My very own portrait

My good friend and children's book writer Moya Simons is married to a painter named Jules Sevelson. One day, not long ago, Jules asked me if he could paint my portrait. I'd never had my portrait painted before and I was delighted. He asked me what I liked to do when I wasn't writing and I said that I loved bushwalking, especially in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. I sat for Jules twice while he sketched and painted and here's the result. He said he wants to work on it just a bit longer to get the colours right but I think it's already a fantastic painting---and it looks just like me!

Selby Sprung again

I've just finished writing Selby Sprung, the 16th (and final?) book of the Selby series. I've been over and over the stories and now it's with my publisher, HarperCollins.

They will correct any mistakes and then send it back to me for further editing. Another copy of the manuscript is now with Allan Stomann, the wonderful illustrator of all the Selby books. He's been drawing Selby and his world for twenty-five years. Selby Sprung will be published in August.

Who can tell me what moth this is? It wandered into my house for just long enough for me to take a photo and then it flew away. I did a bit of a search of the internet and found out that there are about 22,000 species of moths in Australia. Of course this one might be a very common one so you might know it's name.

Writing Selby Sprung

I'm getting very close to finishing the sixteenth Selby book, Selby Sprung. And when I'm working hard, my office is as messy as my bedroom was when I was a kid. There are stacks of books and papers all over the floor. Jasper has found a new sleeping place, a file box filled with Selby stories. The papers in front of him are the drafts of the stories in the Selby book. I wonder if he reads them when I'm not watching.

Out and about

Disaster! My computer hard drive fried! It just suddenly quit and there was nothing I could do to rescue the things that were on it. I'd backed up most of the important things a week before the crash but some emails, were lost. So if you wrote me and didn't get answer, please write again.

I've been madly trying to finish the latest---and maybe the last---Selby book, Selby Sprung. When my computer crashed, I lost the latest changes to the stories but, fortunately, Selby rang me and helped me get the stories right. So no Selby stories were lost. I should have the book finished soon.

One thing that Selby refuses to tell me is why he wanted the book to be called Selby Sprung. Did he really get sprung? Did people find out his secret? He said that he'd tell me that last story just before the book is published. I can't wait to hear about it!


Australia has some of the most beautiful birds in the world. These are rainbow lorikeets and they're very common here in Sydney. And they're not shy. This group let me get very close to them to take this picture.




Every year in November the suburb of Glebe in Sydney has a street fair. The whole of Glebe Point Road is jammed with people listening to bands, buying wonderful food and clothing from street stalls. Here are a couple of people with their clothes painted to look like the sky.




The New South Wales Premier's Reading Challenge is a program to get kids reading lots of books. A number of my books are on their reading list so I was invited along to the launch of the program. Here's a picture of me, Selby and Snow White at the launch.

Happy New Year!

I hope you had a good break and that you have a great 2011. And happy Chinese New Year!

Much has happened between my last blog entry and now, so much that it's hard to remember everything. One of the more memorable events was the KOALA (Kids' Own Australian Literature Awards) ceremony. Here I am talking at the awards ceremony.

Most of my time recently has been taken up in writing the 16th Selby book, Selby Sprung. The book was almost finished when I suddenly had an eye problem and needed an operation. That was last week and I'm still recovering but I'll be back to normal soon and working on the last bits of the Selby book. Selby hasn't told me his final adventure yet. He said he was going to wait and tell me at the very last minute. I'm worried that it might mean he's about to give away his secret. I guess I'll just have to wait and see. Or maybe he knows that he's about to be found out. Maybe the Search for Selby Society is about to spring him. Come to think of it, maybe that's why he wants me to call the book Selby Sprung.

Just now I'm waiting for the weather to change into something that's bearable. But although it's been incredibly hot in Sydney we haven't had the floods and cyclones that Victoria and Queensland have had to deal with.

Book Week

Book Week for many authors is not just a week - it's usually many more because we get asked to speak at a lot of schools and libraries. This year I was busy for about six weeks and I still have more schools to visit.

I was invited up to Port Macquarie and talked in some schools there and in Kempsey. I had a great time meeting the kids and reading from my Selby and Emily Eyefinger books. It was also a chance to read from my latest book of funny poems, My Sister has a Big Black Beard.
Here I am at a little country school near Kempsey. With me are Georgia and Samuel, a couple of great school captains.

Below I'm talking to kids and parents at the Port Macquarie Public Library. I hope you enjoyed Book Week at your school.

A trip to a museum

I'm just back from a trip to the United States where I was visiting friends and relatives. It was a wonderful trip and one of the best parts of it was seeing a museum that I used to visit when I was little. The museum is at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In it are rooms and rooms filled with stuffed animals. I found some of these quite scary when I was a kid and there were parts of the museum I used to tiptoe through for fear that animals would suddenly come to life and attack me. But it was a delicious kind of scariness like the kind you get from reading a scary story that isn't too too scary.

In another wing of the museum there are floors of exhibits about the Indigenous peoples of North and South America: American Indians and Eskimos. My favourites were the little models of villages with tiny people in them.

There was one in particular that I loved - a diorama of Native Americans from the American West, doing a dance. I remember pressing my face to the glass and trying to imagine what life must have been like for them. On my visit I found this diorama again and relived a bit of my childhood.


Another favourite part of the museum is the glass flower collection. It may sound boring but they are most fascinating and real-looking flowers all made from glass. Years ago before photography, science students used these to study plants. Glass-makers in Germany made these life-like models for Harvard University. You can see from the photos how fine the work is and how real the flowers look.

Here's a link to the Glass Flowers collection at Harvard, and the Wikipedia entry on them.