed, in the spirit of Mr Gradgrind himself, the INFORMATION CENTRE, although the students, with their own instinctive recalcitrance, continued to call it the library. INFORMATION CENTRE is not even an accurate renaming. Of course we go to libraries for information and for research and for school projects, this is a noble and vital part of a library’s purpose. But going back to those public library statistics, of those millions of items borrowed every year, the vast majority are fiction, children’s and adults. A library is for most people, and children are people, an IMAGINATION CENTRE first.

And it is a place where you become a reader. A child becomes a reader, for life, not by chance but by opportunity.

Public libraries

And so to public libraries A while ago I was in the audience at a Sydney Writers’ Festival event, and the conversation of the panel turned to how to encourage children’s reading. One of the panel members spoke in a heartfelt way about program, one of several that exist, that through a combined effort of charities and publishers provide children with a free book to take home.  She argued how terrible it was that some children did not own any books, and this program would redress this and thereby help children love reading.

I am not challenging that book possession is a great thing – I’m a writer, obviously I want people to buy books and couldn’t feel more strongly in support of bookshops and book suppliers – but I do remember thinking at the time, well why not just get them to join the local public library? Wouldn’t that be the simplest idea?  Especially for families without money for books.  That amazing, replenishing, free resource, established here in NSW by the great 1939 Library Act, and then all over Australia, open to everyone, where every child in Australia can borrow books at no cost, as many as they like, ad infinitum.

Did people perhaps not know about public libraries? As a child who was brought up going regularly to the library wherever we lived, the bounty of the library was an unquestioned part of my everyday life. Every Saturday morning off I went to borrow my six books, brought them home and spent the rest of the weekend reading. Then back again the following Saturday to do it all over again, week after week. Driven purely by the desire to read. Talking about this library habit with a friend of my own age recently, though, I was taken aback. My friend, who had grown up in an affluent middle class suburb of Sydney, with, by the way, a very nice public library, she told me as a child she’d never been there and when she walked past it,  she would peer through the open door wondering if she was allowed inside – in just the same way she peered through the open door of the local TAB. Of course, this is only one person, but it struck me with force that possibly not everyone does know about the wonders of the public library.

Close to 40 per cent of Australians – and closer to 50 per cent in NSW, are currently members of their local public library – meaning they have gone into the library, showed their ID and been issued with their own library card. That does not include all the people that spend time at the library without becoming a member, but even on its own I think is a remarkable statistic.  That is a lot of people to voluntarily join a public institution. And yet, why isn’t everybody a member?  Why isn’t every child a member? And so that’s how my quest for the two years of my laureateship sprang into life, as the single practical thing that I could do – to urge every child in Australia to get down to their local library, and join up. Get their own library card, with their own name on it, and let themselves loose among the books.

Public libraries, in contrast to school libraries, are flying, or have been up until the very last moment, when they have all been temporarily closed for the duration of the virus. Councils all over Australia have been building new and wondrous libraries.  I visit them both as an author, and as a member of the NSW Library Council. The flagship building of the municipality is far more likely now to be the library than the town hall. My own local library, Marrickville, is a typical example. What a dreary old dungeon it was for the past 20 years, but late last year a new library was opened – beautiful, large and light. Shelves and shelves of books, study rooms, reading nooks, gardens and verandahs. It is full of people day and night and full of children, piling up their books and staggering out the door with them. Nobody could possibly walk into Marrickville library and think that age of the book was over or that reading was a necessity of life.

Last year the NSW State Library, just a few minutes up the road here, opened the very first library for children in that great institution. Again, it’s filled with books and filled with children. There are no screens. What for? Children don’t look up books in catalogues. They run up and down the shelves, pulling out the spines, exploring the world of literature with energetic freedom.  They choose what they like and reject what they don’t like. In the children’s library they will always be welcome, and they will never run out of books. And if they never run out of books, they will never stop reading.

The future …

Of course, at the moment, children cannot go down to the library. They can join their local library online, they can use their library cards to borrow e-books and audio books and film and television series. They can watch story times on shared videos and hundreds of other things.  Libraries I know are doing everything possible to keep children involved with reading. But like librarians and library staff everywhere, I feel tremendously sad that they cannot go to the library.  And I do wonder.  Time will show the impact of this rupture of the virus on the reading lives of children.

My sister-in-law said to me memorably once, “the Jewish mother never gives up!” I am not a Jewish mother, but I happen to agree with her. We cannot give up. The library doors will open again, and we will, we must return to books and libraries. And to reading, that gateway to the vast and wonderful world of literature past present and future which seems sometimes on the face of it slowly to be swinging shut on the next generation. Great works of literature are not so easy to come by. They are rare. We can’t afford to cast aside books for our children simply because they have become too hard to read.

Interview with Anne Henderson

Anne Henderson: Ursula, I loved that. Terrific. As someone who taught older children for some years, I understand a lot of what you were saying. It is difficult to inspire reading and times have changed. The way children absorb information or absorb ideas or imagination has changed. You really are  a wonderful children’s writer. Tell us what makes a good children’s book. What are the tricks of the trade? That a book is an easy read? That it’s entertainment? Great themes? A page turner? And the titles of your books are intriguing – Red Shoe, Blue Cat, Too Many Elephants in the Room in This House. So tell us, what’s a good children’s or young adult book?

Ursula Dubosarky: Well, those titles you read out are from a range of age groups and so of course a good book will depend on what age your child is. This is why – and this is not at all intended to avoid the question! –  I’m so keen on the idea of young people joining the public library. It can be so difficult to find the right book for a child, as all parents, teachers and librarians know, many of whom work very hard to find that right book. Often they may have a series of disappointments and just the occasional jackpot.

But when you go down to the library and you see children wandering around the shelves you’ll notice they’re very open-minded. They will just go up and down and pull something out, either randomly or attracted by something that we don’t even know. And they’ll start to read it. Then they might toss it aside or may really love it.

So in answer to your question, if I had a reluctant reader on my hands, which I know some people do, what I would do, which I believe eventually will work, is take that child or teenager to the local library and get them to join up and get their card. Then I would say to them, “Just go and pick one book.” That’s all I ask of you, just one book, you don’t even have to read it, just go and pick it. Now, I can imagine there will be quite a few children or adolescents who’ll say there is not one single book in this entire library they have the slightest interest in. I would simply accept that and then I would take them back the following week, and the following week, and the week after that.  I find it impossible to believe in that whole range of books in the library that even the most  unwilling reader won’t eventually find something they are interested in.

Human motivation is a deep mystery but if we want children to read, they’re no different from us. If you want people to do something, they need to want to do it. So you need to maximise the possibilities of them finding an opportunity to want to do it.

That is why I get upset by schools without libraries, because it just seems to be cutting out those opportunities. Parents can give their children those opportunities by taking them to the local library and if they’re lucky enough, they will also get this at school. Some schools have fantastic librarians and teachers who do so much to encourage children to read. But in the end, it is the child who will find for themselves for what  they love to read,  as you would have yourself as a child. I’m not suggesting there’s no room for thoughtful and particular recommendations for a particular child, but in the end, it is the act of one individual mind to find what they want to read. One thing in favour of local libraries is that they are not part of the school, which for some kids is not a helpful association. They might look on the librarian as another teacher who’s trying to make them do something. But down at the local library there’s a kind of privacy. You just borrow what you want to borrow. Nobody’s peering over your shoulder, nobody’s asking you to write a book report. There’s a sense of personal freedom and engagement on your own terms with what there is to offer.

Anne Henderson: What about the craze to read the same type of books? How do you feel about that? I remember being about 8 years old and my teacher saying to my mother oh she has to stop reading Enid Blyton, it’s just too easy. She thought I should get onto something a little bit more advanced. And I was pushed by my mother to do that, which was fine. But there are a lot of kids who get a craze to read the same sort of thing. Take Game of Thrones. I’ve got a 15 year old grandson who got totally into Game of Thrones books and now he’s moved on to the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials series. What about that sort of thing?

Ursula Dubosarky: Well I absolutely applaud it.  My mother was a librarian and I also was crazy about Enid Blyton. And I remember it upset my school librarian a bit. But my mother took the view, and I think she’s right, that reading is also a habit you have to develop and have an association with pleasure. That’s the other thing in what I was saying about the public libraries. You’re not being judged for what you’re reading. If you want reading to have positive connotations with kids, I think it’s important not to judge too much what they’re reading but just to let them read. Let them develop that discipline and habit and the association of pleasure with reading. I also moved away from Enid Blyton and now I’m unable to read her books, I cannot concentrate on a single paragraph. But, at the time the richness of reading her fed my imaginative life enormously, especially re-enacting through games and play.

Anne Henderson: And it was a page turner.

Ursula Dubosarky: The page turner. And you just wanted to read, you wanted to read and read.

Anne Henderson: It was like having McDonalds every day for dinner.

Ursula Dubosarky: And you do want people to eat more than McDonalds. And eventually they do. That’s the other thing, isn’t it? You probably noticed with your own children a complete obsession with eating white bread. And then, mysteriously, at a certain age, they all seem to want to eat bread full of seeds.

Anne Henderson: Well that’s maturity, I guess.

Ursula Dubosarky: That’s right.

Anne Henderson: And knowledge of what the world’s really all about. Now, a lot of your books take children into unfamiliar places, which is what a good children’s book does, into the imagination. But, to what extent does that rely too on having familiar themes and recognition of certain things? And give us some examples of that.

Ursula Dubosarky: Well, we read for comfort and then we read for discomfort. Reading is both things. My novels, for example, that you mentioned, The Red Shoe, and The Blue Cat and The Golden Day, are probably for children aged around 12 or 13, possibly slightly younger, possibly slightly older. One is set in the 1950s, one in the 1940s and one in the 1960s. In my view, with children’s books, there’s really nothing that must be excluded. I don’t really feel that. It depends on how it’s told.

Some of the themes in those books are quite tough. But in all three of those novels I wanted books that were easy to read but quite hard to understand. So the language is not dense, but I wanted the sensation, for the reader, at the end of the book, of questioning the meaning of what they have read. The reading is easy and you feel like you’re understanding everything and then you get to the end and there is that sense of mystery, unfinished mystery.

Look, when it comes to good children’s books, I can’t tolerate mediocre language, so I look for language, myself, first. I’m aware that’s not the case of many adult and children readers but for me it’s an absolute priority. When I’m writing that’s the thing I’m thinking about most. When I run writing workshops, children don’t ask things like how do I create a character – adults do. My books are much stronger on character and language than they are on plot. The plot for me is the great struggle, the terrible stress. You can get there but it’s a struggle. When I published my very first novel called Zizzy Zing about 30 years ago, I was told that I had the opposite problem to most children’s writers because most children’s writers are very good on plot.

Anne Henderson: Yes, plot. Surely what is most interesting to younger readers.

Ursula Dubosarsky:  Whereas I had the opposite problem. And there’s not much you can do to teach someone how to create a character. It’s probably like acting, something that people for whatever reason have a certain tendency to be able to do. I remember when I was a child, those writing exercises you did at school where you had to create a character of, say, a bush ranger, a swagman or something like that, you had to write all these paragraphs of description. Now I’ve never been a descriptive writer. In fact, I don’t even know what my characters look like on the whole.

The thing about writing, and I say this to children when I talk about writing to them, is it’s an exploration. You’ve got to discover what kind of writer you are. You can train yourself to write a good description but if you’re not a naturally descriptive writer it’s probably not going to be very interesting. Of course, some writers can do everything and some writers are fantastic descriptive writers. The world of literature is just so varied and vast.

Sometimes libraries seem to operate almost like they’re a bookshop. They’ll have 20 copies of the latest Len Deighton or something like that. Because that’s what their customers want and that’ll get their statistics up. They’re under their own pressures with their council and so on. I’m not arguing with that. But when I go into a library I also expect to find, and I would hope to find this in school libraries, a kind of repository of the national culture as well, and international culture. That it’s not just a place where you find the latest contemporary book that everybody is reading. One of my great pleasures at my own school library would be wandering around that 800 section of world literature and just looking at the titles. Even if I didn’t pull them out. But it’s a kind of engendering of knowledge. And if you’re not ever going to have that  opportunity you have no way in.

Anne Henderson: It’s interesting when I think about children’s literature and we use this term suspended disbelief.

Ursula Dubosarsky: Yes.

Anne Henderson: How much is it easier to do that with children’s literature than with adults? I know we have the fantasy adult literature, Game of Thrones whatever. But with children, you can really stretch reality. I tell the worst stories to my grandchildren late at night getting them to go to sleep; there’s always a witch and we always solve the problem with an absolutely impossible event happening so it all comes to a happy ending. But to what extent can you use suspended disbelief? I’m thinking of the Chimneys of Green Knowe where ghosts and happenings in the past actually blend with the contemporary story to bring about a resolution which is quite adult and a learning experience. How much can you use suspended disbelief in children’s writing compared to adults?

Ursula Dubosarsky: That’s such a good point and it seems to me often when you’re reading people talking about innovation of magic realism in literature, it seems some adult readers don’t remember ever reading children’s books because it’s  such a standard way of storytelling from picture books up. This is what I was saying about that openness of children to the strange and bizarre and the extraordinary. When you were describing your witch story it sounds like ancient Greek tragedy where people expected shock and astonishment. My books for older children do have a slightly what you might call a paranormal element. But on the whole they’re realist novels. Whereas, when I’m writing for younger children it’s quite different – you imagine a little boy who lives in a house with a hundred elephants. With children, you never have to explain. I’ve read that story to thousands of children and not one ever said, “Oh but it’s not possible to have elephants in the house.”

Anne Henderson: Why do you think that is?

Ursula Dubosarsky: I remember when my daughter Maisie was four years old and we had found a film of man landing on the moon. We, of course, think of this as a great and impressive moment in history. We projected the film to Maisie on the wall of our living room and I remember she was not particularly impressed. And I thought, well why would you be at the age of four? The world is anything. The world has millions of possibilities.

When I’ve done poetry workshops with children who are just learning to read and write, they come up with the most extraordinary images. Yet you know by the time they’re in Year 3 they will have edited them out as not conventional enough. There’s loss and gain in growing up and that kind of extreme openness to wonder and acceptance is the loss. I wrote a novel called Abyssinia some years ago. As a narrative, it’s quite peculiar. It’s about a dolls house and certainly teenagers and adults who read it sometimes have a belligerent attitude to it, almost an angry retort, “Well what was that all about? Why did that happen?” Whereas I’ve noticed in the primary schools those questions never arise. They accept the logic of the dream. In the middle of the dream, we don’t say, “Well that couldn’t happen.” That’s for when we wake up.  Perhaps there’s some sort of mental capacity of accepting the dream that with maturity disappears.

Anne Henderson: The secret is to keep that imagination. Not lose it entirely, isn’t it?

Ursula Dubosarsky: Yes. And I suppose children’s writers must have some of that. I never particularly sat down and decided I wanted to be a children’s writer. I wanted to be a writer, from when I was about six but if you had asked me as a teenager I would never had said I wanted to be a children’s writer; it wasn’t any kind of burning ambition. But in my 20s when I was sitting down and trying actually to be a writer, it was on the suggestion of a friend that I wrote something for children. Until then, I’d been not able to finish things, or nothing worked or it was all very frustrating. A common experience when you want to be a writer!

Anne Henderson: Yes. Writer’s block.

Ursula Dubosarsky: That’s right. It was just ghastly. And then somebody suggested writing a children’s book, a picture book. So I did, and I remember a strange feeling of ease, indeed it flowed out of the pen! May I say, most of my books do not flow out of the pen so that was an unusual experience. There must have been a lot of something pent up something. But I realised immediately that this was what I should be writing. Now, every time I sit down to write I don’t say to myself, “I’m going to write a children’s book.” I just think, “I’m going to sit down and write.” But it’s a children’s book that appears on the page. Who knows what that’s all about.

Anne Henderson: How much is the problem with reading today about concentration? A lot of our young people have a real difficulty with taking themselves into anything for a length of time. It’s a momentary world.

Ursula Dubosarsky: I think it’s enormous. That’s why I’m also sceptical about how they’re all going to be reading all these books on their phones and their devices because the nature of phones and devices is they’re completely disruptive and that’s why we like them.

Anne Henderson: They’re momentary.

Ursula Dubosarsky: They’re momentary. I, and many adult readers, do read books on my phone. It’s got great advantages. I’m never without a book in my pocket. But I have noticed it in myself, that my concentration levels have changed from where they were before this device-ridden age. For children, publishers may well produce very engaging book-like artefacts that work on devices, but they won’t be books. It’ll be a different experience to reading a book.

Anne Henderson: It’s interesting that Sydney Grammar a year or two ago banned computers in that school. And I wonder if this has something to do with the problem of lack of concentration. Does it help to take us off it? A bit like going cold turkey?

Ursula Dubosarsky: It’s funny isn’t it. One of my sons was in Year 9 when they rolled out all the free laptops. And all very laudable to make technology accessible to every child in the country. Yet, I have to say, within a month by their own admission they were just playing games all the time, and it was cat and mouse with the school who would regularly bring in “firewalls” to overcome this. Very naive because the children of course knew exactly how to get over it.

Anne Henderson: They were ahead of the pack

Ursula Dubosarsky: The boys just thought it was hilarious. And within 18 months they were not using them at school at all. That said, my son is now a maths teacher and more or less all his Maths teaching is done on screens and and it’s fantastic.

Anne Henderson: Well that’s perfect for that.

Ursula Dubosarsky: Brilliant. But that’s not reading a book. Obviously nobody is totally against screens in schools. But reading book is a different thing and that simply has to be borne in mind. Reading is a pleasure and also a discipline. It has to be learned.  That’s why it’s great to read Enid Blyton for hours on end because you learn the habit.

Anne Henderson: Because you get into the habit of sitting still.

Ursula Dubosarsky: And you won’t develop the habit if you do it for 5 minutes or even 3 minutes and then you’re checking your email or something pops up or. I suppose we could wipe our hands and say okay well that world of reading books is over, and this is now. But we can’t afford to be so prodigal. The access to thousands of years of human literary civilisation are not to be just shrugged off.

Anne Henderson: Yes I often say about archives that they’ll bring out a box in a few decades time when some reader asks for a book. The archivist will bring it out and say “Now this is a book.”

Ursula Dubosarsky: Yes

Anne Henderson: And it doesn’t have a search engine.

Ursula Dubosarsky: That’s strange.

Anne Henderson: You referred to that program called Books in Homes I’ve been involved in it through Rotary. It is actually for people where they do not have advantages or are in the outback. So, how important is the home? The Books in Homes program brings books to children on a basis of so many per term that they can take home. These are kids where their homes may not have a book in them.

Ursula Dubosarsky: I’m not against such programs. It’s just that in certain circumstances I’m sceptical.

Anne Henderson: For example, the little school at Stuart town, where I was involved, doesn’t have a local library. The tiny school has about 12 pupils.

Ursula Dubosarsky: Yes, that’s invaluable. Although you do have mobile libraries all over the state driven around in buses. They’re amazing, you know. The Outback Letterbox Library in Western New South Wales is fantastic. Councils own buses fitted out like a library. I have read the studies – which I’m impressed by – that children who come from homes with a lot of books in them do better at school. But simply putting the books in that home is a big ask for those books. You may be taking a book home to a family with literally no interest in books and no understanding of even what to do with those books.

I know there are a number of these excellent programs – the Dolly Parton Imagination Library does something like this. It can only be applauded. But I do feel that if children but can get to the library or if the library can come to them then it’s got that advantage of the enormous choice of books and the sense of plenty, the sense of more coming. Of course, it has been pointed out to me by a good friend that, in a certain generation, people became excellent readers and the only book they had to read was the Bible.

Anne Henderson: And quoted from it.

Ursula Dubosarsky: And they also became excellent writers. Nonetheless, what I felt was the one practical thing I could do over my two years as Children’s Laureate was to get children to join the library. And so that’s what I’m concentrating on.

Anne Henderson: Well the library idea is marvellous. I live in North Sydney and I know grandchildren of mine that have gone to school in that area. The library is where many local students go to do their homework. Lots of them. The library is a public space.

Ursula Dubosarsky: That’s right.

Anne Henderson: Then, the real problem for a lot of young people, especially in suburbs that are not as advantaged as that suburb, is there’s not a lot of public space.

Ursula Dubosarsky: Yes

Anne Henderson: And I think libraries are an ideal public space. The problem is to get the libraries to be what you think they should be. So what are your ideas? Are you going to be actively pushing libraries on this?

Ursula Dubosarsky: It’s sad at the moment, with the lockdown.

Anne Henderson: But you can kind of communicate with libraries. I mean they could have book fairs. They could have all sorts of things.

Ursula Dubosarsky: They are doing a lot. There is an awful lot going on. More generally, many libraries are wonderfully supported by their council and there’s been kind of renaissance of local libraries. As I was saying, my local library used not to be so impressive. The librarians were excellent, but the buildings they worked in were not.

Anne Henderson: But it looks fantastic now.

Ursula Dubosarsky: It’s divine. It is now a beautiful thing. A wonderful thing for that municipality. Before it was as though the municipality was saying to the citizens, “what’s reading?”. You’d have to be desperate to go there. And I was!

I want to celebrate all libraries, both public libraries and school libraries. There’s all sort of people out there that are passionate about their particular sector of libraries but my view is that all libraries are to be celebrated. My tension levels drop every time I go into a library, wherever it is. And you want that feeling for everyone. I want all children to feel that the library belongs to them.

I had a funny experience when I worked for the public service in Canberra, 35 years ago. This was at the Department of Administrative Services in what was then called West Block. In my breaks, I always used to go to visit the library, which was just a few shelves of books and a librarian. I’d look around, pull out a book for a minute or two, then back to my desk to do my work. I was in the library every day. Eventually, the librarian – because my surname was Coleman – asked me if my father’s name was Peter. And I said it was but how did she know? And she said, “Well I used to work in the Parliamentary library and your Dad was the only person who came to the library every single day and you look quite similar.” I did laugh, because I wasn’t particularly aware that dad was so fanatically into libraries. But we must have, as a family, shared that same sense of ownership of libraries, that it was a place for us. By the way, I don’t know about the Parliamentary library, but I was usually the only other person in the West Block library. Other public servants clearly didn’t feel the same way!

I lived for a year on a kibbutz, and again I was in the kibbutz library on a daily basis. Thank heavens they had quite a good English language section. I read so many books on that kibbutz. What I’m saying with all this is, that I want children to feel that same way, that the library is there for them. There is the library, walk in the door, it belongs to you.

Anne Henderson: Now with the pandemic and parents being the educators with help of their schools, what are some of the tips? What advice would you offer to those parents who are, you know, tuned in, trying to do their best. How can reading be part of that homeschooling?

Ursula Dubosarsky: It’s so difficult isn’t it? All you can say is,  keep books as a daily part of life. You can borrow books, you can lend books to each other. Perhaps you’re not supposed to because of germs, I don’t know, but you can spray them or something. With many public libraries you can join online and you can borrow ebooks, for children and for adults. You can still buy books and they will be delivered to you one way or the other. Many bookshops are offering fantastic delivery services. So, if you can, you can make books part of the weekly budget.

Anne Henderson: Grandparents could make little offerings.

Ursula Dubosarsky: That’s right.

Anne Henderson: Buy a book for your grandchildren. A series.

Ursula Dubosarsky: Because you can’t go to the movies and you can’t go ice skating. I mean it’s funny isn’t it? People do worry about their children not reading, and sometimes they say it’s a time problem, because of sport or other sorts of activities that take up all the hours in the day and weekend.  I appreciate that, but if you actually want your child to read then you have to make it a priority. In this particularly busy modern digital world it’s unlikely to happen by accident.

Anne Henderson: It has to be part of the agenda.

Ursula Dubosarsky: You have to make those opportunities. Reading aloud, reading to the dog, putting on plays. I put on lots of plays as a child from books, to my poor, polite parents. Someone told me their child, which I thought was delightful, had set up her own little library and put cards in the books and lent them to her friends and so on. But at the same time I feel a kind of melancholy,  because I wonder if these are just temporary stopgaps and what the future is really going to be?

Anne Henderson: And you’ve got a website that I have looked at with monthly suggestions., so what are your suggestions for April? I told my daughter to get onto it because she’s got at least three children from primary school at home at the moment I thought some of the activities were great.

Ursula Dubosarsky: Well April is “April Asks”.

Anne Henderson: I think there was a month where you suggested using puns.

Ursula Dubosarsky: That’s right. This is part of the Laureate program. Each month I’ve done a writing activity for children, a one pager, and you can print it out or whatever. For each month of the year. We had “February Flies”,” March Marches” and “April Asks”. So in March we wrote a marching song. In February it was about puns.

Anne Henderson: Well everyone can go online and work it out.

Ursula Dubosarsky: Exactly. Every month there will be a different writing activity coming out.

Anne Henderson: Well it’s very pertinent right now.

Ursula Dubosarsky: It is. I’m also quite involved with the NSW School Magazine which is part of the Department of Eucation and they’ve done a special Laureate edition of the magazine – various poems and stories I’ve written over the years. So there are massive resources out there for parents connected with reading. But in the end, as I was saying in the speech, the only thing that makes you a good reader is reading. There’s nothing else that will do it for you. So while the associated activities are fantastic, the story times and all the things I was just talking about, in the end, a child will only become a better reader if they read. That’s a fact that has to be faced. I suppose that’s my answer to someone who does want their child to be a better reader, that it won’t happen if they don’t read.So while the associated activities are fantastic, the story times and all the things I was just talking about, in the end, a child will only become a better reader if they read.

Anne Henderson: Thanks Ursula, that was terrific.

SOURCES

Naplan results  https://reports.acara.edu.au/Home/Results

Public library statistics

https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/pl_statistics_1718.pdf

https://www.nsla.org.au/sites/default/files/documents/nsla-aus-public-library-stats-2017-18.pdf